Fahrenheit 9/11
written, produced and directed by Michael Moore
I looked forward to seeing this film because of its reputation and all the attention it received during the past year - especially during the recent U.S. general election. I wasn’t unhappy with it. Michael Moore is an entertaining fellow. Of course I am aware that the films he has recently been famous for - Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine - are part entertainment (detractors would say that they are wholly entertainment) and as such have some staging, scripting and fictionalizing about them - none of which means that Moore is incorrect in his opinions or wrong to make and distribute his films. It is easy to see why he is one of the most despised people in American society today - by conservatives, at least, which, if the November election results are accurate, comprise 51% of the entire U.S.population. He has been called a“vulgarian” and a traitor, and receives regular hate mail and death threats for practicing a couple of the seminal freedoms of the American constitution - freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. But I like him. I like his big, unkempt, fat ugliness. I like the balls he has to just walk up to famous, influential and powerful people on the streets, in their offices, or at the gates of their homes and driveways asking the most idiotic - but also obvious and therefore brilliant - questions. Simple questions, humorously posed in ambush interviews of the unprepared.
In this film Moorepursues the path of money that connects the Bush family in the U.S. through multi-billion dollar multinational corporations with political cronies and with the rulers of Saudi Arabia(and with the family of Osama bin Laden as well). It was an ambitious goal, but frankly I am less interested in that as a possible explanation of the U.S. escapade in Iraq than I am in a careful study of what we know to be the lies and official deception that constituted President George W. Bush’s causus belli. Moore would have done better, I think, to concentrate on exposing and advertising the lies, lies, lies, lies that constituted Bush’s argument for launching an unprovoked war. Even during the recent election George Bush and his vice president, Dick Chenney, contradicted themselves more than once, and within seconds of previous contrary statements during their televised debates with Democratic Party candidates. The whole Republican Party’s in-your-face-dishonesty persists, and it remains breathtaking. That’s what I would like to see a Michael More movie about.