Fahrenheit 9/11 Attacks
I recently saw Michael Moore’s new film Fahrenheit 9/11 but have been reluctant to write about it since every blogger and her brother has already weighed in on the topic. I do feel like I need to respond to this critique, however, from blogcritics.org’s David Flanagan. In addition to making several incorrect assertions about the scope of copyright law that I won’t address here, Flanagan writes:
Really, though, what can you expect from Michael Moore? Michael is not interested in an issue or a cause, he is interested in the bottom line question, what will this film produce for him in the way of fame and fortune? In this sense, then, Moore is no different from any of the so-called “greedy” corporations so reviled by liberals (including Moore).
This sort of attack on progressive writers and filmmakers always strikes me as totally hollow. It can be generalized as: if someone writes a book or creates a film I disagree with, I can attack them as “just trying to sell more books and movies,” and thus impugn their motive in creating the work.
Of course Michael Moore wants people to see his movie, and Noam Chomsky wants people to read his books. I’m sure Van Gogh wanted a lot of people to see his paintings, and Beethoven for many people to hear his sonatas. Publius wrote the Federalist Papers with the hope that a lot of people would read them. Why else do people create?
If the best attack someone has on some political message is that the speaker is just trying to spread their political message, I suggest we just stop listening to that person.
Even weaker critiques, I suppose, are found in virulently ad hominem attack books like Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man (I shudder to even create the link). This book includes gems like “Moore shows the greatest disdain for that which he actually is… a very rich, pasty white American male.” I wonder if these people realize that they strengthen their enemy with such ridiculous attacks. If I’m white and antiracist, or Jewish and pro-Palestinian, does that make me a hypocrite?
Relatedly, here is a video clip of Michael Moore explaining his views on file sharing. He basically says he wants more people to see his movies, so if people share them online in a noncommercial fashion, that’s fine with him.
James Nugent Jan 28
Actually Christopher Hitchens, in his Slate piece Unfairenheit 9/11 – The lies of Michael Moore. By Christopher Hitchens, does a wonderful job of laying out Moore’s half-truths and manipulations. What bothers me about Moore is that he’s just as guilty of spin and BS as any of the Republicans are, yet he has people thinking he’s a paragon of truth. He’s far from that, and as it so happens I don’t care for Bush, intend to vote for anyone but Bush who has a realistic chance of beating him (which means Kerry), but yet I found myself very uncomfortable with the way Moore spins things.
Here’s the cut: He doesn’t think much of his audience, which he neither expects to question or think much about what he says, and he’s a master of the cheap shot. Were he not so far to the left he’d make a terrific neo-conservative.
edward (ted) jahn Jan 28
adam, i stumbled across your blog while looking at some photos of the laniels on stephen’s site (you may remember my frustration at your innate, and superior mathematics skills when we sat together in CVU math class)…
i’m convinced that a lot of people are completely misinterpreting the message of michael moore’s latest film. i think we can all agree that the bush administration has employed an amazing amount of carefully orchestrated propaganda, lies, and “spin” in order to deceive the american people about its true motives and actions. we can also probably agree that fahrenheit 9/11 contains a lot of facts that have been assembled together in such a way as to effectively be counter-propaganda, and this is where i make my point: i think moore is trying to teach us something about the bush administration’s mastery of propaganda and deception, and the media’s complicity in it by showing us how easily the same events can be recontextualized to paint an entirely different picture.
if such a vastly different conclusion can be drawn from moore’s film compared with the official media narrative, then we (or some of us at least) may be naturally led to an epiphany about the power of televised media to lie and deceive.
many viewers of the film are going to leave the theater wondering how the media could have let them down so totally; how could there be so many other threads to the story that went unexplored?
that’s what i think moore’s true message is: to prove, almost viscerally, how easy it is to manipulate the perceptions of the masses through the media, and not the relative validity of the “facts” themselves.
it’s about the politics of perception….