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Fast train coming
The political pedagogy of Fahrenheit
9/11
Mandy Merck
This August, when Fahrenheit 9/11 had long since surpassed all records to
become the most commercially successful documentary ever made, the New Yorker
ran an article anxiously attempting to establish it within a generic tradition
stretching from Grierson and Flaherty to Fredric Wiseman and Errol Morris. Like
Grierson, the New Yorker’s Louis Menand argued, Michael Moore focuses on ‘the
drama of the doorstep’1 (presumably that of ordinary life rather than the
dramatic doorstepping that the director also practises with such élan). Like
Flaherty, whose apparent anthropological studies were often arranged
reenactments of obsolete customs, Moore frequently stages the events he films.
Like Wiseman, who unapologetically avows that his institutional portraits are
‘totally fictional in form although … based on real events’, Moore’s films are
markedly subjective. Like Morris’s Fog of War, which includes footage of former
US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara checking sound levels before a statement to
camera, Fahrenheit 9/11 displays a whole line-up of White House heavies
anxiously preparing to perform on air. In seeking to place this film in cinema
history, Menand reaches all the way back to Lumière’s 1895 Arrival of a Train,
and argues contrary to legend that its audiences, like Moore’s, knew they were
watching a film, not a massive machine about to flatten them. None of this is
entirely beside the point, but no documentary film has taken $100 million in six
weeks at the US box office, or been pronounced mandatory viewing by the previous
president of that country, let alone
assumed to be a crucial influence on
the re-election hopes of his successor. The faint praise of the New Yorker
obscures those killer facts, as well as Fahrenheit 9/11 itself.
Critical physiognomy
Moore’s work has been described as performative
documentary, suggesting that the director’s own appearances in his films amount
to performances that point to all documentaries’ ‘performed’ or constructed
nature.2 The director cheerfully agrees. As he told Film Comment, ‘I believe
everybody who appears on camera knows that the camera is on them, and you can’t
help but behave in a different way. It’s all performance at some level.’3 From
Roger and Me through TV Nation to Bowling for Columbine, Moore’s on-screen
persona has not only become firmly established (the comically deflating everyman
– shambling, bespectacled and unshaven), it is now extremely famous. His 2003
Academy Award speech denouncing Bush and the Iraq War made him an international
star, and now America can see him coming. For a doorstepping reporter this is
something of a disadvantage, and Moore changes tactics in Fahrenheit 9/11.
Throughout most of the film he is invisible. Indeed, a good deal of its original
footage has not been filmed by Moore at all, but instead acquired from
sympathetic network and military sources. Although he figures prominently in
interviews with House of Bush, House of Saud author Craig Unger and
dissident FBI agent Jack Cloonan, as well as bereaved mother Lila Lipscomb,
Moore stages only two of his characteristic stunts in the entire film. The
first, and funnier, of these involves Moore hiring a Washington ice-cream van to
read the Patriot Act over its loudspeaker to members of Congress. In the second,
he attempts to persuade these legislators to enlist their own children in the
war they voted for, and they do indeed see him coming. Asked about the
‘personality cult’ that has developed around him, Moore acknowledges this as
further reason for rationing his appearances in Fahrenheit 9/11: ‘I don’t want
the public to think that I’m the one who’s going to correct the problem.… I’m
asking them to do that.… The catharsis has to happen on November 2.’ 4 If
Moore’s reluctance to appear on camera is strategic, it is certainly
understandable, since Fahrenheit 9/11 is a great exercise in critical
physiognomy.5 Its key sequence occurs round the titles, which are deferred until
the film has narrated the 2000 election, the role of Murdoch’s Fox News in
calling it for Bush, its condemnation by African Americans in Congress, and
Bush’s vacation-filled early months in office. Following the president’s own
protestations that he’s really hard at work, this work is suggested to be also
that of performance, with Dubya, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice and Wolfowitz shown
being groomed and miked for television as the titles roll. The trope’s familiar
association of such preparations with deception doesn’t ompromise their
fascination. In particular, Bush’s adolescent grimaces and nervous eye movements
(including one spookily recalling Norman Bates at the end of Psycho) are offered
as revelations of his character, setting up the subsequent sequence showing his
stunned response to the 9/11 attacks.
Formally, the film’s opening sequences are its most accomplished,
effectively evoking the surreal quality of American politics from Moore’s first
question, ‘Was it all just a dream?’ The nightmarish feeling of those months is
intensified by slow motion and punctuating fades to black, leading to 38 seconds
of darkness, explosions and screams from 9/11 itself. In a reversal of this
device, these sounds then cease over a ghostly montage of shredded paper,
fleeing people and devastated survivors. Throughout these sequences Moore
performs off-camera, in a narration by turns ironic, indignant, sardonic and
sad. Over to Bush on that fateful morning, already aware of the first crash but,
ever the photo-opportunist, proceeding with his Florida classroom reading of My
Pet Goat. Then the second occurs, and an aide whispers to him ‘The country is
under attack.’ My favourite construal of Bush’s reaction to this announcement
was the Private Eye cover of him being told ‘It’s Armageddon, sir’, and replying
‘Armageddon outahere!’ Whatever he was thinking initially appears as another
physiognomic puzzle, but Moore then pre-empts this by launching the first major
contention of his film, that the president was concluding that the perpetrators
were Saudis, rogue members of the families who were business partners and
friends of the Bushes. This is, to use one of the more polite descriptions it
has evinced, a tendentious way to introduce Unger’s evidence of the financial
alliances between the Bushes and the Saudi ruling class, including the Bin
Ladens. Although the film goes on to raise powerful questions about the
permission granted to members of that family to leave the United States
immediately and unquestioned, and although it indicates something of the Saudi
money invested in Dubya’s dry wells and his father’s more successful interests,
it attributes rather more prescience to Bush than seems plausible, while crudely
conflating the Saudi royal family, Saudis generally and al-Qaeda activists
(many, of course, not Saudi). As with the film’s ridicule of the USA’s less
powerful allies in the Iraq War (the Netherlands represented by a large joint),
ethnicity threatens to replace exploitation as the issue in question. And
nowhere is this clearer than in the derisive roll-call of the Coalition, which
ignores the participation of the less dismissible Spain, Italy and the UK, and
never examines the role of Blair as its cheerleader.
To be fair, a filmed version of Unger’s book would have taken up the
whole of Fahrenheit 9/11’s two hours, and still failed to convince the likes of
Louis Menand that the war in Iraq ‘was about money’. To develop precisely that
argument, Moore eventually refocuses in sequences indicting American-installed
Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s involvement with the US oil pipeline company
Unocal; Marine recruiters cynically targeting poor teenagers for enlistment;
Bush’s black-tie banqueting of ‘the haves and have mores’ who constitute his
‘base’; US corporations preparing to score super-profits in Iraq; and, finally,
in a quotation Moore reads from Orwell, the ‘ruling group’s’ perpetual war on
its own subjects to keep its interests intact.
Political economy
Outlined like this, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a work of the
most audacious
economism, saluted by John Berger for reviving ‘one of the
main theses of Marx’s interpretation of history’.6 To make it palatable for
Menand, Bill Clinton, producer Harvey Weinstein and the millions of other
non-Marxists who have gone to see it, Moore interweaves its material analysis
with a more popular cause – to wit, opposition to an unjustified, brutalizing
and murderous conflict conducted by a unelected cabal fronted by a moron. In
filmic terms, this opposition is sustained by the acute use of archive footage
(most impressively, that of black congresswomen gavelled down while trying to
record the
exclusion of their constituents from the 2000 electoral rolls)
whose previously unseen status is itself an indictment of the class interests of
the US media.
As ever with Moore’s work, the film is an essay in political pedagogy,
and this time he casts an exemplary student in Lila Lipscomb, a conservative
Democrat radicalized by her soldier son’s death in Iraq. Patriotic, religious
and wholly without irony, Lipscomb is meant to be
false consciousness in the
flesh, until her son’s letters alert her to the futility of the war in which he
later dies. If not quite the conversion experience visited upon the redeemed
stripper in the anti-porn documentary Not a Love Story, her transformation is
still unconvincing, in part because Lipscomb is already an articulate critic of
economic injustice when we first meet her. More importantly, her appearances
before the camera generate suspicion for the same reason that Bush’s do, because
the film has made us hyper-alert to them as performances. Despite her
protestations to a passer-by that her tearful visit to the White House isn’t
staged, the Jerry Springer style of her emoting is too identifiably mediated to
be entirely engaging.
Lipscomb, of course, is a stand-in for Moore, another
angry, overweight activist from the devastated Michigan town where he grew up
and made Roger and Me. But no surrogate can deflect attention from the real star
of this documentary, however off-screen. And here Moore’s foregrounding of
performance, particularly mediated performance, rebounds on him. Thus, when I
proposed seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 to a BBC documentary director, she declined,
with a very uncharacteristic diatribe about how Moore made millions from his
films and treated his researchers badly. Similarly, in the liberal press (‘the
preening Michael Moore’, ‘buffoonish self-aggrandisement’7) Moore’s work seems
to attract such ad hominems, since its interest in the deceptiveness of mediated
performance directs the spectator to scrutinize his own, in and out of his
films. In apparent acknowledgement of this, Dude, Where’s My Country? includes a
letter from the author to the president, thanking
im for his 4 per cent tax
cut in a year where his savings were more than Bush and Cheney’s combined – and
then pledging them to the campaigns of opposition candidates. ‘There is great
irony’, he admitted to the Guardian’s Gary Younge, ‘that, by railing against the
wealthy, I have had the fortune of this financial success.’8 Can Moore’s candour
about his financial success re-establish the sincerity of his public persona? It
certainly can’t bridge the gap
between representation and reality that his
own performative documentaries disclose. But Moore’s success may be the point.
Surely the closest precedent for his career is not that of Grierson or Morris
but of an earlier ‘publicist of genius’ criticized by E.P. Thompson for
‘glibness’ and described in his lifetime as ‘no Examiner’.9 Like Moore, this
self-educated egalitarian stood for a graduated income tax, public funding for
education and pensions, arbitration instead of war. And, as we know (not least
by his own statements), his publications broke all sales records. Such was their
fame that they vastly extended a public
sphere confined by limited literacy.
Recently Tom Paine’s writings have been reconsidered as a harbinger of modern
celebrity culture – massified, commercial, phantasmatic but (sometimes)
transformative.10 If the polemics of his political descendant have anything like
their influence, Bush could lose on 2 November. On the other hand, that train
could run over us all.
Notes
1. Louis Menand, ‘Nanook and Me’, New Yorker, 9
August 2004, pp. 90–96.
2. Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary,
Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 153–80.
3. In an interview with Gavin
Smith, ‘The Ending Is Up to You’, Film
Comment, July–August 2004, p.
25.
4. Ibid.
5. I’m indebted to Laura Mulvey for
this observation.
6. John Berger, ‘The Beginning of History’,
Guardian, 24 August 2004,
p. 13.
7. Mary Riddell, ‘This Is No
Parody President’, Observer, 5 September
2004, p. 28; Kent Jones, ‘Much
More’, Film Comment, July–August 2004,
p. 20.
8. Gary Younge,
‘The Capped Crusader’, Guardian, 4 October 2003,
reprinted in Michael Moore,
Dude, Where’s My Country?, Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 2003, p.
262.
9. William Blake, quoted in E.P. Thompson, The Making of the
English
Working Class, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp.
98–102.
10. Chris Rojek, Celebrity, Reaktion, London, 2001, pp.
107–10.
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