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President Bush sits in a classroom waiting for someone to tell him what to do after the second Sept. 11 crash.
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Primal screen
"Fahrenheit 9/11" puts the most important questions about the last four years up on movie screens nationwide where they can't be ignored forever.
By JOSHUA TANZER
Offoffoff.com
In the Third World dictatorships with the lowest literacy rates, it's
often noted that the newspapers are relatively free to print whatever they
want — because nobody's reading them anyway. The dictators only bother to
control radio and television because that's where the national dialogue is
happening.
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| FAHRENHEIT 9/11 |
Written and directed by: Michael Moore.
Produced by: Jim Czarnecki, Carl Deal, Kurt Engfehr, Jeff Gibbs, Kathleen Glynn, Monica Hampton, Tia Lessin, Agns Mentre, Michael Moore, Bob.
Cinematography: Mike Desjarlais, Kirsten Johnson, William Rexer.
Edited by: Kurt Engfehr, Todd Woody Richman.
Music by: Jeff Gibbs.
Related links:
Official site
| Additional review by Offoffoff's David Butterworth
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Of course, we in the U.S. shouldn't feel smug on this account. L.A. police brutality wasn't
a mainstream story until somebody filmed it; reports of torture at the Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons didn't register with the public until
pictures leaked out. Reading isn't believing — but seeing is. And that's
why "Fahrenheit 9/11" is so important.
A lot of the material in Michael Moore's film has come out in the recent
flurry of books, interviews and testimony — you could have read most of
it by now — but the movie is a milestone because it pulls the whole
far-flung story of the Bush administration into sharp relief. On screen.
For all to see.
Several segments of the movie make a very strong impression — the first
of which is footage of what the president himself was doing on the morning
of Sept. 11. After the first plane struck, while the entire country was
watching the televised scene in horror, a still-cheerful Bush was led into
a Florida grade-school class for a photo opportunity in which he would
read with the children. Informed of the second plane's impact, he
continues to sit in front of the class for seven minutes, looking troubled
— if not lost. He has no idea what to do next, so he sits and waits. Moore, having already established Bush as an empty suit, lingers repeatedly on the president's quizzical face and narrates:
"Not knowing what to do, with nobody telling him what to do, ... George
continued to read 'My Pet Goat' with the children."
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Filmmaker Michael Moore attempts to shame pro-war congressmen into enlisting their children in the military.
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The film constructs a whole web of interconnected histories about the two
Bush presidents, their longtime connections with the Saudi royals and the
Bin Laden family (drawing on Craig Unger's book "House of Bush, House of
Saud"), top officials' dismissive attitude toward the terrorism warnings
coming from their own agencies, and the defense contractors' salivation
over the inflated profits to be made from an Iraq war. Some of this is selective, some is a
quick gloss of information that deserves to be addressed more thoroughly,
but within the limitations of a two-hour movie it raises a lot of the most
important questions. More significantly, it puts the uncomfortable truth
up on screen where there's no denying it.
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| | These horrors, which the Bush administration does its best to hide from view, are meant to remind us of the most basic fact about war. It is hell. |
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Still, the other most devastating section of the film is not a direct
indictment of the administration at all — it's footage of American
soldiers in Iraq and at home. Midnight raids show us the terrifying face our soldiers project toward Iraqis; roadside bombs show us the toll that occupation is taking in terms of American lives and bodies. Some soldiers are shown recovering in stateside hospitals without legs or arms. One is struggling with brain damage. If right-wing Bush supporters complained about "Nightline" respectfully reading the names of soldiers who lost their lives in this campaign, they will certainly howl about Moore showing real American casualties. But the purpose is not to undermine morale. He's saying something else.
These horrors, which the Bush administration does its best to hide from view, are meant to remind us of the most basic fact about war. It is hell. Even if you ignore our alienation of the Muslim world and our own allies, even if you ignore the toll that killing tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens has taken on that country's people, you must understand that the decision to go to war is not a glorious one. It condemns our own people to death, to life in a wheelchair, to lifelong psychological effects, and to who knows what new form of Gulf War syndrome. It is the most awful possible solution to this problem, even if we come out the "winners." If, as a montage of administration claims and empirical reality demonstrates, every single public justification for the war was bogus, then our country's leaders are guilty of playing with our people's lives. If they cannot look these casualties, their next of kin — in fact, every one of us — in the eye and explain why it was truly necessary to inflict this evil on our young, then they are beyond shame. The right wing throws around the idea of patriotism as a tool of political coercion, but it should now be perfectly clear that America's true patriots include those who tried to protect our people by opposing the war.
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Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a soldier killed in Karbala, tells how her feelings about the war changed.
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If they stick to their script, the spokespeople for the right wing will avoid answering any difficult questions about their misdeeds by ignoring the questions and demonizing the messenger. (The label "fascist" has histrionically been flung at Moore this week — that seems to be the approved line.) Don't expect Republicans to honestly defend a single one of their actions from criticism — they assiduously avoid having to answer questions — and don't expect the media to press them on it. But this film is part of a change in the nation's consciousness.
A lot of people are going to walk out of "Fahrenheit 9/11" thinking: Wait a minute, why did the president ignore all the warnings about Osama Bin Laden attacking New York? Why did the president secretly fly all the Bin Ladens out of the country after 9/11? What about Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice's flip-flops when they said that Iraq had no weapons and wasn't a threat in 2001? What did these veterans go over there and lose their legs for, anyway? You can ignore my questions but you can't tell me I didn't see these things with my own eyes.
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JUNE 23, 2004
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
Reader comments on Fahrenheit 9/11:
Genius from DarkFx, May 25, 2006
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