Fahrenheit 9-11 (2004)
Columbia DVD (region 4)
d. Michael Moore; pr. Jim Czarnecki, Kathleen Glynn, Michael Moore; m. Jeff Gibbs; ed. Kurt Enghfer, T. Woody Richman, Chris Seward; scr. Michael Moore; cast. Michael Moore (himself) (122 mins)
Michael Moore begins Fahrenheit 9-11 by questioning the legitimacy of the Bush government in the narrow Florida election that won him the Presidency: Florida’s governor being Bush’s brother. With Bush’s limousine pelted with eggs on his inauguration day by the youth protest movement, the sheer hostility to his claim to the Presidency in America is documented alongside the refusal of the Senate to support a motion by Florida Afro-Americans against the handling of the election and their disenfranchisement under Florida’s governor. The pre 9-11 Bush is depicted as an inept vacationer already becoming a “lame duck” and living the high life, unconcerned. Soon, the credits reveal the Bush President’s staff as vain, fixing their façade for the awaiting media.
Fahrenheit 9-11 evokes the events of 9-11’s terrorism in reaction shots of onlookers. The concern here is the nation in reaction: crisis management once the initial inhumanity of the act is taken into account. As Bush, informed his nation is under attack, sits holding a book for pre-schoolers, the dilemma of crisis management and (eventually) the moral accountability of the Bush government for their actions in the War on Terror take shape as the dominant themes in post 9-11 cinema. Yet, Bush’s first moves after 9-11 are to evacuate Bin Laden family guests, who were not interrogated, and alter his records of military service to avoid association with the Saudi Bin Laden Group he protected. Ironically, Bush and his father, were both financial investors in The Carlyle Group, a company linked to defence investment and who came under scrutiny after profiting from the events of 9-11: and a company in whom the Bin Laden family were investors.
The Bush Family’s ties to Saudi oil money to the tune of $1.4 billion over thirty years are enough to question their loyalties to the oath of office in Fahrenheit 9-11. Michael Moore here ponders the fact that Saudi investment in America makes them effective owners of 7% of America. In light of that, the Afghani War is shown by Moore here as a strategic mishap from the very beginning and the ineffectual Afghani campaign obscured the oil driven impetus of Dick Cheney to secure pipeline development and allowed Bin laden two months to escape. The stage-managing of the War on Terror through the media perception of fear, propagated through Fox News, creates a situation of feigned alert, which Moore demonstrates kept the American populace from criticizing the Bush Presidency and slave to a paranoia which fed into America’s patriotic duty to prepare for a terror attack.
The extent to which the War on Terror was a fear-driven media fabrication reflecting a covert Republican agenda driven by oil-dependent relationships to the Saudis is the subject of Moore’s reflective manipulations, which with his direct (albeit brief) participation in the film as celebrity question the relation between the objective and the subjective in the documentary form. Richard Ashcroft’s Patriot Act and its ramifications as taken by Moore to qualify life in the War on Terror: the increased powers given the government and their ethical human rights implications in the crisis management of the War on Terror are raised by Fahrenheit 9-11, making the film the single-most potent force of political dissent during the Bush years. In Fahrenheit 9-11, Michael Moore establishes what would be the discourse underlying the subsequent wave of terrorist films in 2007: the ramifications of the Patriot Act on American civil liberties – a theme extended in the later Alex Gibney documentary Taxi to the Dark Side to include human rights.
George W. Bush, as a “wartime” President emerges in Fahrenheit 9-11 as an ineptly dangerous warmonger, inheritor to a cowboy-like gun culture that Moore would subsequently portray in Bowling for Columbine as embodied in actor Charlton Heston. Bush’s war agenda against Iraq, sanctioned by the doctrine of “pre-emptive defence” (a post 9-11 term), results in indiscriminate fire by US troops on civilians. These same troops listen to heavy metal music in their tanks as they invade Baghdad, reflecting the gung-ho nihilism of military amorality that had earlier infiltrated the Gulf War movie Three Kings and would continue into the 2007 The Situation, detailing US military atrocities against civilian Iraqis by hyped, thuggish soldiers. These gung-ho heavy metal troops are contrasted to the horrendous damage and suffering inflicted upon innocent Iraqis by their actions: when one Marine is confronted by what US fire has done, he muses “shoot, what the hell did we do now?”
President George Bush in kindergarten on hearing of a
terrorist attack against the World Trade Center on 9-11
Such ironic reflections on the armed forces owes to depictions of Vietnam War troops in particular in the films of Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola, though here is evoked by Michael Moore through careful if manipulative and exclusionary juxta-positioning of archival and interview footage to create irony. Such irony is the seed of "dissent" propelling the linear structure of Fahrenheit 9-11 as it moves to the manufacture of the threat of state sponsored terrorism by weapons of mass destruction manufactured by the Bush propaganda machine to create a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq where none existed, purely to incorporate Saddam Hussein into the War on Terror in order to invade Iraq. Bush’s premature announcement of victory precipitating a mounting casualty toll, the dead US troops found through recruitment drives in economically underprivileged urban areas, as represented here by Moore’s “hometown” of Flint, Michigan; areas ignored by the Bush government to the point where the benefits offered by military service appeal most to the same socially-deprived, minority-heavy communities whose vetoed voice of protest against disenfranchisement during the Bush election process began the film.
And finally, as to whose agenda was served by the Bush War on Terror, Moore reveals Vice President Dick Cheney’s connection to Halliburton, a business looking to make money from involvement in Iraq. It’s Moore’s audacious, and reasoned, critique of the ethics of the Bush era that makes Fahrenheit 9-11 the impetus from which the terrorist film as a genre would explode in 2007 though less focused on Bush’s money agenda and its ties to Saudi oil, than on Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and his sanction of the ethics of torture, hinted at in Fahrenheit 9-11 , exposed fully in the 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side and saturating the wave of terrorist films in 2007 in the lead-up to the election that would see the end of the Bush Presidency.
Additional Reading
UnFairenheit 9-11: The Lies of Michael Moore (by Christopher Hitchens)
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