(dave e)

sunday matinee

I’m having difficulty writing about the Moore movie. Each start begins with intemperate sarcasm. Moore’s an ideologue? Farenheit 9/11 isn’t documentary – it’s propaganda? Wha? You mean documentary isn’t a transparency through which truth-seekers see the Real? NO!!

This is, by the way, not unlike the Ed Gillespie-driven madness about CBS’s Reagan miniseries. Those crazy liberals are at it again, getting in the way of the straight story, in which everything serves itself up for clear review on the easy-to-follow pages of History. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto…

That’s neither a fair nor a meaningful way to respond to the film, though. I think Chuck’s right. Moore’s narrative is scattershot. Presumably, that’s maddening for both his admirers and his enemies. The former can’t reflect much on how, exactly, the House of Saud and Carlyle collude to bring about anything because Moore sort of winks and moves on from his not-very-subtle points about crony capitalism and blood. The latter can’t really defuse an argument about international conspiracy, because it’s not carefully made enough to take seriously.

And so one is frustrated by the fact that Moore doesn’t simply point out the profits enjoyed by war financiers and move on. That would be damning enough. Implying without arguing that finance, oil, and Saudi influence somehow orchestrated the past four years seems more than reckless. This commits a sin from the same cloth as Moore’s nicely edited Bush montage: “Al Qaeda Saddam Al Qaeda Saddam Al Qaeda Saddam Bin Laden.” Correlation and causation collide.

Yet the narrative formula made sense. The mission of documentary is the creation of context, and Moore’s film establishes and critiques that work. Bin Laden’s family enjoyed some financial relationship to the President’s? LOOK – OVER THERE! SADDAM! The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism wasn’t actually read by members of Congress? OHMIGOD! THEY MIGHT USE BALLPOINT PENS TO KILL OUR COWS IN RURAL VIRGINIA! Yes. Precisely. A filmmaker tells his story, in which contexts (Bush the failed oil man, Secret Service protection at the Saudi embassy, smokers who want to light up a Camel as soon as they find an airport smoking lounge after that transcontinental flight) lose their stability as explanations. Moore, of course, never says correlation is causation (Bush was bailed out by Saudi investors, the Secret Service is there because Bush wants to keep pesky Moore from snooping on his pals, RJ Reynolds makes sure you can carry four books of matches and two lighters through any TSA checkpoint).

Moore’s best work with contextualization, though, is his juxtaposition. Those moments are utterly predictable, but when he cuts from bloody corpses to Rumsfeld on our “humanitarian” attack, it does what it ought to.

Then again, Moore’s visual rhetoric in his roll-call of the coalition of the willing borders on the childish. We already know that these nations’ “participation” has more to do with their status in the coalition of the coerced. Why poke fun? There’s little need to goofily wonder whether Morocco will “send some monkeys to check for land mines.”

I honestly have no wager to make on whether or not the film could change any minds. It certainly tries –the wounded soldier at Walter Reed explaining that he had been a Republican, but they’re crooked, so he’s going to do everything he can to help his local Democratic party when he gets home comes to mind. The story of Lila Lipscomb, the mother whose story gets the most attention in the film’s (better) second half, ought to obliterate anyone’s complacency. But it probably won’t.

All the critics who favor the second half are right, I think. Once the cameras are on the ground in Iraq, the film organizes itself more effectively around the illogic of war. I appreciate Moore’s willingness to let those soldiers tell us that they get a “rush” out of blazing around Baghdad listening to that cd. As Michael Herr made more than evident after Vietnam, we absolutely must know the soldiers’ stories.

Moore’s best moment is his exclusively aural representation of what Scott Simon called "the visual profanity of planes carrying innocent people to their deaths" (scroll to "Street Sound - Disaster Minute"). I can’t fairly talk about how it felt to hear the planes tearing the sky apart again, this time in a dark theatre, without resorting to cliché. My heart rate picked up considerably. I closed my eyes and remembered the precise blue and the cool smell of That Morning.

OK. Overblown. That’s enough for now. It's a story we already pretty much knew. I"m glad I saw it, and I'm satisfied about the fact that my ticket price was part of the opening weekends. I'm pleased that the theatre was full and that the line for the next show was even longer than ours had been.

Posted by dave at June 27, 2004 8:21 PM | TrackBack