"Fahrenheit 9/11": Yea!

Moore is not just a traditional muckracker, but a crusading artist -- like Dickens, Solzhenitsyn and Springsteen -- and has become a signal artist of our time.

By Andrew O'Hehir

June 23, 2004 | It might seem cynical, or downright offensive, to suggest that "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's dizzyingly broad indictment of George W. Bush's handling of terrorism and the war in Iraq, should be considered primarily as entertainment. It's a strange kind of entertainment indeed, one dedicated to exposing a national emergency that is -- if you buy even one-fifth of the film's arguments -- profoundly alarming. It's a dark, metafictional entertainment, one in which the duly elected (or, well, at least duly sworn) president of the United States delivers a dire warning on terrorism for the cameras and then turns around to address his tee shot; one in which the filmmaker himself comes under Secret Service investigation for photographing on the streets of Washington. (No, that isn't actually illegal, at least not yet.)

How can one apply that term to a film that features, among many other things, nightmarish images of mutilated Iraqi children and mortally wounded American soldiers? I'm not suggesting that Moore deploys such images for laughs, or exploits them (although some viewers may have that reaction). But he is most certainly trying to shock you, to galvanize you, to make your jaw hit the floor. These are the goals of old-style muckraking journalism, and Moore belongs, in part, to that tradition. But they are also the goals of the crusading artist, from Dickens to Solzhenitsyn to Springsteen, and it's time to recognize that Moore has one foot in those waters as well.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is an enormous film, an angry film, a flawed film and often a very, very funny film. There is anguish in it and death, and not as much coherence as there might be. It's a political screed that makes our commander in chief look like a simpering dolt (and also like the instrument of a massive machine he cannot control), but -- as in the horrifying scenes where Bush sits in that Florida classroom reading "The Pet Goat," clearly nonplussed, while people dive from the twin towers -- it is not entirely devoid of a certain curious compassion for him. It contains multitudes. In its bigness and rage, its low humor and its sentimentality, it has something of Whitman, something of Twain, something of Tom Paine. Love him or hate him, Michael Moore is becoming one of the signal artists of our age.

Everybody who meets Michael Moore gets a story out of it; here's mine. Fifteen years ago, when Moore was touring the country to promote "Roger and Me," the film that first made him famous, I interviewed him for the San Francisco weekly newspaper where I then worked. As you can tell from his movies, he's a big, friendly guy who works his shambling Everyman persona to perfection. I liked him a lot, and he spun me a hilarious yarn about his brief and disastrous tenure as the editor of Mother Jones, the political magazine based in San Francisco. This was a dishy topic of local interest, so I ate it up. The Mother Jones staff, Moore said, had been outraged that this working-class nobody from Michigan had been hired to run their august publication. In a final fit of pique, the outgoing editor had actually unscrewed the telephone mouthpieces in her office, so that on Moore's first day he couldn't even make phone calls.

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