Speaking of Michael Moore

Here's a column I'm working on for Whats Up. The November issue, hopefully. Tentatively untitled.

By the time these words see print, the presidential election will be decided (if it hasn’t been already) and Fahrenheit 911 will have been available for nearly a month on DVD. Whatever the results, the controversy of the movie will no doubt be ongoing; but a moment of clarification might be welcome regardless of how fanned the fire towards Moore is. Given that so many people think the media and entertainment worlds are liberal driven already, it’s still surprising how many people who believe in a liberal-dominated media are still up in arms over the film’s hard-to-find information without realizing the irony of their outrage over opinions and viewpoints they haven’t been exposed to in what might be years.

The fire I am referring to is the collection of various charges towards the filmmaker. Critiquing Moore’s partisanship is moot, given Moore’s declared intentions with his movie and the election (it’s hardly a hidden agenda). Accusations of Moore including faulty facts in the movie may or may not be a valid case, but also somewhat silly, given that they were up in arms over a lot of information that Moore presented almost a year ago in his book Dude Where’s My Country? and other books from years back like Fortunate Son (which has a Bin Laden cameo before the events of September 11 ever happened). However, the most interesting accusation I found came in the July 12th Time magazine.

The cover presented Moore’s film as “a new kind of political weapon;” and though they presented set of fair and balanced pieces, they ended it with a “Viewpoint” piece by Andrew Sullivan, painted Moore’s movie as a mirror image as Mel Gibson’s Passion of The Christ, calling both movies “forms of cultural toxin—poisonous to debate, to reason and to civility.”

While it is fair to call Moore’s movie a polemic, I would also like to point out that there’s something we can call it that I can’t remember hearing or reading much, if at all: a backlash.

Although we seem to declare something as never having existed if it isn’t still on-line, I would hope someone would remember the late lamented (at least by me) Brill’s Content and it’s Fall 2001 article “Hollywood Wars” by David Robb. It is an eye- opening piece and an alternative to the constant rhetoric against liberal Hollywood. In it, the author acquires quite an extended list of movies that were approved by the Pentagon in order to be made, including films as far back as the 1950’s.

The list of movies that were not taken under the military’s wing might baffle you. True, some, like Oliver Stone’s Platoon and the near-nuclear debacle Crimson Tide, are of no surprise. But how many people expect that mainstream darlings like Saving Private Ryan and Forrest Gump (presented this summer in The Boston Globe as a response to the Clinton era)? On the other hand, we can be thankful for the military’s contribution to such gems as Batman and Robin and Pauly Shore’s In The Army Now.

Less amusing but just as informative are the quotes from pentagon officials and military documents, emphasizing their desire to help Armed Forces recruiting and retention programs.” In reviewing the Tom Clancy adaptation Clear And Present Danger, one military official noted, “[M]ilitary depictions have become more of a ‘commercial’ for us, more than damage control.”

With almost fifty years of attempting to direct the Hollywood movie world, and the most recent end results including an action movie actor allowed to bring his old catchphrases to public office, Ronald Reagan being eulogized into a hero he never was off-screen, and people viewing the war with no more thought than the summer blockbusters, one has to ask questions like these: how liberal is the media Republicans purport to hate? And how surprised did we have a right to be as Fahrenheit 911, Outfoxed and other anti-Bush/war emerged?

Perhaps Moore’s left wing-driven work is as much of a problem as Fox’s broadcasting, but neither can be addressed until we take a look and realize how necessary it is after the majority of us have worn blinders to other views for generations.

Noam Chomsky argued that the main historical significance of 9/11 was the change in, “the direction in which the guns were pointing.” A similar argument can be made, I think, with the Fox-coddled nation’s continued sight-unseen disgust towards media presentations like Fahrenheit 911 and the many other works that will no doubt continue to appear if the insanity continues with Bush or his too-similar successor.