Fahrenheit 9/11 controversy may burn Bush more than film itself

Terry Prone

"I wouldn't miss it," she told the interviewer. "Once they tried to ban it, I knew I had to see it."

When she stepped back into the queue, she was glowing. Hey, back in the 60s, you had to march, stick a flower in the business end of a soldier's gun and get night-sticked by a hostile cop in order to affirm your liberal status. These days, all you have to do is pay $6 to see Michael Moore's latest documentary.

Half the queue had to wait for the second showing, because the first was packed as a result of the publicity surrounding its opening.

No problem. They didn't mind the wait. They wandered off, tickets in breast pockets of their Ralph Lauren polo shirts, to consume lattes and discuss the iniquities of George Bush, before re-grouping an hour later. Cardboard cartons of popcorn and jumbo sodas in hand, they filed into their seats, ready to be outraged, already so committed that a lot of them even laughed delightedly when an early credit announced that this was a Dog Eat Dog Films production.

As far as the audience was concerned, it was a miracle they were getting to see the film at all. It might have won overseas awards and its director may have won an Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, but every obstacle had been put in the path of screening the successor to that film.

The Disney Corporation, originally scheduled to distribute the film, pulled out of the task weeks ago, reportedly worried about the anti-Republican slant of the documentary. For a while, it appeared that the movie might fail to find an alternative distributor, but the publicity surrounding Disney's abandonment of the project ensured others would step up to the plate.

As soon as it became apparent that other distributors would be found, a prominent Republican, who has described Fahrenheit 9/11 as "a recruiting film for al-Qaida" led a campaign to pressure theatre owners not to show it. Opposition surfaced even from non-political sources. Unexpectedly, Ray Bradbury, the aged writer of the classic novel, Fahrenheit 451, gave out dog's abuse about Moore's coat-tailing on his title.

The Republican Party itself is currently demanding that Federal authorities stop TV networks running the ads for the film, on the basis that the ads are really anti-Bush commercials, gratuitously intervening in the middle of a Presidential election and most annoying of all not paid for by John Kerry's fundraisers.

John Kerry's team are not as grateful as you'd expect for all this. They say the furore may be doing damage to the President, but it's not doing Kerry any good, because the coverage isn't showcasing him, but is soaking up column inches and airtime which would otherwise go to his campaign.

Just as the protestors who tried to stop film-goers attending Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, ended up driving hundreds of thousands more to it and exponentially enriching Gibson, so Fahrenheit opponents have given the movie a good chance of becoming the most commercially successful documentary ever. If it was a documentary, which it isn't.

Moore himself describes it as an "op-ed piece". What you're currently reading is an op-ed piece: a chunk of personal opinion on a current issue, positioned close to or opposite to the editorial in a national newspaper.

Calling his movie an op-ed piece is a smart move, allowing it to fail the pesky requirements of a documentary, like coherent story-telling and discovery of truth. Documentaries require their arguments to be supported by evidence. An op-ed polemic can rely, instead, on assertion, supported by caricature. It can be and Fahrenheit 9/11 is built on style, rather than substance, on passion rather than lucidity.

If you're Michael Moore, you pick whatever footage makes Republicans in general, and the President in particular, look like complete eejits. Nor is there shortage of such footage.

An early sequence, for example, shows George W, Colin Powell and others being prepped for the cameras. (Lesson to all politicians: never, EVER let the cameras roll while you're having make-up applied. You will look ridiculous.) As the performers are readied to perform, one of the President's advisors is seen spitting on a comb he then uses to smooth down his hair. The low-level wave of nausea this evokes is exacerbated when, within seconds, he enthusiastically licks the palm of his hand to finish off the gloopy task.

OF course it's not venal to apply saliva to one's hair, and the Republican administration can legitimately crib about Michael Moore's use of it on the big screen, although they can't contend that it will drive audience-members to al-Qaida. It's just a cheap shot. It does, nonetheless, show that long before Carol Coleman took to interrupting the President on camera, his administration was not always on top of the media thing. Comb-licking on camera hasn't a great track record as a popularity ploy.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is fascinating on a number of fronts. When, for example, Moore covers the two planes going into the World Trade Centre, he does so purely through sound. The screen is empty. The device forces viewers to provide their own memories. And they do.

He also takes a familiar still photograph we all remember, and changes how we see it. The still photograph is the one of the President, at a photo-opportunity in a kindergarten, listening to a Secret Service man whispering the news of the second plane.

Still pictures sum up a moment the President looking stricken but they don't tell what happened before or after that moment. This movie fills in both gaps. Before the President went into the kindergarten, the script announces, he knew that the first tower had been hit. After the news of the second attack was whispered to him, the film establishes, the President sat for seven minutes, looking not saddened or outraged or decisive, but merely flummoxed, waiting for someone to tell him what to do.

The central problem of the movie is over-reliance on guilt-by-association. Guilt-by-association is grand, if all the associates are famous. But when a film-maker makes a big deal about Dubya being pals with Prince Whatsit from Saudi and Head-the-Ball the big financier (of whom we've never heard) and rants about both putting money into some company he once owned which otherwise would have gone belly-up, all it does is prove that rich people tend to hang around with other rich people. Affluence sans frontiers.

This film is not going to attract floating voters in sufficient numbers to make a difference to the Presidential election, even if it is assumed that Michael Moore's self-indulgent smart-ass approach to his subject was actually going to convert those floating voters to achieve his stated goal: to get the Republicans out of the White House and make George Bush a one-termer.

On the other hand, the objective just might be achieved by the TV ads and controversy generated by the film, rather than by the film itself.