Fahrenheit 9/11

[pauraque_bk]

Tonight keladryb invited me out to the late showing of Fahrenheit 9/11.

Is it propaganda? Of course it is. I didn't expect to like it, and I didn't. It was artistically well done, but all propaganda makes me want to do is find out how the other side would rebut it. There were too many instances where I wondered where they got this or that number (you've heard figures as high as 630 billion? you've heard? from where?), too many times when footage was shown with no date or other identifying information. Too many for me to like it, I mean -- for what he was trying to do, it was fine, and cohered extremely well as a narrative.

Someone on my flist complained that they wished Moore had made a different movie, one more likely to persuade swing voters. I don't know if that objection is well-founded. The fact is that people react to propaganda, they react to strong visuals and are taken in by biased reporting. People are stupid: That's why it works. I wouldn't be surprised if many people were persuaded against the war by this movie, and came away questioning Bush's integrity when they hadn't before. These are people who hadn't considered their positions carefully to start with, and don't understand what these filmmaking techniques do to your brain, and I think there are a lot of them.

That's not to say that if the movie makes you think Moore's onto something, you're stupid -- far from it. If it raises questions and makes you want to find out more -- wonderful. I certainly want to find out more, particularly about the pipeline in Afghanistan, which I hadn't heard of before tonight.

To me, though, this is really two movies. One about corruption in the Bush administration, which presents a lot of complex connections and really needs unbiased information to be fully convincing, and one about the horror of war.

I am a pacifist. To me, images of war need no explanation or illumination. It's killing, it's organs ripped out in the street, it's people becoming murderers. That's reality, a reality that's been kept from us. That makes me viscerally angry in a way that the oil connections don't. It makes my heart beat faster, makes my hands shake. It's killing, and I hate it so savagely that I have difficulty finding words.

It could be my own bias, but I wouldn't be surprised if more people were convinced by this movie of war's inherent wrongness, than of any specific corruption.

I guess that's about it.


[EDIT: keladryb's thoughts are here.]

Comments

[noblerot.livejournal.com]

he could have made a film that zeroed in more closely on particular corrupt practices, addressed the other side's rebuttals, and absolutely demolished the administration's credibility

Yes, exactly. And he could have done just that -- the holes in the administration's arguments are a mile wide and begging to be demolished.

What this movie does do, however, is serve as a record of why people are angry and what the objections are to what's going on. That, I think, makes this a film that will be very important in a historical context, even if it doesn't change minds now

I do think it's a good film, and I do think it will stand as an important historical document. But we need more than that now. If Bush is re-elected, the ramifications will be widespread -- from the supreme court to civil rights to the economy to the lives of people in countries the administration deems threatening. What we desperately needed was a documentary that would open eyes and enlighten those who don't have access to (or, sadly, the inclination to locate) information beyond corporate U.S. news. What we needed was -- and I always flinch to have to say it -- effective propaganda, pure and simple. And I don't think F9/11 pulled that off.

Alas, in the past four years my idealism has gone into survival mode. I'm looking forward to a day when that changes.