Don't Try and Change My Mind Pt. II Monday, June 28, 2004

I nearly forgot why I went with that title. I got invited, partially as a gag, I guess, to see the Palm d'Or winner over the weekend. The invitation, also partially as a gag, I guess, was to "challenge myself." This is something I'm perfectly willing to do. A good chunk of my daily reading is stuff I flat-out disagree with, and that makes me actively uncomfortable. If you've got a case to make, I'll listen.

But, for Chrissakes, make a case. A line comes to mind: Robert Christgau (one of the guys I disagree with but read anyway) describing an album of Jim Morrison's spoken-word poetry. Bobby describes the Lizard King as a self-indulgent jerk who would "jack off with both hands if he didn't have to carry a tune." That's my take on the Upper West Side's favorite fatso. I decline to spend two hours and ten dollars watching someone jack off with both hands because nobody's holding him to any rules. Christopher Hitchens, that notorious fascist, put it elegantly in a brilliant review:

Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.

Like he said. If you're making a documentary, keep your feet on the ground and your hands out of your pants. If you can't do that, call it a visual op-ed or an editorial cartoon or something. But don't pretend you're delivering the "real story." It's dishonest and it hurts the discourse.

My tutelary spirit, Mark Steyn, makes another nice point:

Bush has always been the issue for Moore. On September 11 itself, his only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and DC instead of Texas or, indeed, my beloved New Hampshire: "They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the plane's destination of California – these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for 9/11 when Clinton was president and Gore was ahead in the polls, and they'd have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected. Though Mohammed Atta took flying lessons in Florida, he apparently wasn't as exercised about its notorious hanging chads as Michael Moore. Mr Moore is guilty of what I believe psychologists call "projection".

The "Why didn't you terrorists kill the Bush voters?" line is not reprised in the movie, but the strange preoccupations it betrays drive the entire picture. Here's the way it works: if Bush is wearing the blue boxer shorts, they're a suspicious personal gift from Crown Prince Abdullah. If Bush is wearing the red boxer shorts, it's a conspiracy to distract public attention from the blue ones he was given by Crown Prince Abdullah. If he's wearing no boxer shorts, it's because he's so dumb he can't find his underwear in the morning.

So, shortly after 9/11, Moore wrote that footage of one of the World Trade Centre planes showed that it was being trailed by an F-16 – ie, the government could have shot it down but chose not to, so it could hit all those Al Gore voters. Imagine if, on September 11, the USAF had blown four passenger jets to kingdom come. Moore's film would be filled with poignant home movies of final Christmases and birthday parties and exploitative footage of anguished parents going to Washington to demand the truth about what happened that day and an end to the lame Bush spin about "threats" to public buildings.

Midway through the picture, a "peace" activist provides a perfect distillation of its argument. He recalls a conversation with an acquaintance, who observed, "bin Laden's a real asshole for killing all those people". "Yeah," says the "pacifist", "but he'll never be as big an asshole as Bush." That's who Michael Moore makes films for: those sophisticates who know that, no matter how many people bin Laden kills, in the assholian stakes he'll always come a distant second to Bush.

I can understand the point of being Michael Moore: there's a lot of money in it. What's harder to figure out is the point of being a devoted follower of Michael Moore. Apparently, the sophisticated, cynical intellectual class is so naïve it'll fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act.

Again: like he said. A Rocky Horror Show for bein-pensants; a Senior Spring Semester Follies where you get to make fun of the teachers. I've been that kid, and I've been that teacher. The former's more fun, but he doesn't know a goddamn thing. So I'll see you in "Spiderman."

@ 9:32:00 PM,

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