Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: Ancora su Michael Moore


Dog Eat Dog Films
"But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how
many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what
do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why
should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And
watch him suffer."
- Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America," March 18, 2003
SHE needn't have worried. Her son wasn't suffering. In one of
the several pieces of startling video exhibited for the first
time in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," we catch a candid
glimpse of President Bush some 36 hours after his mother's
breakfast TV interview - minutes before he makes his own
prime-time TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He
is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman is
doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old time. He
darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-
a-boo game with someone just off-camera. He could be a
teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing tedium
of a haircut.
"In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin
Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before declaring war,
with grave decisions and their consequences at stake," said
Mr. Moore in an interview before his new documentary's
premiere at Cannes last Monday. "But that may be giving him
credit for thinking that the decisions were grave." As we
spoke, the consequences of those decisions kept coming. The
premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" took place as news spread of
the assassination of a widely admired post-Saddam Iraqi
leader, Ezzedine Salim, blown up by a suicide bomber just a
hundred yards from the entrance to America's "safe"
headquarters, the Green Zone, in Baghdad.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" will arrive soon enough at your local
cineplex - there's lots of money to be made - so discount
much of the squabbling en route. Disney hasn't succeeded in
censoring Mr. Moore so much as in enhancing his stature as a
master provocateur and self-promoter. And the White House,
which likewise hasn't a prayer of stopping this film, may yet
fan the p.r. flames. "It's so outrageously false, it's not
even worth comment," was last week's blustery opening salvo
by Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. New
York's Daily News reported that Republican officials might
even try to use the Federal Election Commission to shut the
film down. That would be the best thing to happen to Michael
Moore since Charlton Heston granted him an interview.
Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's
detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources - foreign
journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four),
freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped
him illicit video - he supplies war- time pictures that have
been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling
images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11
once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of
the president continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to elementary
school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes
after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the
savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it
all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-
jolting images that have become the battleground for the war
about the war.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the movie Moore watchers, fans or
foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes would find it
easier to ignore.) When he first announced this project last
year after his boorish Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush,
he described it as an exposi of the connections between the
Bush and bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so
strenuously told elsewhere - most notably in Craig Unger's
best seller, "House of Bush, House of Saud" - that it's no
longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a brisk recap in the first
of his film's two hours. And, predictably, he stirs it into
an over-the-top, at times tendentious replay of a Bush
hater's greatest hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court,
Harken Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group,
Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August 2001, the
Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in another
direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same hairpin turn the
country has over the past 14 months and crash-lands into the
gripping story that is unfolding in real time right now.
Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we
should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted
Koppel should read their names on "Nightline"? In "Fahrenheit
9/11," we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi
civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts
that the violence of war entails. (If Steven Spielberg can
simulate World War II carnage in "Saving Private Ryan," it's
hard to argue that Mr. Moore should shy away from the reality
in a present-day war.) We also see some of the 4,000-plus
American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at
Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in
Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage
and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk
about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about
betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few years," one
soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, "and
for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest
way."
Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to
include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist.
But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've
seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of
"news," has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the
most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing
American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a
holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male
soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a
stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual
humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same
time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's
report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse
not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven
guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see
any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?
Don Van Natta Jr. of The New York Times reported in March
2003 that we were using hooding and other inhumane techniques
at C.I.A. interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
CNN reported on Jan. 20, after the Army quietly announced its
criminal investigation into prison abuses, that "U.S.
soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially
unclothed Iraqi prisoners." And there the matter stood for
months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with
knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert
Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the
story.
Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an independent
foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. "We've had
this footage in our possession for two months," he says. "I
saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's
pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school
education and with no training in journalism can do this.
What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic."
We already know that politicians in denial will dismiss the
abuse sequence in Mr. Moore's film as mere partisanship.
Someone will surely echo Senator James Inhofe's Abu Ghraib
complaint that "humanitarian do- gooders" looking for human
rights violations are maligning "our troops, our heroes" as
they continue to fight and die. But Senator Inhofe and his
colleagues might ask how much they are honoring soldiers who
are overextended, undermanned and bereft of a coherent plan
in Iraq. Last weekend The Los Angeles Times reported that for
the first time three Army divisions, more than a third of its
combat troops, are so depleted of equipment and skills that
they are classified "unfit to fight." In contrast to
Washington's neglect, much of "Fahrenheit 9/11" turns out to
be a patriotic celebration of the heroic American troops who
have been fighting and dying under these and other deplorable
conditions since President Bush's declaration of war.
In particular, the movie's second hour is carried by the
wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving, self-
described "conservative Democrat" from Mr. Moore's hometown
of Flint, Mich., whose son, Sgt. Michael Pedersen, was killed
in Iraq. We watch Mrs. Lipscomb, who by her own account
"always hated" antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and
rage. As her extended family gathers around her in the living
room, she clutches her son's last letter home and reads it
aloud, her shaking voice and hand contrasting with his
precise handwriting on lined notebook paper. A good son,
Sergeant Pedersen thanks his mother for sending "the bible
and books and candy," but not before writing of the
president: "He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am
so furious right now, Mama."
By this point, Mr. Moore's jokes, some of them sub-par
retreads of Jon Stewart's riffs about the coalition of the
willing, have vanished from "Fahrenheit 9/11." So, pretty
much, has Michael Moore himself. He told me that Harvey
Weinstein of Miramax had wanted him to insert more of himself
into the film - "you're the star they're coming to see" - but
for once he exercised self-control, getting out of the way of
a story that is bigger than he is. "It doesn't need me
running around with my exclamation points," he said. He can't
resist underlining one moral at the end, but by then the
audience, crushed by the needlessness of Mrs. Lipscomb's
loss, is ready to listen. Speaking of America's volunteer
army, Mr. Moore concludes: "They serve so that we don't have
to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free.
It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in
return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it
is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"
"Fahrenheit 9/11" doesn't push any Vietnam analogies, but you
may find one in a montage at the start, in which a number of
administration luminaries (Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell) in
addition to the president are seen being made up for TV
appearances. It's reminiscent of Richard Avedon's
photographic portrait of the Mission Council, the American
diplomats and military figures running the war in Saigon in
1971. But at least those subjects were dignified. In Mr.
Moore's candid-camera portraits, a particularly unappetizing
spectacle is provided by Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of
both the administration's Iraqi fixation and its doctrine of
"preventive" war. We watch him stick his comb in his mouth
until it is wet with spit, after which he runs it through his
hair. This is not the image we usually see of the deputy
defense secretary, who has been ritualistically presented in
the press as the most refined of intellectuals - a guy with,
as Barbara Bush would have it, a beautiful mind.
Like Mrs. Bush, Mr. Wolfowitz hasn't let that mind be overly
sullied by body bags and such - to the point where he
underestimated the number of American deaths in Iraq by more
than 200 in public last month. No one would ever accuse
Michael Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine
distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it
turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful
to tell.

 "news," has been just as subjectively edited. 
Meglio di cosi' non si poteva dire.
Moore non mi e' simpatico ma non vedo l'ora di vedere questo film.
-- 
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