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At
a meeting in Cannes a guy got up to heckle Michael Moore, asking him why he paid
his workers such lousy wages. Moore had him thrown out. There are always good
reasons why entertaining but basically banal populist lefty/liberal movies like
"Fahrenheit 9/11" avoid the essential critique of capitalist social
relations: the creators of such movies are as complicitous in these
hierarchicala relations as Bush or Blair (even if differently complicitous). In
fact, almost all movies so far, along with their creators, are part of the
problem and not partt
of the solution: they produce a message or a story
which is just a commodity to be bought - the audience remains passive,
happy to be entertained or to consume the ideology.
The best thing about Fahrenheit 9/11 is that it never shows that
endlessly repeated footage of the 2 planes hitting the twin towers or their
collapse, a gesture towards subtlety not matched by the crudely populist
democratic ideology that pervades the film as it does American ideology
generally. Through avoiding virtually all explicit criticism of the
Democrats, the underlying message is "Vote Bush Out!". Everything
comes down to mere personalities – as
if the desperate debt crisis of American capital doesn't force it, regardless of
the President's name, to pursue the only strategy where its power is superior
– the military strategy. Populism doesn't want to get entangled in such
complexities – it's aim is to win people over to some 'message' rather than to
develop some practical opposition to their rulers and their economy. In this
upside down world in which many people justify their ideology according to the
amount of adherents who can repeat it, populism pretends to be anti-elitist,
whereas ideas that encourage people to think and act for themselves are
considered intellectually obscure, therefore elitist. Moore is now part of the
rich oppositional elite who prides himself on being a man of the people.
Even if, in interviews separate from the movie, Moore doesn't support
Kerry (not surprising – the imperial project of this shithead is even more
expansionist than Bush's; he's just a cleverer subtler manipulator than the
buffoonish Bush), there is virtually no criticism of the Democrats because that
might force him to criticise American bourgeois democracy, and that's a taboo
no-one who wants to be immediately popular
in America can dare break: if he clearly and unambiguously criticised the
Democrats, ticket sales would plummet. It comes as no surprise that Moore was
invited to the Democratic convention by Jimmy Carter's family. Carter, like that
other Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Kissinger, was such an advocate of peace
that he could massively arm the Indonesian government which slaughtered over
200,000 East Timors; he also helped set up the precursors of the Taliban that
Moore attacks - the Mohajadeen, whose most famously pacifist fighter was Osama
Bin Laden.
In the movie Moore says America is a great country. A load of
"let's not offend anyone" bollocks: like all nation-states,
it's crap, even though there might be some good things despite the crap. The
implication is also that Bush and co. are ruining the country, as if all capitalists
for 200 years haven't constantly ruined life for the vast majority. American
ideology always says "The country's great – the problem is particular
politicians and specific millionaires". Moore's film is the best ad for
America you could have – in America you can come from a poor background and
still make it – even by attacking the high-ups (and that's one of the American
ways to become a high-up). The country's "great" for the likes of
Moore because the myth that in America you can rise whatever your background has
paid off for him. For at least 90% of the poor and working class, this is the
carrot that is never reached. It's
not just that Moore doesn't want to be accused of anti-Americanism, which could
certainly reduce sales, but the
fact that one of the more regressive aspects of 'opposition' in the States is
that it has to claim to be patriotic because basically it sees solutions only in
national terms because all sense of international class struggle and of its
history has been lost. Ignoring all historical experience, they hope to develop
some national political organisation to reform the State.
But as long as hierarchical power exists, so this earthly hell will
continue to exist.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is a classic liberal/left bit of journalism.
It's mildly entertaining and reminds you of your anger, but with virtually
nothing to say about the world since 9/11 which hadn't been said sometime before
by loads of people who, unlike Michael Moore, never wanted to make a
professional career out of their opposition to US foreign policy (for this reason they
often had more to say than Moore). Even the details about Bush's connections
with Saudi capital only fill in very specific details about a general connection
that everyone who wanted to could find out for themselves. And it's not precise
secret details of corruption that make me hate this world – the details are
endless and inexhaustible – the question is "What do these details tell
us about the competing capitalists strategies and what are we going to do about
them if anything?". This is the problem: most people want their thinking
and acting done for them - hence they look to journalists like Moore to do their
research for them and 'simplify' things. Conspiracy ideology is the ultimate
simplification, reducing all the complexities of opposing this world to the
pursuit of endless details researched, consumed and churned out in the same way
some people relate in great detail the story line of the latest soap opera. And
Moore says less than is necessary for even a limited take on Iraq and the
current world situation, even though he lightly alludes to a lot. For example,
why so very little about the Gulf war in '91 (supported by the whole of the UN)
and the subsequent sanctions policy, which, with the support of France and other
countries, resulted in 500,000 Iraqi kids dying in the first 5 years of its
existence until it was then opposed by France, etc?
One of the more entertaining clips in the movie was Moore approaching
Congressmen to ask them if they could offer their son to be recruited to fight
in Iraq. Armed with a team of cameras and engineers who are being paid,
well-known professionals can now do things which we mortals would love to do but
would be arrested within 2 seconds if we tried. This is the image of freedom
this society promotes: paid representatives who do what we'd all love to do but
risk far more if we do (Mark Thomas & Dennis Pendennis in the UK
come to mind). It's above all this commodified representation of
subversion that makes the wealthier forms of capitalism seem so much more open
and free than the old style totalitarianism of Saddam Hussein or the Saudi
ruling class.
As always with the cinema, you have some passively absorbed 'collective'
experience which, because it's never followed by everyone who's just watched it
debating the issues and some maybe coming to some practical conclusions, leaves
you alone, leaving the theatre silently, or just discussing it with friends. But
then that's what all commodities do – and though each film-commodity is
different, films just enrich the careers of the people who make them – they
very rarely have concretely
explosive consequences, and those are usually despite the intentions of the
people who make them (e.g. Bunuel's "L'Age d'Or" which provoked a riot
by right-wing Catholics, or Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock", which provoked
teenagers in the 50s to tear up the cinema seats so they could dance). A cinema
collects a large amount of people together to isolatedly consume, in this case,
a polemical documentary. Despite Moore's ideology of democracy, the film's
not intended to provoke any polemical debate in the cinema that
could vaguely be called democratic – each person voicing their point of view
in public, communication in a
non-hierarchical manner. No – everyone just leaves separately, surprise
surprise.
At about the same time that Moore was sitting down in the streets
of Cannes to show his CGT-sponsored 'support' for the 'intermittents'* the
increasingly precarious intermittents themselves were expressing an
interestingly innovative critique of the cinema –
occupying one of them, only to be evicted, beaten up and arrested by the
cops. Profound opposition is always a risk: Moore's shallow 'critique' is oh so
very safe. No wonder he won the Palme d'Or. * See "Culture in
Danger – If Only" (October 2003), for an analysis of the contradictions
of the 'intermittents' movement, available
from the above email address; also available in French with some changes –
"Culture en Danger – Si Seulement" (May 1st 2004). |