Fahrenheit 9/11

Talk of the town and the nation at the moment. Saw it this past weekend at the two-screen California Theater near the Berkeley campus. It was quite a scene. The line stretched all the way down the street and wrapped around the corner. And it was a highly-charged, circus-like atmosphere with political activists on both sides of the political spectrum, "left" and "left-of-left" (this is Berkeley after all), rallying the very partisan crowd, distributing "informational" leaflets and registering voters. Strange. I may have been the only registered Republican in the crowd. In the runup to the film's premiere on Friday, I was a bit torn about watching what amounted to a two-hour political advertisement for the Democratic Party, conveniently released in the middle of an election year. It's no secret that Michael Moore has an agenda, the defeat of George Dubya this coming November. Regardless, I thought it was important to see the film for myself and to form my own opinions about it, not heeding the canned dribble that was being disseminated the past couple of weeks by the conservative media. After having been impressed by his previous documentary, Bowling for Columbine, I was willing to cut Moore a little artistic (and political) slack. Good thing I did. This film, at its very heart, is not about Bush, politics, war, or terrorism per se. Surprised? The film is really about an issue closer to Moore's own heart, class warfare. The theme of rich versus poor (and the institutionalization of a two-tier class system) was central to Moore's very first documentary, Roger and Me. Same theme, different context. The desperately poor families of Flint, Michigan (Moore's hometown) still live in third world squalor, in ghettos that one young man in the film points out look more war-torn than the villages in Iraq. But the "wrongdoer" is no longer General Motors. It is now the War Administration of George Dubya, whose Armed Services are unfairly targeting the sons and daughters of the poor to fight in a war that is both unjust and unnecessary. But here's the rub. Whether a war is just or unjust is of little importance to the "system". War, according to Moore, serves one primary, overarching purpose, as a means for the rich to stay rich and the poor to stay poor. War is just one more subsystem within the class struggle. Interesting argument, one that is getting lost amidst all of the political rhetoric. Moore's own shenanigans too often get in the way as well. The story of a Flint mother's tragic loss of her son in Iraq and the transformation that she undergoes from one of flag-waving support of the war effort to one of confusion, loss, and ultimate rage at the Administration gets undermined by the sophomoric and high-handed stunts that typify all Moore documentaries, e.g., hijacking an ice cream truck to read aloud the Patriot Act to Congressmen. Regardless of your politics, Fahrenheit 9/11 does provoke thought about some serious issues, rare for any film nowadays. For that reason alone, it's one I would recommend without hesitation.