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The
Temperature at which Reason Burns?
As
a longtime movie critic, watching the media’s ever-expanding
obsession with the box office performance of each week’s new
releases has been depressing. In my conspiracy- theorist heart,
I assumed it was because the mass media had been absorbed
by the same conglomerates that own the movie studios. That
was until National Public Radio starting reporting film grosses
too. Ain’t that America: Show us the money, and we’ll know
which film is cool.
So it’s funny to see Michael Moore’s anti-Bush epic, Fahrenheit
9/11, become a blockbuster worthy of mention on Access
Hollywood and—think of Mary Hart and say it with reverence—the
venerable Entertainment Tonight. Since the film opened,
the media have breathlessly followed the snarky flick’s box-office
triumphs. It opened at No. 1, instantly becoming the highest-grossing
non-Imax documentary ever. It held its own against the Spider-Man
2 onslaught, taking in almost as much money the second
week as the first. Fahrenheit 9/11 has become this
summer’s hot ticket. Moore is so hot, if Friends were
still on he’d probably get a guest slot as somebody’s goofy
uncle.
And the money is impressive: a $16 million diatribe (production
costs plus marketing) against George W. Bush has grossed,
as of July 7, approximately $64 million. And it hasn’t even
opened in the rest of the world, where folks really
hate George W. Bush. As for those nasty conglomerates—those
“useful idiots”—it looks like Sony is going to outbid GE-owned
NBC Universal for the home-video rights. (Again, Lenin is
proved right.)
This has clearly flummoxed the pundits. The red-meat right-wing
crowd is apoplectic; Ann Coulter titled a recent column: “Saddam
in Custody—Moore, Soros, Dean Still at Large.” (I get Moore
and George Soros, but poor Howard Dean—doesn’t she know Kerry’s
the nominee?)
Liberals wring their hands over inaccuracies. Washington
Post columnist and Iraq-war-supporter-turned-critic Richard
Cohen was clearly tearing his hair out in his July 1 column:
“. . . the stunning box-office success of Fahrenheit 9/11
is not, as proclaimed, a sure sign that Bush is on his way
out but is instead a warning to the Democrats to keep the
loony left at a safe distance.”
Cohen was disturbed at Moore’s connect-the-dots, conspiracy-minded
view of the 2000 election. In fact, that was all he could
sputter about; Cohen did not engage any of the other points
Moore raised.
“Speaking
just for myself,” Cohen continued, “not only was I dismayed
by how prosaic and boring the movie was—nothing new and utterly
predictable—but I recoiled from Moore’s methodology, if it
can be called that.”
Call Moore’s film what you want; it ain’t boring. (Boring
doesn’t make $60 million in two weeks.) Cohen seems to be
suffering from that peculiar inside-the-Beltway delusion that
most Americans pay attention to the news. Moore’s rant is
fresh info to a lot of folks.
Paul Krugman, who was a lone voice against the Iraq adventure
back when it wasn’t cool, took his colleagues like Cohen to
task in his July 2 column in The New York Times.
“There
has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the
movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual
errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions,”
Krugman noted. “Many of these same pundits consider it bad
form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration’s use
of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war with 9/11,”
he dryly pointed out, adding “why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist
to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United
States?”
Then there’s the heartland. High-school student Hunter Thieme,
writing a guest op-ed piece in the Springfield, Mo. News-Leader
on July 7, expressed his dissatisfaction with Fahrenheit
9/11, and let the filmmaker have it with both barrels:
“The definition of terrorist in my mind is someone who attacks
the innocent and causes fear in the minds of many. Odd, it
seems Mr. Moore fits nicely under this category.”
And, there are some exhibitors still unwilling to book the
film. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Iowa-based
theater-chain President R.L. Fridley sent this e-mail message
to his employees, explaining why he wouldn’t book the film:
“Our country is in a war against an enemy who would destroy
our way of life, our culture and kill our people. These barbarians
have shown [through Sept. 11] and the recent beheadings that
they will stop at nothing. I believe this film emboldens them
and divides our country even more.”
In point of fact, however, the film is doing well in the Midwest.
Moore supporters aren’t backing down, either. Embedded journalist
Urban Hamid filmed the Iraq sequences that appear in Fahrenheit
9/11. On July 6, he related this story to Amy Goodman
on Democracy Now!: “I remember one of the last conversations
I had was in January, and a sergeant was basically telling
his fellow soldiers that, you know, I understand why the Iraqis
hate us. He said that . . . we have all been duped, and we
know that, and . . . we should not be here in the first place.
And the interesting thing was that he was talking to about
four or five other soldiers, and they did not disagree. They
were all listening to him.”
If nothing else, the continuing controversy guarantees that
Fahrenheit 9/11 will be in theaters for the rest of the
summer. And just wait for the great October surprise, when
the DVDs flood the malls.
—Shawn
Stone
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