The Moore you know

For every action in Michael Moore’s career as a left-wing
polemicist, provocateur and rabble-rouser, there’s been an inevitable
and equal reaction. Moore’s films—Capitalism: A Love Story,
out Friday (see page 21 for review), is his latest—inflame passions
and debate on both sides of left and right divide.

One could credit Moore for the explosion of the documentary form.
From when 1989’s Roger & Me burst onto the mainstream cinema
landscape to 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11 opening number one at the
summer box office, Moore has become a legitimate movie star—his name
alone is enough to draw a crowd. However, with the rise of the doc
event movie, Moore’s also beget a genre he probably prefers didn’t
exist: the anti-Michael Moore doc, works responding to and critically
re-examining his films and methods.

On DVD at local video stores are three films representative of that
anti-Moore niche: Manufacturing Dissent, Fahrenhype 9/11 and Michael Moore Hates America. All three are deeply critical
of Moore and are eye-opening in what they find, but they are also
purveyors of the similar tactics and methods Moore uses to varying
degrees of self-awareness.

Manufacturing Dissent follows a similar structure to Moore’s
Roger & Me, with Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine tailing Moore
on his 2004 Slacker Uprising tour of American colleges, demanding an
interview that never materializes. In between stops, the filmmakers
look closely at Moore’s career and the people he has engaged with—not
all are particularly happy with his success. The section on Moore’s
long love-hate relationship with Ralph Nader makes Moore out to be an
egomaniacal opportunist drawn to Nader because he can so easily
overshadow him in the media.

The film discredits itself for the most part, however, by relying on
the same tactics that critics of Moore point to frequently:
context-free footage, unattributed newspaper articles and quotes and
unfair footage of Moore supporters and critics at his rallies that
skews toward the hysterical, error-prone and inarticulate. As
Canadians, filmmakers Melnyk and Caine have no stake in the debate and
don’t rustle up the tension and urgency that Fahrenhype,
Michael Moore Hates America and even Moore’s films themselves
contain.

Alan Peterson’s Fahrenhype 9/11 is at once restrained and
pressing in its argument that Moore totally underestimates the threat
of terrorism to America, has assigned “enemy” status to the wrong
target (George W. Bush) and fills his films with implications, rather
than facts. Remember Moore’s damning statement that Saudi nationals
hightailed it out of the country immediately after the 9/11 attacks? As
the 9/11 Commission Report states, they were thoroughly checked by the
FBI and did not take off until after airspace opened up again on the
13th of September, not before. With former NYC mayor Ed Koch to former
Clinton advisor Dick Morris stressing the constant terrorist threats to
America and painting a starkly different portrait of that country than
Moore, the film is a reminder that all documentaries are fabrications
of some sort.

In Michael Moore Hates America, Michael Wilson sets out, a la
Roger & Me, to talk to Moore, and ends up with a film that
is as much about documentaries as it is about Moore. With his
antagonizing title, Wilson is wary of what he thinks people’s negative
reactions to his project will be, so he avoids as best he can revealing
the title of his film. He then regrets misleading people, but doesn’t
exactly stop, editing all those underhanded manipulations into the
film. The result is a searing commentary on the inherent
untrustworthiness of the non-fiction form, and a meditation on the fact
that films are just as much about what’s left out as much as what
remains in the final cut.

Is this the kind of spirited debate that Moore set out to inspire
when he began making movies in the late 1980s? His objectors bring up
important points when discussing his work, hitting upon relevant issues
about American politics and film. What’s that oft-repeated film cliche?
The best way to critique a movie is to go out and make another movie.

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Michael Moore offers no solutions, just the usual rhetoric.

This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2009.