Link-filled thoughts
Jun. 21st, 2004 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taerowynI fully intend to see Fahrenheit 9/11. In fact, I already have plans to see it next Tuesday. I enjoyed Bowling for Columbine and the much older Roger & Me.
That said, I am a little trepidatious going into this, especially after having read Dude, Where's My Country?. Maybe it's because I read it right after reading the amazingly well-researched Fast Food Nation, but after "Dude..." I was left feeling that I'd read Moore's personal manifesto as opposed to a well-documented look at the status quo. He was completely unsubtle in his cherry-picking. And it seems that that hasn't changed for this film:
I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody, and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.
I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like Moore feels he must pull to the EXTREME left in order to get people slightly left of center (Nader, anyone?). But in doing so, he completely undermines the validity of a lot of the left's actual POV. Anyway, I guess I'll just have to wait and see what I think of the movie.
That said, I am a little trepidatious going into this, especially after having read Dude, Where's My Country?. Maybe it's because I read it right after reading the amazingly well-researched Fast Food Nation, but after "Dude..." I was left feeling that I'd read Moore's personal manifesto as opposed to a well-documented look at the status quo. He was completely unsubtle in his cherry-picking. And it seems that that hasn't changed for this film:
I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody, and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.
I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like Moore feels he must pull to the EXTREME left in order to get people slightly left of center (Nader, anyone?). But in doing so, he completely undermines the validity of a lot of the left's actual POV. Anyway, I guess I'll just have to wait and see what I think of the movie.
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Date: 2004-06-21 09:38 pm (UTC)