“And what did Bush do…He went on vacation.”
“Vacation all I ever wanted!”
Michael Moore’s entertaining documentary, Fahrenheit 911, which focused in on a time in America that is not considered a laughing matter at all, is extremely intelligent. What we don’t realize in his film is that none of what he says should be taken at face value. In fact, much of his documentary is solely his views about the tragedy on September 11th and the Bush administration. Whether we chose to believe his views or not was our choice—but a very hard choice.
Moore’s persuading tone and evidence invites us to join him in his “I hate Bush” campaign, without ever explicitly stating that he actually hates George W. Bush. Moore criticizes Bush’s decisions prior, on, and after the September 11th attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon including warnings of terrorist attacks, the day of the attacks, the war on Iraq, and the election of Bush.
Throughout the film, Moore uses different sources such as news reports, news videos that weren’t aired on television, clips from the war in Iraq, interviews (he tried) with other members of the administration and Congress, interviews with the Iraqis, and interviews of people who were directly affected by the war. Many of the scenes he portrayed were scenes of things that we had already witnessed such as the scene of the atrocities of the Iraq war and the scene where Bush continues to read a children’s book to a room full of adolescents while America is under attack.
However, even though we had already witnessed many of these events, Moore presents them in a very different light. I’m sure that many of us have seen pictures or videos concerning the war in Iraq numerous times, but we’ve never actually heard an Iraqi woman screaming at the top of her lungs. The other scene regarding Bush’s story time on September 11th has been portrayed in a very different light in other documentaries. Moore thinks that Bush was a coward and instead of taking action he just sat back and watched our country come to ruins because he is unable to make decisions on his own. On the other hand, other documentaries say that Bush had to stay there because of security purposes, because they didn’t want him to scare the room full of children, and because a decision could not be made in a few minutes.
One of the reasons why I really enjoyed Moore’s film is because he took facts that I had already known a lot about, but made me think differently about them. Another choice that Moore decided to take in his documentary is juxtaposing “sad” scenes with “comic relief” scenes. For instance, he would show a scene from Iraq with dead babies covered in blood in the back of a pickup truck and the next scene would be of Britney Spears being interviewed about Bush’s presidential decisions. I think the reason why Moore does this is to show that he’s not trying to make a sad documentary on 9/11 and its aftermath, but instead he’s documenting this moment in time and putting his own point of view out there on all of these events.
One thing I really liked about Moore’s narrative tone is that he never really blatantly states his point of view but it is noticeable through his choice of images, tone, videos, etc.
My favorite choice of Michael Moore’s direction of his own film in the beginning scene where everything was dark and all we heard were screams, fussing, and commotion when the Twin Towers were falling. Since we all saw this video and many others taken by tourists, news stations, and others, we were familiar with seeing the attacks. When the image was taken away and all we could hear were sounds that hit home for me and was a stronger emotion than seeing the towers fall. That darkness symbolized our country. In essence, we were in a state of darkness, from those of us who were in the Twin Towers, in the hijacked places, those of us watching on the news, on the streets, even Bush—we were all in a state of darkness.
Michael Moore is very deservingly the director of the most watched documentary. This film has influenced a change in my views about the war and the Bush administration. Although I do not hate Bush as much as Moore does, I do dislike him a little more after watching this documentary. Fahrenheit 911 is hands down, the best documentary I have ever seen.
