I actually heard
Michael Moore’s infamous acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine the
day before he gave it.
The night before
the 2003 Academy Awards, the 2003 Independent Spirit Awards were given. I’d
been watching them with fascination for the last four years and already enjoyed
them more than the Oscars. Bowling for Columbine won the documentary
prize and Moore, with one notable exception, basically gave word-for-word the
most notorious acceptance speech in history.
There were two
major differences. The first was that when he gave his speech he was greeting
with applause and not a single negative comment which no doubt encouraged him
to give it the next night. The second – and perhaps more critical difference –
was his tone. Moore was not his usual confrontational self, more humble and
there actually seemed a note of melancholy as he gave his speech. I vividly
remember the one critical line he said at the Spirit Awards that he never said
at the Oscars – and it got the most applause:
“Violence is the
solution to our nation’s problems. That’s the lesson for the children of Columbine.”
Even his famous
end quote actually seemed more in good humor and less spiteful. I was impressed
by it. None of that was present the next night when he won the Oscar, he was back
to his old self and seemed to revel in the fact that people were booing him. I
now think back to his speech at the Spirits with more fondness; in hindsight
that’s the last time I remember finding Michael Moore likable.
The next year the Academy
Award winner for Best Documentary Feature was Errol Morris. At the time, this
was a bigger deal than Moore’s win the previous year. Both Moore and Morris has
been known for being shunned by the Oscars for groundbreaking documentaries but
in the case of Morris, it had been for far longer. When he won his Oscar for The
Fog Of War, he likewise got a standing ovation. Unlike Moore, he gave a
much more humble speech. The movie was about Robert McNamara, the Secretary of
Defense who had been integral in the expansion of the war on Vietnam and by March
of 2004, it was becoming clear just how much a quagmire the Iraq War was
becoming. But the most Morris said in his acceptance was: “I fear we’re going
down that same rabbit hole.” He was greeted with a huge round of applause, but
that was all he mentioned to it. Later that summer, Fahrenheit 9/11 was
released and would become the highest grossing documentary of all time.
Both Morris and
Moore are among the most famous documentary filmmakers of all time. Yet while
Moore could not have been what he was without Morris’s laying the groundwork,
Moore is far more famous and successful while Morris’s fame is almost entirely
among those who know documentaries.
As we commemorate
the 20th anniversary of Fahrenheit 9/11 I have come to
realize all of the issues I’ve had with Moore and his style of filmmaking over
the years. And much in the same way Truffaut the best way to criticize a movie
is to make another movie, the best way to criticize a documentarian is with
another documentarian. So in this article I intend to give a brief overview of
the work of Morris and Moore, why one is
the better filmmaker and one is more popular and their most famous films tell
you about so much of how we view both documentaries and politics today.
Errol Morris revolutionized
documentary filmmaking with Gates of Heaven, in which he told the story
of a pet cemetery in California and the people who have pets buried there.
Roger Ebert would name it one of the greatest films ever made and it is one of
the most profoundly moving films ever made about life and death. In it came one
of the most famous lines of all of cinema, said by the owner of the pet cemetery:
“Death is for the living and not for the dead.” The famous director Werner
Herzog bet his film student Morris that he would eat his shoe if he made a film
about pet cemeteries. Morris did, and Herzog kept his promise.
Morris then spent
the next decade making some of the greatest documentaries of all time: The
Thin Blue Line argued that a man was wrongly convicted for murder because
of a corrupt justice system in Texas and not only helped free Randall Adams
from prison it got the guilty party to confess. Next came A Brief History of
Time which made a celebrity out of Stephen Hawking and made physics
understandable to the masses. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control explored
the careers of four unrelated professionals: a lion tamer, a robotics expert, a
topiary gardener and a naked mole rat specialist. And in Mr. Death he
gave the cinematic portrait for the man who designed the most famous American
execution device and then spent his career denying the Holocaust. In all of these
movies Morris spend most of his time just following his subjects and
interviewing people, simple work but absolutely groundbreaking.
Despite the clear
incredible nature of his work, Morris was never even nominated for an Oscar for
any of these films. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Documentary branch of the
Oscars was known for making some notorious oversights, constantly excluding the
most popular and well-made documentaries of the era, perhaps most infamously with
Hoop Dreams in 1994, which many considered the best film of the year.
But Morris’s continued omissions during this period are considering by far one
of the biggest travesties in the entire history of the Academy Awards,
certainly when it comes to non-fiction movies.
The Fog of War which bears the
subtitle: “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara” covers the entire
career of much of the twentieth century. McNamara shares stories with many
historical figures. He tells us of an exchange with Curtis LeMay, who ordered
the fire-bombing of Dresden, who told him that if Germany had won he and McNamara
would have been tried for war crimes. He tells of his time in the Kennedy administration,
particularly at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis. And he confronts his
role in Southeast Asia through these lessons. The most pertinent ones are one
we would do well to listen to, not just in war but every single element of
human kind:
-
Empathize with your enemy.
-
Get The Data.
-
Belief and Seeing are often wrong.
-
Be Prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
And I have to say the most important one
is the last one: “You can’t change human nature.”
The lessons that
he give are clearly ones he learned the hard way and it is as close as he comes
to admitting his errors during the Vietnam War. It’s not a mea culpa, the way
many thought it was, but it did admit at least he learned from his mistakes.
Michael Moore is
not much younger than Morris, I was actually surprised to know he’s only six
years younger than Morris but the movies he made over the years don’t seem to
take place in the same universe. From the start of his career in Roger &
Me, Moore made it clear that he was never going to be the quiet
observational filmmaker Morris was. What Moore was about from day one was
confrontation and rage.
It's hard not to
watch Roger & Me, which is in a way both Moore’s best and certainly
subtlest documentary and see everything we need to know about him. Watching him
I can’t help but be reminded of Geraldo
Rivera or so many investigative journalists then and now who seem more interest
in shouting questions at the powerful and getting ‘no comment’. I don’t deny Moore’s
anger is justified given how personal the subject matter is to him and much of
Americans. But even from the start you get the sense that unlike with Morris,
who seems content to let the truth reveal itself both to its audience and the
subject, Moore comes in with a predisposition in mind and wants to make sure
the audience gets it too. This is less the attitude of a great documentary
filmmaker, and something that reminds me of the work of Adam McKay – and I have
to say watching many of Moore’s later films, the resemblance becomes clearer
over time.
Moore spent much
of the next several years working in entertainment: he made his one fictional
film the comedy Canadian Bacon and the failed but often fascinating
series TV Nation. It’s pretty telling that Moore’s next documentary The
Big One was his filming of his own book tour: it’s not a good sign when you’ve
decided to say you’re going to tell the truth about business and politicians –
and then openly make yourself the subject.
Moore spent much
of the 1990s in what seemed to be pure self-indulgence so Bowling For
Columbine seemed like a refreshing return to form as he used the school
shooting to talk about guns in America. The film was less subtle but the
subject demanded it. I would argue that film was also the last real documentary
Moore ever made.
I saw Fahrenheit
9/11 in the theaters and at the time I was impressed by it. In hindsight, I
think I agree when Moore didn’t want to submit for Best Documentary for that
years Oscars. The movie is many things but it’s not a documentary, certainly
not in the way that Morris had been making them, definitely not in the sense The
Fog of War was.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is essentially a
two hour rant about the Bush administration and the Iraq War. Even the summary on
imdb.com makes it clear that this is “Michael Moore’s view on what happened to
the United States.” To be clear documentaries to that point were known for at
least trying to be objective in their approach, certainly Morris’s were. It
might have seemed impossible for feel sympathy for a man who spent his career
denying the Holocaust, but in his rave review of Dr. Death, Roger Ebert
seemed to come away with the idea of that the subject was a sad figure as much
as a fool.
With Fahrenheit
9/11 Moore never pretends that he’s being objective or balanced about his
approach. He makes no effort to talk to the Republican lawmakers or any
politicians at all. All of the political figures are done through archive and
are frequently manipulated to look as dumb and foolish as possible (the notorious
opening credits) He makes it very clear
how much contempt he holds for every single member of the Bush administration
and basically every politician. He wants you to know this is why the invasion
of Afghanistan and Iraq happened. The fact that much of it turned out to be
true is almost incidental to Moore who doesn’t bother to give any of these
characters a defense.
This approach, it’s
worth noting, continued during the morning interviews promoting the film. Moore
not only didn’t bother to answer criticism about not being objective but was on
attack, essentially blaming the media themselves as accomplices to this. He
attacked the distributor for not wanting to release it, the MPAA for rating it
R, the media for wanting to ‘bury the
truth’.
I think the reason Fahrenheit 9/11 is
the highest grossing documentary has less to do with its quality but rather
Moore’s promotion of it and diving into the controversy full-tilt; in that
sense, it’s just a variation on how Mel Gibson would approach The Passion of
the Christ that same year. And the cynic in me thinks that their most
devoted filmgoers were both deeply devout to their beliefs in polar opposite
ways: both Moore and Gibson were preaching to their respective choirs.
Moore spent the
next decade becoming more and more famous and making fewer and fewer films. I’ve
often ranting about all the doomporn that I see written online; there’s an
argument that from Fahrenheit on Moore has been making the cinematic
equivalent of it. Just like viewers went to X-rated films in raincoats during
the 1990s, a certain group of people will come to see Moore rant against all of
the leftist talking points: the health care system in America, the evils of
capitalism, our policy of empire and of course, Fahrenheit 11/9. With
each movie Moore keeps going further and further from even the pretense of
objectivity; in his last film, he more or less states that Donald Trump is
having sex with Ivanka, which has basically been a sick joke by so many ‘comedians’
over the years. You wonder if Moore was hoping Trump would sue him or arrest
him; he must have been disappointed that neither happened.
Morris has been
working more steadily than Moore since his win, as much for TV as film. He has
been as political as Moore – his next major film was Standard Operating Procedure
which examined what happened in Abu Gharib and he filmed a TV series when
he sat down with Steve Bannon. But despite that he has never enjoyed the favoritism
among the left that Moore does. This may have been made most clear in his most
direct film related to the Iraq War The Unknown Known in which he
basically did for Donald Rumsfeld was he had done for McNamara ten years
earlier. The film was as direct a critique of him as it was of McNamara.
A review on
imdb.com says that it covers much of interesting ground, but that he finds
Morris’s approach of Rumsfeld sitting down and talking to the camera “inevitably
boring” He also says, he still preferred it to Fog of War. Perhaps the
most telling line is “others will…have to make their own mind up.”
I wonder what this
viewer expected given everything we had seen Rumsfeld do over his career. Were
they expecting a Robert Durst type confession at the end of it? For Rumsfeld to
admit after the fact all his sins when he never had? For Morris to ask the kind
of questions that would trap him into war crimes? That is not the kind of documentary Morris
ever made - but it seems to be the kind
this viewer was expecting.
And its clear that
this viewer had already made his mind up about Rumsfeld and everything he’d
done and wanted his point of view confirmed by The Known Unknown. This
seemed one of the major criticisms of the movie by political columnists, if not
film critics. Morris had in a sense done all of that by showing the
inconsistencies in Rumsfeld’s stories and seemed to think his denials and
non-statements were supposed to speak for themselves and it was for the viewer
to make their own judgment. And its telling that Fahrenheit, which only
shows Rumsfeld in stock footage, grossed $100 million while Unknown which
actually had Rumsfeld talking only made $300,000.
By contrast most of Moore’s subsequent
documentaries have always grossed among the highest of all documentaries, before
and after Fahrenheit. Sicko grossed
$36 million, Capitalism: A Love Story grossed $17 million and Bowling
for Columbine had grossed $58 million worldwide. That of course is the
other reason Moore is famous: by the standard of the free market, Moore is the
best one: he is the documentary filmmaking equivalent of Spielberg.
There is a reason
for this, to be clear. Morris is still making films that he hope that filmgoers
will want to see while Moore’s movies have a built-in audience that will always
turn out for it whenever he makes them.
Most of them probably have never heard of Errol Morris or even know of
another documentary filmmaker; I’m certain about this for the youngest among
them. What they know is that Moore ‘speaks to them.” This is not what a
documentarian is supposed to do when he is filming a subject, documentary
filmmakers prior to Moore were known for being notorious in their objectivity.
That very reason is why, even before the explosion of cable news and partisan
politics, Moore was always popular with a certain set of people and always will
be.
Even before Fahrenheit,
Moore was considered by many people as a ‘truth-teller’. But he was never
one the same way that great documentarians like Errol Morris are. The reason
that Moore is considered one is the exact same reason the right excoriates him
and the left uses him for fundraising: it is because of the truth that he has
chosen to tell. He gave up any pretext to objectivity long before so many on
the left said we needed to abandon it to save ourselves in the last decade.
That retaining objectivity is something you can’t just give up when it suits
you is something that so many in the world can’t accept – and it’s in part
because of the kind of movies Moore has made that it’s become mainstream
thinking.
Many might
commemorate 20 years since Fahrenheit 9:11 but twenty years later the
lessons that we learned from Errol Morris through Robert McNamara are infinitely
more pertinent and vital to our daily lives than any message Moore has tried to
tell both there and in the last twenty years. I think by far the most important
one is “Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.” In the world we live in
today, that’s a lesson we need to keep going if we have any chance to survive
as a society. It goes against the dogma of our world, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
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