On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, BklynMagus wrote:
> I suspect most "positive" reviews will follolw the same tack: "Yes it is
> powerful, but where is the proof?"
Your prophecy has been largely fulfilled. But I think the endless arguments about his arguments (Do they stand up? Are they one sided? Do they run all over the place without reaching a conclusion?) might be missing the essence of the film. The arguments are an integral element, like the images or the stunts or the FX. But at its heart this film is not an argument. It's an attempt to break a non-argument with another non-argument. It's a sustained attempt to break the connection between 9/11, al-Qaeda, and terrorism, on the one hand, and Iraq on the other. That connection wasn't created by real arguments. It was created by fake arguments. It was created by juxtaposition, repetition and emotional charge. And this movie attempts to use exactly those same tools against it -- which might be the only tools that could possibly work. They're like the arguments of a defense attorney who says to the jury "I'm not saying I can prove any of these things. I'm just saying there are lots of plausible leads the prosecution played down when they were rushing to frame my boy."
I think the take-away Moore is aiming at is not that we went into Iraq for this reason or that reason. It's that we went into Iraq for No Reason. That there is No Connection At All. And thereby to finally secrete that drop of corrosive doubt in the minds of people in the center who just haven't wanted to accept that it was all a Big Lie, that the constantly repeated reasoning of the ruling elite is absurd.
I also think that as a documentary this film is more creative and original than it's given credit for. It's not only his underlying conception, his invention of the Moore-film, which is more distinctive than it looks (how many others do you really see out there?) but the set of techniques he's developed to take a totteringly long stretch of associations and give it narrative drive, entertaining lightness, and a hi-gloss coat of normality. His films look completely commercial, which helps them get broadcast (in the original sense of the term) in a way no other documentaries are. But structurally, his webs of association are more like the situationist film _Call It Sleep_ than 60 Minutes. They just looks like the latter.
Now that it's an Event, people beyond the choir are clearly seeing it, so he's preaching to them. Can he break their faith that Saddam caused 9/11? I don't know. But it's certainly conceivable to me that in some cases he might. Not immediately or all at once, of course. But maybe after a couple of months of being snappish. And that little snap, in a small number of people who haven't yet, is all we really want. And it's what all the argument in the world has so far been unable to accomplish.
In the end, Moore's arguments are exactly like those of the administration. The logical form is a guise. It's an excuse for juxtaposition, repetition and emotional charge. The seams may be more obvious when it's all done in two hours rather than two years. But fundamentally they're no different in kind. And this form of persuasion definately worked for them.
Michael