A note from Chris Stroffolino. The ellipses in what follows are his.
Dear Ron —
Just a quick note about Michael Moore's oeuvre as you summed it up in your recent blog. We just returned from seeing F911 with Continuous Peasant's bassist, and political science teacher, Bob Gumbrecht, and his wife (and saw Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy in the audience as well) — and yeah, we too, had to wait for a ticket (or they graciously waited for me, while I rested my broken leg), as the 5:50 showing was sold out (made the 7:30 showing)....
Anyway, I still haven't "digested" the movie enough to come to an ultimate assessment, though I'm pretty sure I agree with much of what you have to say about what Moore might be able to achieve in that movie that often "the left" has been not able to achieve (though with some reservations that I need to sort out), particularly, as you point out, with regard to the issue of the U.S. military. If anything, I wish he would've emphasized more, perhaps by placing it earlier in the movie, the human impact on the life of the U.S. underclass. I thought the focus on so many phases of the military, from recruiting (and his comic attempt to recruit congressmen's sons), to the gun-ho soldiers playing heavy-metal when they kill, to footage of their beating and killing Iraqi civilians, to their increasing frustration with Iraqis (something to the effect of "they are angry at us for being here, but then are also angry if we don't do anything"), to their increasing anger with Bush ("why are we here?" said one in combat, the amputated soldiers in hospitals, and the last letter from the soldier to his mother, severely criticizing Bush), and even anger at Halliburton (the juxtaposition of the Halliburton ad about they "feed soldiers," to the Halliburton corporate luncheon back home, and the priceless footage of the U.S. Soldier at an Iraqi oilfield complaining about how he gets $2000/a month to put his life on the line, while the guys he guards who work for Halliburton get paid at least 4 times as much, he approximated, to drive a truck around....
I wonder if this message will reach the "swing vote," the "conservative democrat" like Lila Lipscomb, and others. I'd like to think it might, but wonder if the way the movie is billed, as ANTI-BUSH, or BUSH-BASHING (partially because of the way the movie is ordered; it takes Moore a while to get to his sympathy with the soldiers) may undermine that message. I have to think about that more....
But, that being said, the main point I wanted to raise, as a possible point of disagreement with you, concerns not your assessment of F911, but of BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, which I thought was a very successful movie, and far more subtle than you're giving it credit for. You claim that in B FOR C, Moore DOESN"T explore "AT ALL" what you call the "anomaly" of Canada's lack of gun-control and the fact that there are less gun-related deaths there, but that "He instead focuses on the gun-lobby." True to a point; Moore does famously confront Heston, and theatrically take the victims of the Columbine shootings to K-MART to get them to stop selling ammunition. But, along with this, you could call it rather "shallow" analysis, Moore also, and I think more profoundly, offers a deeper analysis, in considering the "culture of fear." He quite specifically and consciously explores what might be seen as the "discrepancy" between gun-deaths and gun-control laws in Canada to undercut any simplistic conclusion that gun-control will solve the problem in the USA. In fact, he begins the movie by talking about his own childhood fascination with guns, and how he himself is still a member of the NRA (which at first may seemed to be a "put-on" but it's not at all clear it is). So, either Moore is talking out of both sides of his mouth, on one level advocating gun-laws and on another level saying "GUN CONTROL WON'T SOLVE THE PROBLEM!," or he's astutely recognizing the need to work on a variety of fronts, straddling a wedge issue, in at least as "fair and balanced" a way as F911 deals with the question of "You don't have to be anti-SOLDIER to be anti-THE IRAQI war." And it is precisely this that allowed him to emphasize the analogy to American response to 9/11 and American response to high-school shootings, in B FOR C. In some ways that linkage of the seemingly more "local" with the "national and international" attitudes (and the role in the media) may have made B for C an even more radical movie (if not necessarily better—-they each serve their different functions) than F911, in terms of depth of analysis. In some ways more, since I felt Moore could have done a better job of investigating Bush's relationship to Saudis and Bin Laden. Because Moore came off as not just "another liberal" wanting to "take away our guns" in B FOR C, I think the movie possessed a persuasive power that may also exist in the new movie. Conservative commentators couldn't as easily just write him off. In this movie, because it begins so clearly as an anti-Bush movie, I'm not so sure it will — but the jury (of which I am not a part!) is still out on that. "No silver bullet?"
