Michael Moore's new film, 'Fahrenheit 9/11', is hilariously funny and passionately argued. It is also speculative and paranoid, writes Donald Clarke
Some time ago I appeared on a radio show to comment on the various offences against logic in Michael Moore's - admittedly powerful - documentary, Bowling for Columbine. Among the worryingly dubious sequences we ruminated upon was one in which Moore interviewed an employee of aviation company Lockheed in front of a great big rocket. The Lockheed plant was located in Littleton, Colorado, the town where the Columbine school shootings took place, and Moore's point - in so far as he had one - seemed to be that simply having weapons of mass destruction in the area could, through some magical diffusion, inspire homicidal urges in the youth of the Centennial State. It later transpired that the factory made nothing more threatening than weather satellites.
Well, I won't indulge in Moore-esque hyperbole by claiming that the radio station's switchboard was overwhelmed by complaints, but we did receive a steady stream of text messages expressing amazement that we should dare to question the bearded controversialist's right to bend the facts. One message in particular suggested that it was the duty of Irish journalists to support Michael Moore. He may be unreliable, the implication went, but he's unreliable in the cause of peace and justice.
Fahrenheit 9/11, already a massive success at the US box office after being awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes by a jury headed by the well-known political sophisticate, Quentin Tarantino, arrives here next week and once again those liberals who have doubts about Moore's methods are being dared to side against their enemy's enemy.
As anybody who has not been sharing Osama bin Laden's cave will be aware, Fahrenheit 9/11 investigates President George W. Bush's behaviour before and after the World Trade Centre attack and comes to some rum conclusions about his connections with the bin Laden family, George Bush senior's interests in Afghanistan and the "real reasons" for the war in Iraq. The film - particularly when making brilliant use of pre-existing footage - is hilariously funny, skilfully structured and passionately argued. It is also tendentious, speculative and wildly paranoid. And saying so does not make me a friend of President Bush.
Like so many conspiracy theorists, Moore makes great use of the Big Question. He points out an anomaly and hopes that the audience's puzzlement will edge it towards the most sinister interpretation of the events possible. Having discussed the financial connections between the bin Laden family and the Bushes, he talks us through the progress of the Afghan war.
Why, he then asks, did it take so long for troops to enter the area in which the al-Qaeda leader was believed to be hiding? Well, I don't know, Mike, but I certainly don't believe that it was because Bush had struck some sort of secret deal to let bin Laden escape. Actually, I don't really think that Moore believes this either, but he is happy to finesse more gullible viewers into such a view without making the accusation directly.
In a similar vein, he points out that the defence wing of a company named The Carlyle Group, in which both Bush senior and a bin Laden family member had interests, profited greatly in the wake of 9/11. Are we seriously meant to deduce that Dubya and Osama levelled the World Trade Centre to improve their relations' share portfolios? Again Moore doesn't specifically say as much, but he is clearly nudging his more unhinged supporters in that direction.
More serious are the specific claims he does make about Bush's motivations in invading Afghanistan. Put simply, he suggests that Bush family interests stood to gain from the building of a pipeline (we're talking about a natural gas pipeline, so you can take that it's-all-about-oil-you-know look off your face) and that the war was arranged to make such a development more likely.
The distinguished journalist, Christopher Hitchens - who, in the interests of full disclosure, we should identify as a vocal supporter of the war - has looked closely at the matter.
"The project to build it [the pipeline] was abandoned in 1998," he tells me from his home in Washington DC. "And it has not been resumed. Not that it would be a terrible thing if poor old Afghanistan did have a pipeline. But it just isn't true. There is no such pipeline. It was considered and it was dumped. It is not just a misleading explanation. As scientists say about theories that are junk, it's not even wrong. Bogus hypotheses often help to uncover the correct explanation. This couldn't even do that."
Elsewhere, Moore talks at great length about the arrangements made by the US government, in conjunction with the Saudis, to fly bin Laden family members out of the country after September 11th, while all other planes were grounded. Surely, a startled FBI talking head muses, the authorities should at least have talked to the relatives of their prime suspect before letting them escape.
Unfortunately for Moore, the September 11th Commission has since concluded that there is "no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace". Expect talk of a cover-up any time now.
So why are so many otherwise intelligent people prepared to put up with Moore's cavalier approach to the actualité? The world's buses are packed full of people pouring anxiously over his tub-thumping book, Dude, Where's My Country?. In the same way as Naomi Klein's infinitely better written and infinitely more securely researched No Logo, Moore's texts act as badges of membership to some club for recreational dissenters.
"There is a vague consciousness on why it has spread on the American left," Hitchens says of Moore's popularity. "That right-wing taunt that they are basically SUV-driving, elitist limousine liberals - they have always feared that there might be some kind of truth to that. And there is something reassuring that here they have this big, blue-collar figure. You have someone here who is an earthy man of the people."
Hitchens says this with a distinctly arch trill. Moore, reputedly an unforgiving employer, is known to insist upon staying in the most luxurious hotels in whichever city he is currently eating his way through. But let us not get petty. It is his choices as a film-maker that interest us here, and perhaps we are treating him too harshly in that regard.
Maybe, rather than judging him by the standards of grown-up documentarists such as Errol Morris (see that director's recent, excellent Fog of War for comparison), we should take him for what he is: a highly entertaining saloon-bar polemicist.
"I would generally say that that is true," Hitchens says cautiously. "I can say this with some knowledge be- cause I spent a long time - and was faced with many more distribution problems than Mr Moore has encountered - making a film putting Henry Kissinger in the dock. Nobody would say that that film was made to explore both sides of the question; it was an advocacy film. But nobody could say that any accusation made in that film was inaccurate or unsourced."
Hitchens admits that both he and Moore are in the business of propagating their own political beliefs.
"But writing an op-ed piece does not free you from the obligation to observe basic scruples of objectivity and factuality," he says. "But Moore is completely unmoored from that. He doesn't think that's a responsibility at all."
Let us be frank. Fahrenheit 9/11 is propaganda, and the fact that you and I might occupy the same political territory as its maker should not distract us from identifying it as such. Consider Moore's lengthy analysis of the seven minutes that George Bush sat in a Florida schoolroom reading the children's book, My Pet Goat, to himself after being told that the country was under attack. The director focuses in on those pinched features - "Bush's eyes are so close together he could wear a monocle," Hitchens admits - and speculates about what is going on in that much-derided brain. Was he worrying about the bin Laden connection? Was he trying to comprehend what it all meant? I suppose he does look concerned - who wouldn't? - but then again, maybe his pursed lips indicate anger or resolve or, for all we really know, constipation. I am reminded of the famous experiment where the great Soviet director, Vsevolod Pudovkin, intercut footage of an equivocal-looking Ivan Mozuhukin with shots of a bowl of soup, a coffin and a child, making the actor seem, respectively, hungry, sad and creepy.
And what about the sequence where Moore stands on a street corner in Washington trying to inveigle congressmen into sending their sons to fight in Iraq? (He, of course, fails to mention that the son of John Ashcroft, the attorney general and one of the most fearsomely right-wing of Bush's cabinet, has served in the war.) It is amusing in a hectoring, agitprop fashion.
But what is it doing in something that calls itself a documentary? Now, none of this - the inaccuracies, the speculation, the paranoia, the grandstanding - would matter if Moore's ravings were not taken so seriously by such a wide section of the public. Just as there are, following Oliver Stone's totally ridiculous JFK, a generation of nutters walking the streets who believe that Kennedy was assassinated by a section of the New Orleans gay community, so too new, equally deranged orthodoxies are already forming among Moore's fans.
The problem is not that Fahrenheit 9/11 is propaganda - after all, so are commercials, pop videos, party political broadcasts and The Passion of the Christ - the problem is that so few people seem to recognise it as propaganda.
Approach with caution.
• Fahrenheit 9/11 opens next Friday