Quotes of the Day
Sitting in the movie theater watching Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 amid an audience utterly riveted by a movie speaking to its deepest emotions, I kept getting a sense of deja vu. Where had I felt such crowd dynamics before? And then I remembered. What I was sensing was eerily similar to the awestruck devotion I had noticed in another audience — this time of Fundamentalist Christians — as it watched Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Both movies were appealing to what might be called their cultural bases. They weren't designed to persuade. They were designed to rally the faithful, to use the power of imagery to evoke gut sentiment, to rouse the already committed to various forms of hatred or adoration.
Gibson and Moore — two sides of the same coin? Absolutely. There are times when the far right and the far left are so close in methodology as to be indistinguishable. And both movies are not just terrible as movies — crude, boring, gratuitous; they are also deeply corrosive of the possibility of real debate and reason in our culture. They replace argument with feeling, reasoned persuasion with the rawest of group loyalties.
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Compare a few of the techniques. Moore argues that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were designed only to enrich the Bush family with oil money. For Moore, Sept. 11 wasn't the cause of the war on terrorism. It was a pretext for corruption. He cannot prove this, and so he tries to bludgeon the viewer emotionally to that conclusion. He uses innuendo, sly editing, parody, ridicule and somber voice-overs to give his mere assertions a patina of truth.
Similarly with Gibson's movie: there is no historical evidence that Jesus endured anything like the sadistic marathon that The Passion lovingly re-creates. But it is portrayed — at fantastical length and in excruciating detail — as historical fact. This is, Gibson wants you to believe, "as it was." Quibble with Moore, and he will accuse you of siding with the devil. Quibble with Gibson, and he will accuse you of opposing God.
Both Moore and Gibson use ominous, swelling music. Both give us manipulative scenes of mothers grieving over dead sons as the emotive climaxes of their work. Both clean their narratives of anything that might give them depth or complexity. In Gibson's case, this requires removing any thorough treatment of Jesus' message — the whole point of his suffering. With Moore, it's accomplished by omitting critical pieces of evidence or context — Bush's success at decimating al-Qaeda's leadership or the vileness of the police state of Saddam Hussein. These facts might add to your understanding. But they would detract from your ability to hate the President.
It is a sign of how far the culture war has gone that almost no one condemns both movies. If you're a Fundamentalist red-stater, Gibson is a hero. If you're a leftist blue-stater, Moore is, in the words of the New York Times, "a credit to the Republic." The truth is that both movies are different but equally potent forms of cultural toxin — poisonous to debate, to reason and to civility. And the antidote is in shorter and shorter supply.
- Andrew Sullivan