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In Moore the left wing has now found its own Falstaff of the political revels, a figure who can punch as hard and fast--and as recklessly?--as anybody the right has to offer. And Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the watershed event that demonstrates whether the empire of poli-tainment can have decisive influence on a presidential campaign. If it does, we may come to look back on its hugely successful first week the way we now think of the televised presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as a moment when we grasped for the first time the potential of a mass medium--in this case, movies--to affect American politics in new ways. If that's the case, expect the next generation of campaign strategists to precede every major election not only with the traditional TV ad buys but also with a scheme for the rollout of some thermonuclear book, movie, CD or even video game, all designed to tilt the political balance just in time.
Fahrenheit 9/11 may also be branded as the film that made an overblown case against the Bush team. Certainly defenders of the Iraq war are already casting it that way. Limbaugh calls it "a pack of lies." In the online publication Slate, Christopher Hitchens wrote that it was "a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness." Even liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, an opponent of the war, told his readers that he "recoiled from Moore's methodology." To mount fast responses to critics like those, Moore has organized a "war room" overseen by former Clinton White House aides Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani. He also hired the former chief of fact checking at the New Yorker magazine to comb the film for inaccuracies. "There's lots of disagreement with my analysis of these facts or my opinion based on the facts. But," he insists, "there is not a single factual error in the movie. I'm thinking of offering a $10,000 reward for anyone that can find a single fact that's wrong."
Whatever the film's merits as a reliable account of recent history, for months to come pollsters and political consultants will be analyzing and focus grouping the viewer/voter response to Fahrenheit 9/11, struggling to measure its real impact on their thinking (and voting). But the R-rated film has taken the first important step toward being a political weapon of consequence by becoming an indisputable box-office phenomenon. In its first weekend, it torpedoed all predictions and earned $23.9 million, instantly passing Moore's Bowling for Columbine as the all-time top-grossing documentary (excluding IMAX spectacles). Fahrenheit 9/11 last weekend passed $50 million. Miramax's Harvey Weinstein predicts a $100 million gross in the film's first three weeks.