Michael Moore is back to remind us just how fucked we all are. His new documentary, Fahrenheit 11/9, starts showing today at FilmScene, just over two weeks after its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Though Fahrenheit 11/9 doesn’t quite have the revelations and impact of Moore’s 2004 Palme d’Or-winning documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, it’s “sequel” does a superb job of compiling the clips, photos and issues that have defined politics in the United States for the last few, tumultuous years. Moore’s self-righteous antics are at a minimum (though we do see him spray Flint tap water on the lawn of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s “mansion”), but he discusses the circumstances leading up to and following Donald Trump’s unlikely election with a definite sense of urgency and dark humor.
The heroes of 11/9 are the teenaged March for Our Lives organizers, the teachers who staged a major strike in West Virginia, the doctor who revealed the health crisis in Flint, Michigan, and fresh-faced candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, unintimidated and unencumbered by either party’s establishment.
The villains are more numerous, and not all quite who you’d expect. Here are Michael Moore’s primary targets.
1. Gwen Stefani
Moore is tongue-and-check when he opens his film by blaming Gwen Stefani for Donald Trump’s presidential run, but there’s a slice of truth there. Trump was apparently upset NBC was paying Stefani more to serve as a judge on The Voice than they were cutting him to host The Apprentice. Trump’s first “rally” on June 16, 2015 — in which he paid people $50 each to crowd into Trump Tower and wave “Trump 2016” signs as he announced a presidential campaign — was, Moore alleges, a ploy to show NBC just how beloved, buzzworthy and valuable their star was.
This plan backfired, as NBC wasn’t thrilled Trump called Mexicans “criminals” and “rapists” in his speech. The network gave him a pink slip, but a defeated Trump decided to go through with his next two scheduled campaign rallies, since they were already paid for. This is where he fell in love with speechifying to cheering MAGA crowds, and decided to give this candidacy thing a real go.
2. The mainstream news media
Candidate Trump was ratings gold, and network executives have admitted as much on the record. The air time CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, et. al. devoted to Trump not only helped hype up his run, but allowed men with similarly problematic personalities to interpret Trump’s actions for the rest of us. In a decidedly Mooreian sequence, Fahrenheit 11/9 rounds up some of the top Trump commentators taken down during the Me Too movement, freeze-framing on the faces of Bill O’Reilly, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and others and slapping a “sexual abuser” stamp across the screen.
Several shots are taken at the New York Times as well, which Moore (and interviewee Bernie Sanders) sees as catering to the status quo: toeing the Democratic Party line, giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt on far too many occasions and disregarding progressive movements such as Occupy Wall Street.
3. Himself
Though Moore was one of the famous few who tried to warn the country not to underestimate Trump — Moore recalls with horror the fact his name and comments were mentioned by Fox News on election night 2016 — he sees himself as culpable in Trump’s election. Moore shines a light on several instances in which he was soft on, or accepted praise from, the likes of Steve Bannon, Kelly Anne Conway, Jared Kushner and Trump himself. The filmmaker, considered at one time to be one of the most influential people in the world (assuming the world agreed with Time magazine), admits he should have said and done more to avoid normalizing Trumpism.
4. Gov. Rick Snyder
A native of Flint, Michigan, it’s unsurprising that Moore chose to focus a large portion of his film on the Flint water crisis. The near-cartoonish bad guy behind the switching of Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to the contaminated Flint River to benefit corporate interests is Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder. Moore interviews April Cook-Hawkins, who kept records from blood tests of Flint children. The lead content in the children’s blood was off the charts, but Cook-Hawkins says government officials falsified the data to show regular levels of lead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtnANFLfH48
Attitudes were different when corporate profitability came into play. After the Flint General Motors plant complained the new water was eroding their car parts, Snyder redirected the old, healthy Lake Huron supply back to Flint — but only to the GM factory.
Moore points out that Trump was the only 2016 presidential candidate to visit Flint (sigh), and attributes Trump’s interest in the region to his admiration for Snyder. Indeed, Trump has been very complimentary of the “criminal” governor, as Moore calls him, just as Trump has praised other despotic leaders — Vladmir Putin, Xi Jinping, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — who have pushed the boundaries of their elected power.
5. The Democratic National Committee
As any gung-ho Bernie supporter will remind you, Hillary Clinton’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention was dogged by controversy. Moore specifically focuses on West Virginia, where all 55 counties sided with Sanders in the primary. Still, the state’s superdelegates chose Clinton as their nominee. A similar situation occurred in other states.
Whether or not Bernie Sanders would have made a better nominee than Clinton, this confusing outcome left some Democrats feeling disillusioned about the party and the power of their vote, and Moore says that led to people staying home on Election Day or shifting their support to Jill Stein or even Trump.
But Moore sees the DNC’s flaws as going back to Bill Clinton’s campaign and presidency, when he says the Democratic Party started acting like Republicans, perpetuating racism, the dissolution of labor unions, the prison-industrial complex and more in order to serve their corporate donors. This is complete with a nice little clip of Clinton in the ’90s saying he’s going to “make America great again.”
6. The Electoral College
One of the doc’s funnier moments comes during a jab at the concept of the electoral college. Sad music plays over footage showing about a dozen somber-faced young pages carrying fancy wooden boxes — which Moore dubs, “tiny coffins” — filled with 2016 delegates’ ballots out of the front door of the Capitol Building. It’s an image that emphasizes Moore’s point that the electoral college is archaic, strange and pretentious, undermining the popular vote.
7. Barack Obama
One of the most disappointing moments of Obama’s presidency occurred when the he visited Flint, Michigan in 2016, and made light of the ongoing contaminated water crisis by sipping (or at least wetting his lips with) a glass of tap water in the middle of a speech in which Flintians thought he would announce federal aid was coming to help solve the health crisis. In addition to this stunt (which Obama recreated a couple times on the trip), the president encouraged the city to be more generous towards Gov. Snyder.
Later, military drills involving loud gunfire and explosions that took place in Flint’s abandoned buildings with no prior warning to residents, seemed to add insult to injury.
Moore includes these scenes not just to critique Obama, but because it very well may have ensured Trump’s win in Michigan. Tens of thousands of black Michigan voters who turned out to the polls to elect Obama in 2008 and 2012 suddenly felt betrayed and abandoned, and didn’t bother to cast votes in 2016. Trump took Michigan by just 11,612 votes.
8. 9/11
Moore doesn’t spend too much time dwelling on the central event of his 2004 predecessor to Fahrenheit 11/9, but a sequence near the end of the doc does elaborate on a popular but controversial comparison between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Moore lays out the oft-cited similarities between the two — Trump and Hitler both rising to political prominence with a cult of personality and rejection of the status quo; holding massive rallies with speeches preying off of latent racism, xenophobia and extreme nationalism; condemnation of the far left; the naive belief by the public that their new leader’s more radical beliefs would be tempered by his colleagues.
But the historical referencing becomes more ominous when Moore discusses the Reichstag fire of 1933, in which the German parliament building was burned down a month after Hitler became chancellor. The perpetrators were identified as communist agitators, though some historians (and, seemingly, Michael Moore) believe it may have been a false flag operation orchestrated by Hitler in order to kick Communist Party members out of parliament, create a Nazi majority and produce the kind of fear and unrest necessary to assume ultimate power.
Whether or not the Reichstag fire involved any governmental conspiracy, Moore implies that the next attack on the U.S. will, like 9/11, result in the government assuming unprecedented power at the expense of citizens’ freedoms. With Trump as president, something like an attack from North Korea could culminate in the collapse of America as we know it.
Cue Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song.”
