The New Republic Online: STANLEY KAUFFMANN ON FILMS: Accusation

The New Republic Online: Accusation: "hat we see first are fireworks, celebrating Al Gore's victory over George W. Bush in the Florida vote, therefore in the presidential election of 2000. The television announcements of this result are soon followed by reversals, then by the maneuvers that confirmed Bush's election. Michael Moore thus launches his two-hour documentary attack on Bush with the new president's arguable right to the job. Moore then specifies presidential appointments that, though not corrupt, certainly drip with moneyed cronyism. In this atmosphere--of control by capitalist hegemony--Moore details how the administration heated up the public about terrorism.
Now the title of the film appears, along with Moore's authorial credit. Then comes, cinematically speaking, the film's most effective touch--a minute or so of black screen during which we hear distant crowd rumblings and sirens. We wonder. Suddenly we see agonized faces. These people are watching the World Trade Center disaster.
The positioning of this sequence, between the early propaganda for public jitters and the march to war, has a strong implication: Moore is saying that the disaster was of use to Bush. Something that was possibly not on Moore's mind, though he put it in my head: 9/11 was to Bush what the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 was to the newly installed Chancellor Hitler (F911 Editor: Reichstag Fire See sidebar David Rovics Featured Singer/Songwriter), a disaster contrived by an opponent (the fire was not, as was once thought, set by the Nazis themselves) that, in the government's view, was at once a proof of its policy and a means to advance it. Moore underscores this thought by calling his film FAHRENHEIT 9/11. His title caroms off the title of Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, which is the temperature at which books burn, by which burning a totalitarian regime progresses. Moore is telling us that, to Bush"


Stanley Kauffmann
TNR Film Critic