I went to the theater tonight wanting to be schooled by the master. I intentionally attended alone to sit and ponder every syllable, each edit and all the concepts Michael Moore wished to convey about government, the Trump Presidency and the State of our Union.
I needed Michael Moore to explain to me why my intentional vote for Donald Trump was a giant mistake, one which should give me serious misgivings and need for atonement.
For full disclosure, I am a rabid fan of Michael Moore.
In the past 10 years, I haven’t gone a single year without watching Roger & Me at least once. It is one of my favorite cinematic creations, a whirlwind of thought and editing which told a story Michael Moore desperately wanted to convey about a region of Michigan he loves.
And I love Michigan, too. I was, like Michael Moore, also born there.
I wanted Michael Moore to tell the story of 2018 America with that same level of fervor and angst which made me an instant fan the first time I saw Roger & Me.
The hits kept coming. Bowling for Columbine was deeply thought provoking while Fahrenheit 9/11 became the highest grossing documentary of all time. Sicko came so close to hitting the mark, as I am a Republican who can easily make a numbers argument to support the concept of universal healthcare in the United States. The dollars are there, but the methods of distribution and law are the most inefficient on earth within the first world nation most in need of radical healthcare overhaul.
To be fair, Michael Moore brought his weapons to bear on both the left and the right during Fahrenheit 11/9, a clever numerical switch from 9/11 due to the date we learned Donald Trump would be president.
“How the **** did this happen,” Michael Moore asked toward the front of the movie. Sadly, as the two plus hours unfolded, we never found out. Not from him.
Fahrenheit 11/9 is not a Donald Trump movie. I expected it to be. My confident hope was seeing all the hidden reasons why Donald Trump is a monster and all the complex lines of thought Michael Moore had uncovered to present in convincing form. There would be little of that.
Michael Moore blamed Hillary Clinton for not campaigning enough, and took on the electoral college. He made quick work of the 2016 Republican primaries and Donald Trump’s debate tactics. He cobbled together some cringeworthy edits of Trump’s commentary regarding his daughter and ran through all the dictators who had suddenly become President Trump’s best friends.
Moore also blasted President Obama in a surprising way, as the movie spends an exceptional amount of time on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. He blamed President Obama for going to Flint, doing virtually nothing and leaving after a series of water drinking stunts. As Michael’s home and the site of a genuine water emergency, Moore took on Michigan’s governor Rick Snyder nearly as much as he attempted to paint Donald Trump as a despot president.
The problem is, Michael Moore’s penchant for missing information and serious calendar problems reared its ugly head quite prominently in Fahrenheit 11/9. Being familiar with the Flint situation as I watched it closely, Moore failed in this movie to explain what actually happened to the original source of water Flint used for years. He made it sound as if a direct pipeline from Lake Huron to Flint was suddenly being cut off to build a new pipeline as a profit source for Governor Snyder’s business buddies. Anyone remotely familiar with the case knows the original clean water source from Huron ran through the Detroit municipal water authority and was resold to Flint. This missing piece of information is crucial, and led to one of Michael Moore’s most lacking explanations of anything - other than poor people were drinking even poorer quality water. This much we know was true, however the Flint narrative seemed as dangerous filler for a movie meal rapidly showing free of meat.
Also problematic for Michael Moore’s calendar is his early-on-in-movie narrative that Donald Trump didn’t want to be president at all. Moore claims Trump’s run for the presidency was due entirely to NBC paying Gwen Stefani more than The Donald, with Trump not actually deciding to run “for real” until crowds starting appearing at his two pre-scheduled rallies designed to shake down NBC for more cash. I’m not sure even the most ardent Democrat could buy that with a straight face, but I had to accept Moore’s twisted appraisal and keep watching.
If Donald Trump didn’t actually want to become president, then how did he magically transform into a lifelong totalitarian dictatorial figure precisely at noon on January 20th, 2017? How did this man who had been a developer and walking public hedonism carnival in his previous life suddenly turn tyrannical authoritarian monolith overnight?
Simple answer, he didn’t.
Moore, as much as I love the guy, can’t have it both ways. He can’t describe Donald Trump as an accidental figurehead who tripped into the presidency, then in the next breath describe a race-fueled master plan to undermine democracy as a budding dictator at the age of 72 with the camaraderie of Putin, Xi and Kim. It’s as if Michael Moore started double fisting margaritas in an editing room with unlimited archival film and about three days to match selected clips to his wild delusions.
The “I gotta get out of here” moment of palpable disgust arrived when Moore went there. Yes, there. Hitler. Moore showed a reel of Adolf Hitler speaking overdubbed with Donald Trump’s voice, a cheap shot which has literally negative actual historic point of reference. What the “Trump as Hitler” cartoon political figures fail to recognize is, well, everything. Adolf Hitler became very active in politics well over a decade prior to becoming German Chancellor, as he was vehemently opposed to the Weimar Republic and attempted to overthrow Germany with the Beer Hall Putsch nearly a decade prior. I’m also fairly certain we don’t have any parallels to Mein Kampf, which Hitler wrote while a prisoner in the 1920’s, to attribute to Donald Trump. At the point anyone attempts to make any Hitler comparison, even a Yale professor, I’m lost in the weeds of reality. It’s just too much, and it’s absurd.
In amongst the mess, he found time to trot out the Parkland students whose message is certainly poignant, even if they themselves have been weaponized to the point they do not understand the necessity for guns in American society. They decried “good people with guns protecting against bad people with guns” as one of the many concepts they believe is BS, yet Moore’s use of the David Hogg crowd was at least contemporary.
Michael Moore wants to paint the portrait that Donald Trump’s nationalism is somehow the one trait which ties him to autocratic theory and the desire to dismantle our republic as we know it. It’s a concept too outrageous for me to grasp, but then again I’ve only been studying politics since I was a teenager. Prior to Trump’s run for the presidency, I was unaware of his septuagenarian interstellar plans to live and rule the galaxy forever. Thanks for the tip, Michael.
Healthy nationalism is one of the core reasons I voted for President Trump, and I feel it is a characteristic we are losing amid a sea of severe disrespect and historical failure to protect the fundamental definitions of this country we love. It isn’t racism to want a reliable and managed immigration system, and it is not particularly protectionist to wish for stronger review of trade policy. Along the way, might we have some Kennedy back and stop asking exclusively what the nation can do for the individual?Could we, at some point, speak firmly of personal responsibility without being excoriated for racism, bigotry and various forms of apartheid?
The swamp has come roaring at President Trump since during his candidacy, with admitted surveillance which has led to a string of expendable figures in motion from James Comey to Robert Mueller. There are no stops on stopping the Trump train, to be sure. The losers are the three hundred plus million Americans whose government operation is being sacrificed to disallow the current president from doing his job, yet he continues to do well amid the largest political firestorm I’ve seen in my lifetime.
I saw, and see, President Trump as a proxy antidote for many of the entrenched political horrors which have actually contributed to our nation's disassembly. It is only natural the establishment political strata would hate President Trump from both sides, because he accomplished in one political season what permanent career trademark wonks could not achieve in their lifetimes. President Trump ended two political dynasties, neither of which were particularly entertained by the notion, taking out over a dozen better-heeled established Republican leaders along the way. Candidate Trump worked it. He out stumped, out spoke and outran everyone between his campaign and the White House.
Fahrenheit 11/9 is the least cohesive project Michael Moore has ever released, and I suspect a number of movie reviewers will wonder exactly what Moore was trying to communicate.
Until now, I’d never been disappointed by a Michael Moore film.
But today, I was disappointed by Michael Moore.