Analysis of Witnessing in Fahrenheit 9/11 Documentary - Movie Review Example

Introduction In the summer of 2004, just before the elections in the USA, filmmaker Michael Moore created and released a documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11. Fahrenheit 9/11 presents his personal view of how terrorist attacks in the US were used by the president George Bush to justify illegal was in Iraq and Afghanistan. This film is a very famous performativity documentary. It received widespread acclaim and its box office sales were the highest for any documentary ever in excess of 200 million dollars. The viewers have very strong feeling that the filmmaker is a witness. Michael Moore uses witnessing to create his argument and let viewers to believe his point, and this essay will discuss how Michael Moore uses witnessing. Analysis Witnessing can be described as a social act that allows people who suffered or observed traumatic events to express themselves in the public place (Guerin and Hallas, 2007). Michael Moore follows the concept of witnessing to allow him to express his view about the president Bush and the government to the public. He is a secondary witness in his film whose role is to represent the trauma from victim. From this point of view, Moore is trying to use the evidence and his position as a secondary witness to influence the will of the American people. He wants to cause them to vote out President Bush in the next elections (Wilshire 2005, p.149). The film begins the clip Al Gore “celebrating” his victory and Moore’s Voice over. Swiftly, the Fox News corrected the results that Bush becomes the winner. At the same time, Moore mentioned Bush’s cousin was working for Fox work. The other image is about Katherine Harris, who was Bush’s campaign chairperson, was also the “vote counting woman”. These old news footages as the witnessing can make viewers think Bush stole the victory from Gore. Moore uses the voice over to give viewers more details that he did the research. The audience is made to imagine that Bush’s campaign secretary was also counting votes implying a mystery. However, Katherine Harris was just doing her duty and she actually had no role in counting the votes. In fact, her job just required that she confirm the votes counted that she would not have held without being belonged to either side. Evidently, Michael Moore’s editing way is to put all images with his voice over together to teach audiences his truth. In this opening categorization images of Al Gore interjected with firework spectacles and the text on the Florida victory sign. Then the subtext posits, “Was it just a dream?” metaphorically speaking, a poetic impression is created in which the victory for Gore is depicted as having been turned into a failed dream through George Bush’s machinations. Moore is thus trying to present himself as witness of Bush’s dishonesty and corruption so that he appears credible making Bush look like a usurper of power as opposed to a legitimate democratically elected leader, which is what he legally was In the images of Bush’s vacation, Michael Moore participates to it. He shows himself talk to Bush; he uses this to show the viewer that he is credible since he has actually interacted with Bush in person. Moore also uses statistics from the newspaper to show that President Bush spent 42% of time to vacation. In this way, the director attempts to manipulate the audience into witnessing these ideas although they may not be entirely true. In Fahrenheit 9/11 Moore takes a different approach from most of the films and documentaries on the subject, instead of focusing footage on the falling bodies and burning building, he just keep the black screen and the sound of attack. Moore zooms in on the horrified faces of the eyewitnesses. Real witnessing images were used in here. As far as the actions of George Bush on the material day, Moore uses his voice over to claim that Bush was unconcerned about American people because Bush continues to read the book to school kids even after he was informed of the happenings. The misleading nature of this witnessing is especially evident in the fact that the book he was reading was not even titled my pet goat as Moore insinuated by Moore. It was just one of the stories in the book which was picked because it had the effect of making the president look ridiculous and stupid. However, it is clear that Bush was actually acting in the calmest way possible since even if he had rushed out of the class in the true spirit of an emergency conscious president, he would have done nothing but scare the children and escalate the panic as he was on live TV. Moore shows the witnessing images before Bush’s images, because he wants to manipulate the viewer’s witnessing perspective tries to present the president as a bad person. At the same time there are lots of documents shown as “evidence”. Moore puts images together to insinuate that President Bush could have done something to protect the country if he had taken time to read the security briefings. There was a security briefing that intimated that terrorist were planning to attack the country but it was too vague to be acted upon, this was affirmed by a briefing by Condoleezza Rice in the white house in May 2002. The only person who claimed that the briefing was ignored was Moore; however, in reality the briefing was actually of little use because it did not give specific details (Kopel, 2004). Despite the privilege given to the authority and presence of the images, it is, after all, just an image, a picture. It might be manipulated, biased in perspective: it does not full reveal the truth of what it claims to represent. The material image is relieved of the singular burden of veracity when it is seen within the much broader context its reception and use. Contemporary suspicion toward the veracity of the image can in part be pinned to the ability of technology to reproduce images without an original referent (Guerin and Hallas, 2007). The second day of the 9/11 all flights were canceled and Moore uses footage of Bush’s father and popular musician Ricky Martin who is an icon most Americans could relate to and says, “Even Ricky Martin could not fly”. However, Moore shows out newspaper and document that there are 142 Saudi Arabia and 24 Bin Laden family fly out the US (Toplin 2006, p.91). There are some images from news and clips of old movies were shown as well. Moore uses these as witnessing to audiences make skepticism more pronounced. Why American government allows them leave the country? Furthermore, President Bush family and Bin Laden family had business relationship was present by Moore as evidence of Bush’s alleged intrest in the terrorist activities. By extension, these collective feelings of ill will are by and by redirected to the US government, more so Bush who is gradually depicted as being connected and involved with them (Toplin 2006, p.91). To some extent, this whole process of witnessing can be compared to the dialectic subjectivity that underlies subjectivity and identity formation according to the Hegelian dialectics of subjectivity in which the identity formation is primarily dangerous and antagonist. Witnessing relies on the hegemony of the subject with the pre-set boundaries, which are predicated while in the presence of the addressee to the dialogue in the Levin Asian sense. In Fahrenheit, this idea is indirectly rendered to the audience through various ways in which the director tries to paint the president in a negative light albeit in cases like this one manipulating the setting and information for dramatic effect so the audience be believe what they never saw or noticed before. Images of traumatic events have been considered the viewpoint of those who speak on behalf of the silenced. In written and on oral histories, as well as in psychoanalytical exchange, the survivor is understood to gain agency on several levels. The therapeutic aspect of bearing witness allows the traumatised victim to work through the experiences of the trauma and hopefully be released, if only partially, from the compulsion which forces him or her to involuntarily and repeatedly relive the trauma. As a social act, testimony also permits the survivor to speak a public, whether to condemn or accuse the perpetrator, to memorialise the suffering, or to teach as a warning against repetition (Guerin and Hallas, 2007. Moore uses real witnessing images when he talks to Lisa Lipscombe, she is a mother who is initially shown as happy to have son serving her country but then becomes distressed when she he dies in Iraq and she fails to understand what justification the government had in sending their young men to war. Her witnessing view point is used to emotionally influence the audience that are likely to become immediately sympathetic to her since the image of a parent crying for her child one everyone can relate to One of the functions of witnessing is that it can serve both a means for memorializing the suffering, as well as the didactic function of teaching people not to repeat their mistakes. Lisa Lipscobe is used as a witness of the events following the 9/11 attacks, in the first appearance, she is shown as a proud mother of one of the young men who was going to serve his country in Iraq. However, in her second appearance, she is distraught after her son has died in the war demanding to know why her son had to die. Through her more brings about witnessing both in the didactic and memorialization sense the audience is reminded of the many who died in the war as well the implied lesson that the war bore nothing but death for the Americans furthermore the footage where the mother is mourning her son is outside white house gates is designed to create an impression of an imposing and uncaring government which used the citizens for its own ends yet it is inaccessible Through background research, Moore acts again as a secondary witness and takes the audience back to Bush’s days in the army, he claims and shows proof that Bush was in the national guard with Bath James who later sold a plane to Osama’s brother. He further alleges that the same man was later recruited to invest the Bin Laden family money in Texas and in turn he invested it in Bush’s companies. This is used to justify the claim that Bush was in cohorts with the Osama family especially in view of the fact that he had been funded by them in the past (Hitchens 2004, p.2). According to Moore, the Saudi firms that invested in Bush’s Texas firms profited from the 911 attacks. The fact that only one out of the 530 member congress had sent a child to the war is used by Moore to justify his claim that the war was an example of the exploitation of the poor by the rich. By showing a congressional representative recommending Moore’s point ‘if they are for the war, get behind it and send their own’. While this may appear to be a valid point of view, on a closer look it flies in the face of logic to expect someone to feel morally obligated to send their child because they support a war. In essence this argument is simply a red herring since it has no bearing on whether the haves have taken advantage of the have not’s. By means of witnessing as his main tool, Moore deliberately inserts emotional overtones into the film and instead of avoiding emotion for the sake of objectivity; he exploits it for its dramatic and manipulative effect (Semmler 2003, p.70). The target audience is characterised in terms of voting working-class Americas who can easily relate to the scenes and events he portrays and who were set to vote in the next presidential elections. When he appears with the likes of Bush and the ‘evil’ elite as he tries so hard to paint them, he is dressed in jeans and a baseball cap juxtaposing the formally dressed politicians and clearly appealing to the common man who is more likely to associate with Moore. Ironically, given the amount of money he has made in his career in directing Moore is probably closer to the one percenters he seeks to discredit than to the common person. The moment when Moore ambushed the congressional representatives by asking them to contribute to the war effort by sending their children, Kennedy a republican senator said he had a nephew in Afghanistan and his son was planning on join the navy. While Moore used the quizzical expression that the senator wore when he was asked the question, in the documentary he edited out the response and so the audience only witnessed the senator reacting in a shocked manner to the idea of sending his children to war but conveniently cutting out the answered Moore did not want to hear. Witnessing is further manipulated when Moore shows footage of post 911 events where the relative of the blast and survivors are seen with faces stained with tears in their grief, these images are interposed with others of the president seeming happy and contented even laughing. The subtext is an implication that Bush was immune from the grief of Americans and he had not been affected (Isikoff, 2004). After all, why should he be laughing when everyone else is crying? The reality of the matter is that these images were drawn from different contexts and the interposed pictures were definitely not of Bush laughing in the aftermath of the crisis. In this scenario, Moore’s testimony differs from the reality because he used old pictures of a happy president to create a false impression of mirth in the face of terror and therefore justifying his accusation that Bush was complacent. Moore uses Juxtaposition to depict an unreliable government which is constantly lying to the people and self-contradicting. He shows a clip of Rumsfeld assuring the public in a press conference that the US military was taking utmost care in the aiming of bombs to minimize the number of civilian casualties. The scene then cuts to an Iraq girl receiving stiches, the operation is presented graphically and the audience is made to what appears to be an extremely painful process. To underline this, the scene cuts back to the original piece on Rumsfeld whose assurances in the face of the girls suffering appear dishonest, hypocritical which is the picture Moore wants the audience to have of the government. The same technique is used when Moore underscore the danger of post 911 flying, and follows it with a clip of George bush encouraging Americans to fly, this is then show followed by a clip of an expert discussing with credible “evidence” how dangerous it is to fly. This is supposed to create the impression that Bush is either unconcerned for the welfare of Americans or is an idiot to invite them to fly under such dangers, either way, the corollary is that he cannot be competent as a leader. Witnessing can easily be used to make someone appear as a fraud and liar simply by asking out of context questions and insinuating suggestive and loaded answers. Moore shows a clip of a father mourning a son who died in Iraq and he asks why my son had to die. In “Response” Moore shows a picture of Halliburton, one of the firms affiliated to Bush and which is alleged to have been a beneficiaries of the attack. Similarly, when Lisa Lipscobe asks the, “enemy” why he took away her son, the picture that shown next is that of George Bush. In a way Moore is applying operant conditioning such that the president or his affiliates are shown as answers to questions about grief and the aftermath of the attacks. When Lipscobe asks why her so died, Moore could just as easily have shown a clip of the Taliban and fighters who were in the real sense responsible for his death. However Moore carefully minimizes the presence of aggressive Iraqis and Afghanis choosing to show them as victims of American brutality of manipulation and exploitations. Witnessing through images is again evident in Moore’s direct targeting of Saudis as the enemy of the American people and trying to connect George Bush to them by virtue of his past business connections. In case one was to take the film at face value, they would be faced with the notion that the Saudi loyal families and the fundamentalist Islam terrorists are the same thing. To emphasize on this idea, Moore uses numerous photos of George Bush Senior apparently fraternizing with the enemy, the fact that in many of them they are holding hands is exploited by Moore who makes it appear as if they are uncommonly close given that this gesture is quite rare among westerners. However, holding of hands between men who are friends is common in Arab countries but Moore uses this cultural disconnect to manipulate the American audience who were in most cases unfamiliar with the context and does not bother to explain it to them. Moore uses juxtaposition to enhance his witnessing by portraying Afghanistan before and after the attacks by the US, in the before part, the pictures shown bespeak serenity and tranquility even utopic given that he only shows women and children playing avoiding the bloodshed that was present even before the invasion. An uninformed viewer contrasting the before and after images of would be forgiven for thinking that the Americans invaded a peaceful country only inhabited by peaceful people with no incidences of violence and a nonexistent level of threat for the all-powerful America. This is because in manipulating the witnessing process for the audience, Moore set up the context for them so they would think they are making objective conclusion by passing judgment on the evidence they have seen for themselves. However, this evidence is heavily manipulated and influenced since in reality the viewer’s only end up coming to the conclusions Moore had decided in advance. Among other things, the film has been described by critics as hyperbolic hysteria or means spirited mockery because of its overusing of archival footage to chip away at the credibility of the presidency (Flowers 2004, p.1). In a way, this contributed to its failure to turn the election in favour of Kerry because most Americans do not like the idea having their president being assaulted with hateful innuendos. Moore tries to make an argument for Afghanistan’s innocence and blows George Bush’s motives out of proportion by depicting him as a blundering idiot who goes to war on a whim who has no real issues with the Afghanis. In his narration, he talks about Afghanistan, a country that had allegedly never done anything against the US (conveniently forgets the fact that they hide Osama) and that has never killed a single American. Conclusion According to Kaplan (2005, p.125), to present an ethical witnessing position, the director must be disinterested and ensure that the separate the individual’s personal life from the viewer’s sentiments so as to allow them to take an independent view to a traumatic situation. In the documentary Fahrenheit, it is evident that Moore does not desire to do any such thing; on the contrary, he tries to personalize the debate as much as possible by presenting Bush’s personal side to the audience. In addition, he attempts to use the relatives of the people who die in the attack to justify condemnation of the president for the attack by capitalizing on their grief to evoke an emotive response from the viewer. In conclusion, there is no doubt that Fahrenheit was a bold and ambitious film according to critics; it is the first cinematographic attempt to unseat a president of the USA. Nonetheless, despite its sensational reception, it did not have as much of a political impact as the director may have hoped. This was mostly because the ethics of witnessing were in most part flawed and subjective making it hard to believe the claims that are being forced on the audience through innuendos and manipulative use of evidence. References Flowers, P. (2004, June 25). Anti-Bush screed potent but flawed. South Florida Sun Sentinel, p. 6 Guerin,F. and Hallas, R. (2007). The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture. London: Wallflower Press Hitchens, C. 2004. UnFahrenheit 9/1: the lies of Michael Moore. Slate.com: Available at: http://www.slate.com/id/2102723/ Isikoff, M. (2004, June 28). “Under the hot lights: Moore’s movie will make waves. But it’s a fine line between fact and fanaticism. Deconstructing Fahrenheit 9/11”. Newsweek, p. 29 Kaplan, E.A. 2005. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Jersey: Rutgers UP. Kopel, D. 2004. “Fifty-nine deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11”. Available at: http://patriotpost.us/pages/116 Semmler, S. 2003. Fetching good out of evil: George W. Bush’s post 9/11 rhetoric. Speaker and Gavel 40, 67-90 Toplin, R.B., 2006. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How one film divided a nation. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Wilshire, P. 2005. Michael Moores Fahrenheit 9/11 and the U.S. election: a case of missed opportunity? Australian Screen Education (39), p129 Read More