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London Times Online ... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-716842,00.html is the original link which may work... |
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June 18, 2003
Not so stupid white men fight back
By Clive Davis
Michael Moore's vitriolic assaults on the gun lobby, corporate greed
and smug white men have made him a hero of the liberal left and won
him an Oscar. But now his veracity is being seriously questioned
WITH HIS gift for generating controversy, Michael Moore was
always likely to create a stir at this year's Academy Awards ceremony.
The terminally dishevelled film-maker delivered exactly on cue as he
collected his Oscar for Best Documentary for Bowling for Columbine,
unleashing a tirade against America's "fictitious"
President George W. Bush.
A bestselling author on both sides of the Atlantic, Moore can lay
claim to being the most influential performer-cum-activist of our
times. Harold Pinter merely publishes in-your-face haiku in the
literary columns; Moore commands the attention of millions. His
left-wing polemic, Stupid White Men, was declared Book of the Year at
the British Book Awards. A hero to many on the Left in Europe and the
US, Moore is hailed as the principled voice of the anti-Bush,
anti-capitalist movement. With the Democratic Party still in disarray,
and with conservative "shock-jocks" storming America's
airwaves, he functions almost as a one-man opposition party. When he
came to London last year to deliver a curious mixture of satire and
speechifying at the Roundhouse, in the heart of liberal North London,
the atmosphere was as reverential and ecstatic as a Billy Graham
rally.
Bowling for Columbine got a standing ovation when it was screened at
Cannes last year, and was awarded a special prize by the jury. A
vitriolic assault on the gun lobby, corporate greed, the
military-industrial complex and media hysteria, the film shows the
famous muckraker roaming the land in search of the causes of the 1999
massacre at Columbine High School. His quest reaches a climax when he
confronts the actor Charlton Heston, a champion of the pro-gun
National Rifle Association (NRA), at his home. Heston seems ill at
ease with the line of questioning (it has been disclosed that he is
suffering from a form of Alzheimer's) and eventually walks off camera,
leaving Moore to savour a moral victory.
But having made his name with a brash form of guerrilla journalism,
Moore is becoming the target of the same brand of tactics. Step into
the sometimes murky hall of mirrors that is the internet, and you find
his work coming under increasingly hostile scrutiny. If the mainstream
press has been slower to dissect his modus operandi, the so-called
online community has plunged ahead. Moore's enemies seldom miss an
opportunity to mount personal attacks, too. The fact that this
self-styled blue-collar man of the people lives in some style on New
York's affluent Upper West Side has been a source of wry amusement to
his foes.
At first sight, much of the coverage seems merely the kind of
abusive satire that Moore enjoys inflicting on his own victims. A
cheerfully disrespectful website called moorewatch.com
has sprung up alongside moorelies.com.
And in the weeks since he carried off his Academy Award, a new site, revoketheoscar.com,
has begun urging malcontents to support a campaign to have the
accolade withdrawn on the grounds that Bowling for Columbine contains
errors and distortions.
Is this yet more evidence of a deranged right-wing conspiracy? Moore's
many admirers will certainly think so. The internet is, after all, the
perfect place to dress up rumour and gossip as hard facts. But there
is a serious undercurrent to all this dissent.
The studiously non-partisan political fact-checkers at Spinsanity.org
have lambasted the reliability of the big man in the baseball cap. (Spinsanity
also points out that Moore ran into similar trouble over his first hit
documentary, Roger and Me.) Doubts have surfaced here and there in the
print media as well. At the highly respected New Republic magazine -
certainly no friend of Dubya's - the staff rarely miss an opportunity
to question Moore's veracity. Another liberal journal, The American
Prospect (one of the "must-read" journals recommended
on Moore's own website, michaelmoore.com),
pointed out that his analysis of US gun crime is highly misleading
because it underplays the appallingly high level of black-on-black
violence: "There is a point at which an effort not to perpetuate
offensive stereotypes turns into an impoverishing erasure of the
facts." When the conservative Wall Street Journal's political
columnist, John Fund, joined in with a caustic attack on the film's
techniques, it was a sign that Hollywood's hero might have a fight on
his hands. After summarising some of the most serious allegations,
Fund said: "Moore would deserve an Academy Award if there were an
Oscar for Best Cinematic Con Job. If Bowling for Columbine is a
comedy, most of its fans don't know it. They believe they're watching
something that is in rough accord with reality."
Does Moore have a case to answer? Some of the claims I have seen -
such as the complaint that he faked footage of the dangerous hunting
dog shown early on in the movie - are merely a sign that some of his
antagonists lack a sense of humour. Another assertion, that he staged
the scene where a Michigan bank hands him a shotgun as his reward for
opening an account, has been denied by Moore on the film's website, bowlingforcolumbine.com.
Not a good start for the conspiracy theorists, then. But other points
are disconcerting, to say the least. One of the most important
concerns the depiction of the Lockheed Martin factory, the largest
employer in the Denver suburb where the Columbine shootings took
place. After a caption introduces Lockheed as the "world's
largest weapons maker", a spokesman, Evan McCollum, is
interviewed in front of a huge section of a rocket. Moore suggests
that there is a connection between the presence in the town of a
weapons manufacturer and the demented violence unleashed at nearby
Columbine: "So, you don't think our kids say to themselves,
'Gee, you know, Dad goes off to the factory every day and, you know,
he builds missiles. These are weapons of mass destruction. What's the
difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over
at Columbine High School?'"
McCollum initially appears bemused by this question. The bland reply
that he eventually offers appears to be the typical evasion of
Corporate Man. (Throughout his career, Moore has been very good at
making "ordinary" people, from receptionists to
shopkeepers, look foolish on camera.) Later, we see a rocket being
transported through the streets in the dead of night, en route to an
air force base, passing close to the homes where, as Moore ominously
intones, "the children of Columbine are asleep".
The forces of evil are on the prowl, it seems. But that hardly tallies
with Moore's own subsequent admission, on the Bowling website, that
the plant does not actually make weapons: the rockets are used to
carry satellites, including TV satellites, into space. Given that the
film is so intent on drawing an analogy between rampant militarism and
school violence, this surely undermines Moore's entire thesis.
When you read Moore's explanation for the error ("Lockheed
rockets now take satellites into outer space" it is possible to
infer - if you wish to give him the benefit of the doubt - that there
could simply have been a misunderstanding. But when I spoke to
McCollum this week he insisted that Moore was given the correct
information at the time of the visit.
Blissfully unaware of his previous work and, he says, having been told
by Moore's company that he was making a film about suburban life,
McCollum had given him a tour. When Moore mentioned weapons, McCollum
says he made it clear to him that the plant did not build any. Now
something of a figure of fun to cinema audiences around the globe,
McCollum says that he feels "used and abused".
As for the question of rockets being transported at night, McCollum
says he again explained the reasons to Moore: the launch vehicles are
so cumbersome that they would cause long traffic delays if they were
driven through the area during the day. Later, however, before the
film was released, McCollum heard rumours that the film would show the
company in a much harsher light. He told me that he contacted Moore's
production company to double-check, and to ask if he could see the
footage that was going to be used. The company refused. McCollum later
considered legal action, but shelved the idea. "We thought
he was getting a lot of publicity already. We didn't want to give him
an even bigger pulpit."
All very puzzling. A long list of similar anomalies has been put
together by David T. Hardy, a former Department of the Interior
lawyer. An Arizona gun enthusiast who has handled cases for the NRA,
Hardy is one of the organisers of the Revoke the Oscar campaign.
Clearly, he has his own reasons for wanting to discredit Moore. Yet
many of his allegations - which were aired in The Wall Street Journal
- appear to be backed up by persuasive evidence. The most striking
example concerns Heston, who is shown stirring up supporters in
speeches in Denver and Moore's home town of Flint, Michigan.
The Denver appearance, at the NRA's annual convention, comes days
after the Columbine shootings. Heston is shown brandishing a firearm
and aggressively declaring "from my cold, dead hands"
before proceeding to claim the right for his members to hold their
meeting in defiance of the city's mayor.
Hardy claims that the first line came from a presentation speech made
a year later in North Carolina. (Watch the extract closely, and you
see, after a long cutaway, that Heston's shirt and tie have changed
colour. If that appears obvious to some viewers, I have to admit that
I missed it the first time.) It is, perhaps, a minor point, but it's
worth noting that a Time magazine review, proudly posted on the
Bowling website, repeats the error: "quizzes Charlton
Heston on the propriety of proclaiming, at an NRA convention in
Littleton, Colorado, just ten days after the Columbine shootings, that
his gun will have to be pried 'from my cold, dead hands'."
A more serious charge concerns a later scene in which Heston
resurfaces in Flint, where a six-year-old black girl, Kayla Rolland,
had been fatally shot by a boy in her class. Moore describes at some
length how the boy's mother had been forced to go out on low-paid jobs
as part of a callous welfare-to-work programme. Her son found the gun
in his uncle's house, where he had been staying, and took it to
school. (Moore's critics have pointed out that the uncle was, in fact,
a drug dealer and that the home was a crack house. The gun is said to
have been left as payment for drugs. The details of the mother's
financial circumstances have also been challenged. All this goes
unmentioned in the film.) Hardy argues that Moore manipulates the
fast-moving screen images at this point. Moore's narration tells us:
"Just as he did after the Columbine shooting, Heston showed up in
Flint to have a big pro-gun rally."
The impression of ambulance-chasing is heightened by the fleeting shot
of a report taken from an NRA webpage: we see, in bold type, the words
"48 hours after Kayla Rolland is pronounced dead". Hardy
points out that the rest of the sentence, which you can read when you
freeze-frame the tape, actually refers to pro-gun-control comments
made by the then President Clinton on TV. What is more, Hardy learnt
that Heston actually gave his address in Flint eight months after the
shooting, when he spoke at an election rally as part of the 2000
election campaign. The film also ignores Heston's record as a
civil-rights pioneer: he was a leading member of the actor's
contingent in Martin Luther King's historic march on Washington in
1963.
When I spoke to Moore last week, he confirmed Hardy's point about the
date of the speech, but angrily denied the allegation that he had
misled viewers. Moore said he had not even read Hardy or Fund's
claims, dismissing both men as "right-wing kooks". He
added: "I wouldn't respond to anything like this. These are
people who have no credibility. The facts in the movie are
correct."
When Bowling for Columbine was released in this country, one
broadsheet reviewer lavished praise on its "superb
investigative journalism". The Times's critic, Ian Johns, was
more circumspect, noting that the film was "undermined by
Moore's subjectivity and contradictory arguments".
Curiously enough, the leading US critic Roger Ebert, an avowed admirer
of the film on its release, has now posted a web link to Hardy's site
presumably so that his readers can decide for themselves. I left calls
and an e-mail for Ebert this week, but he did not reply. Richard
Schickel, arguably America's most distinguished observer of the
cinema, was rather more forthcoming about Moore's general approach:
"I despise our gun laws in the States, too. But Moore's tactics,
I think, give aid and comfort to the enemy. In short, he's careless
with his facts, hysterical in debate and, most basically, a guy trying
to make a star out of himself. He's a self-aggrandiser and, perhaps,
the very definition of the current literary term, 'the unreliable
narrator'. This guy either can't or won't stick to the point, build a
logical case for his arguments. It's all hysteria - but, I think,
calculated hysteria."
Moore's personality seems a recurrent factor in the criticism of his
films and his working practices on and off screen. An even more heated
assessment comes from his former manager, Douglas Urbanski, a
Hollywood insider - and avowed conservative - who also handles the
actor Gary Oldman's career.
"He's the only client I ever fired in writing. He was the most
difficult human being I've ever met. There was no one who even
cameclose.
"Michael Moore would never withstand the scrutiny he lays on
other people. You would think that he's the ultimate common man. But
he's money-obsessed."
Fund, meanwhile, believes that much of the cultural establishment has
given Moore gentler treatment than he deserves, because his left-wing
views reflect their own. "Mr Moore's allies have basically
defended him with silence," Fund told me. "He is
getting a pass because he's frankly indefensible. I'm not saying he's
not funny, but he's irresponsible with the facts."
Part of Moore's defence is that he has always made a point of mingling
opinion and fact. Sometimes his methods are so cheerfully exaggerated
that it is hard to decide whether he is trying to make a serious
point. At his live show in London last year, which I reviewed, he
built an entire segment around his argument - presented not as satire,
but as a straight-faced statement of fact - that, if all the hijack
victims on September 11 had been black, they would have fought back.
Moore argued that, because the passengers were pampered members of the
bourgeoisie, accustomed to being waited on at every turn, they did not
know how to defend themselves. Now, it takes only a second to realise
that there is an obvious flaw in this: we know that once the
passengers on the third plane heard about the attacks on the twin
towers, they rose up and fought their hijackers. Even the more
sympathetic reviewers acknowleged that Moore crossed the line into
absurdity at this point.
Bowling for Columbine contains many similarly dubious assertions. But
because Moore peddles a fashionable anti-Bush line and claims, when it
suits him, to be nothing more than a comedian, his work tends not to
be analysed as closely as it would be if he were a conventional
film-maker or author. As the left-wing writer and critic Christopher
Hitchens points out: "I have a sneaking sympathy for his
claim that he's using comedy to make a point, but it should be a
metaphorical technique."
Hitchens insists that facts must remain sacred. Something of a gadfly
in his own right, he nevertheless professes himself
"appalled" by theprestige that Moore enjoys in Europe.
Of course, journalists and writers have often been known to bend facts
to suit their purposes. Reviewers of the new biographies of George
Orwell have noted that the writer, a renowned stickler for accuracy,
was occasionally willing to embellish reality in books such as The
Road to Wigan Pier. In a film, on the other hand, the line separating
truth and fiction is much more delicate; it is all too easy to use
subliminal effects or deft editing to bamboozle the viewer.
It is depressing to think how many people base their view of John F.
Kennedy's assassination on Oliver Stone's film, JFK, a technically
brilliant, but extraordinarily misleading, movie. Michael Moore is not
quite as clever at juggling genres. It will be fascinating to watch
the next phase of his battle with his detractors.
The Second Amendment Police Department Thanks to Leroy Pyle -- the brains and power behind
2ampd.net -- for posting this.
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