Forget Iraq, forget the economy. Some of the biggest threats to President George W. Bush this political season can be found in a theater near you.
Led by Fahrenheit 9/11, a barrage of political films have hit theaters this summer with unabashed disdain for conservative politics in general and the Bush administration in particular. Some are big, some are obscure, but all are notable for their overt agendas and the brash ambition of their creators to affect the political process.
Filmmaker Michael Moore said he hoped Fahrenheit 9/11 would be the first big election-year film to help unseat a president. "We found that if you entered the theater on the fence, you fell off it somewhere during those two hours," he told The New York Times in June. "It ignites a fire in people who had given up."
Fahrenheit 9/11, a tragicomic, anti-administration diatribe, is so biased it has a dubious claim to the documentary genre. Documentaries document actual events; this movie takes bits and pieces of image and sound and glues them together with conjecture and speculation to create an alternative truth.
Part of the film's undeniable political power is that Moore does not explicitly acknowledge that he is forsaking truth for intimation and accusation. He seems poised to become the liberal Rush Limbaugh--a demagogue who plays loose with the facts and insinuations, only to find he has a huge following that takes his word as truth. Depending on your politics, that is either good news or bad; either way, it is clear that Moore has become a force in politics as a result of his film. In its first three weeks, his film made over $80 million domestically.
And Moore isn't alone in producing controversial political films this summer.
Joining him in distate for the right-wing are Harry Thomason and Nickolas Perry's pro-Clinton The Hunting of the President, Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism and John Sayles' upcoming Silver City, a satire of a bumbling "user-friendly" politician's son who runs for office amid sordid allegations. Sound familiar?
But the political movie with the widest reach is The Day After Tomorrow, a blockbuster big-budget summer disaster flick that shows an environmental cataclysm striking New York City. The parallels to 9/11 are obvious, as is the reference point for the arrogant vice president who scoffs at environmental warnings and bears an instant resemblance to real-life Vice President Dick Cheney.
These films have their roots in past forms of political protest. Their polemics, for example, echo the widely circulated pamphlets of the pre-Revolutionary War era. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine also paints a one-sided picture of events, refers to his government as "ridiculous," "absurd" and "farcial" and boldly asserts the hidden intentions of his subject. At times, he sounds just like Michael Moore talking about Bush and his Saudi economic ties in Fahrenheit: "[Britain's] motive was interest not attachment... she did not protect us from our enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her own account."
Left-wing targets are left largely unscathed by this summer set of cinematic attacks. The reason, conservatives say, is that Hollywood and the broader film community are dominated by liberals. Judging from the regisration records of well-known stars and the antics of awards shows, this argument is grounded in truth.
But something else beyond simple partisan sniping is at work this summer. The attacks are fiercer and the filmmaking more energetic than they have been prior to previous elections, with filmmakers galvanized by their visceral distaste for those they view as wrong. The films, despite their imbalances and regardless of their artistic merits, are living evidence that our give-and-take democracy is alive and well.
The author is the president of Duke for Kerry.
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