DVD REVIEW: Michael Moore on How We Got Trump
Sorting through some old computer disks I found my never-published review of Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 11/9 so I'm posting it here and also on other social media.
How in 11/9/16 did we get here—to President Donald Trump—and
what do we do now, asks Michael Moore’s expose of Trump’s America, Fahrenheit 11/9, now on DVD and Blu-ray,
at retailers including Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target.
In a press release Moore argued no one wanted to watch Trump
for two hours, so Fahrenheit 11/9 is, “about far more than just Trump. It's about how we got
here—and how the Resistance movement is bringing America back from the brink.”
With this logline, Moore’s feature-length
documentary tackles enough subjects for three movies, but the result is, none
of these complicated issues are covered thoroughly. There’s his sad angry
hindsight concerning Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign. There’s
coverage of some of what Moore calls “the Resistance movement,” the reawakening of the American
left, many of them inspired by socialist-leaning senator Bernie Sanders and the survivors of the 2018 Marjorie Stoneman Douglas school shooting. There’s the poisoning of the water in Moore’s hometown, Flint, Michigan,
worse than any terrorist attack America has yet experienced--and which President
Barack Obama, a Democrat, treated as a publicity opp.
How the poisoning of Flint’s
water connects with Trump is a broken line, and for all of Moore’s hard
hitting, his hits don’t make many direct connections. The filmmaker draws upon
personal experience, showing how under Republican governor Rick Snyder,
Michigan underwent governance similar to Trump’s America—including years of
fake “emergency declarations” like what we have since seen happen with Trump
and border security. Flint’s water supply was switched and the wealthy profited
while the working people got toxic water.
Ironically in this expose of
Trump, Obama looks bad, too. Moore finds what may be the scandal in Obama’s
otherwise scandal-free administration, and it’s what Obama did in response to
the poisoning of an American city. He visited Flint to much fanfare, mouthed a
story about licking lead when he was a small child, and pretended to drink
Flint water from a glass. We see nothing comparable to what a Democrat like
Kennedy or Johnson might have done. How many votes this shameless publicity
stunt may have cost the Democrats in a key state is incalculable, and Moore
doesn’t even address the possibility of a connection.
Moore ranges across still more
subjects only indirectly connected to Trump. We spend some time with the
teachers’ strikes that happened in several states in 2017, interview the last
surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, and hear Moore ponder whether
we’re one 9/11 or zero 9/11’s away from going the way of Germany under Adolf
Hitler.
Although Moore may say no one
wants to watch Trump for two hours, the fact remains that 63 million people
voted for him. That Moore backed away from focusing relentlessly on Trump’s
alleged crimes and corruption—from the 1980s to the present, before and after
becoming president—is another way of letting him get away with all he keeps
getting away with. When America starts looking at Trump himself instead of
Hillary, Flint’s water, schoolteachers, Nazism, “the resistance” of ragtag
schoolchildren who saw their classmates fall in blood, only then will we see
how to get away from this man and all his toxicity, as dangerous in its way as
Flint’s toxic water.
posted by Lyn Jensen | 12:07 PM
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