Manufacturing Dissent.

This documentary, following the film maker Michael Moore on his 2004 tour around America where he supported the Democratic campaign for president in an attempt to oust George Dubya, is a critique of his work which never really catches upon a strong enough point to denounce his work.

The Canadian film crew behind the film start off as “fans” of Moore's work and politics but as they find it harder to get an interview with the man in question and find out more about him through interviews with people he worked with and people who have come into contact with him in the past, they apparently change their opinion.

Now I have been a fan of Moore since the TV Nation show which was shown on Channel 4 over here and subsequently through his feature documentaries Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, both of which are included in this critique. I have also just seen his new movie, Sicko, questioning why it is that the United States of America is the only western country NOT to have free health care. The thing with Moore is that yes he is a personality, and yes that personality is a big part of his films. His politics are certainly secondary to making an entertaining film and promoting himself as a figure and his career as a film maker. The thing is, I am OK with that, and I understand that certain points in some of his films may not have been entirely accurate or may have had the sequence altered slightly in order to provide greater dramatic effect, or to get the point he is trying to make across in a simpler more effective manner. I'm OK with this because I agree with the majority of his politics and I think it is important that the left have a strong, forthright character to compete with the brash sound bites the right get away with without censure. I was a little concerned going to see this film that I would see a real hatchet job on Moore and we would be shown multiple ways in which he mislead the public in his films and lied as a film maker.

The truth is the “evidence” against Moore is pretty slim. This film concentrates to a large extent on his first movie “Roger and Me” where he is making a story about his home town of Flint Michigan and how General Motors sold the town out essentially because they weren't given enough tax breaks, this led to over 30,000 redundancies in the town and the destruction of a community. Now I think this is a valid subject to make a film about and a worthy cause to draw attention to. The fact that Moore hangs the tale around him personally trying to get an interview with Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors, when he actually managed to speak to the man on two occasions to me is irrelevant. It is a dramatic construct admittedly but without this added entertainment angle the film would never have gained such publicity and would have disappeared into a mire of other documentaries. They speak to other people who worked with him campaigning in Flint with him against General Motors and it is odd that Moore chose to leave out footage of the grass roots uprising in the town, but I still don't think this distracts essentially from what he was trying to do.

Now I will concede that I think Moore has a persona which is not necessarily the real him. There are numerous interviews with people who suggest that Moore is ungracious, paranoid, megalomaniacal and so on, often from his friends. Again this isn't a great surprise to me, I never expected him to be a “nice guy” all of the time – very few of us can say that we are, this again doesn't necessarily detract from his films, not least because even in his worst moments I am fairly sure Moore is a far “nicer guy” than Bush and his group of religious fundamentalists.

The film moves on to Bowling for Columbine and takes issue first with the scene where he gets a gun for opening a bank account – speaking to the bank tellers it becomes clear that the scene shot when they hand over the gun to him in the branch had been set up for months by the producers and in actual fact the gun would only be handed over through a registered firearms dealer – the bank doesn't usually hold any guns on the premises. This is another example of a dramatic construct with which I am happy for Moore to get away with. Surely the issue here is of a society that is so entrenched in a Military-industrial complex that banks, the source of wealth are linked in so closely with the gun lobby to give a weapon away as a free gift. A society that is so at ease with it's violent nature that this is considered OK. Whether or not you actually get the gun in the branch is surely entirely irrelevant, but showing it in the film just heightens the absurdity.

The second main issue was with the treatment of Charlton Heston, for attending a rally that never actually happened and in general for his support of the NRA. This is harder to defend because it is essentially a wheedling approach from Moore with an uppercut attack on an old man who cannot really defend himself. I thought at the time this sequence was a little unkind and less than chivalrous. Having said that, I totally agree with Moore about guns and I think Heston is totally in the wrong, he is usually protected by money and power that the NRA use to lobby government so why not have to face the music occasionally.

The film that Moore is promoting on the tour the film crew are following is Fahrenheit 9/11 and there aren't many examples of where Moore has been untruthful in this film. There is footage of Bush speaking at a formal dinner “The Haves and the Have Mores”, “Some people call you privileged, I call you my base” and it is revealed that this was at a large gathering of politicians where speakers are encouraged to be self mocking. There are a lot of other points that are not rebuked in this film and it is unclear whether we are meant to do our own research into how Moore is lying to us or if we are just supposed to distrust him in general now because it has been suggested that he isn't such a nice guy and has been known to edit certain sequences in his movies.

There are a couple of moments actually at Moore's rallies where you do begin to wonder a little, the Canadian film crew is thrown out at one point after getting in to the university with fake reporters ID (A trick they borrowed from Moore) and there is footage of them being ejected. The reason given is that “Commercial” filming is not allowed, although as the point is made, a documentary is probably less “Commercial” in nature than one of the news channels. It is difficult to know why this happened or why the Canadians are not allowed to plug into Moore's sound board at another event when other broadcasters are, or why Moore is so difficult to get down to do an interview. It might be that they were hassling him for no particular reason other than that he hassles other people. They show an interview where a film critic is slating his one fiction film and the critic suggests he should be able to take it but is surprised when Moore is offended and looks daggers at him. Frankly the comments made were just rude and to suggest you should be able to dish that sort of treatment out to someone, in a slightly aggressive way, just because that is Moore's approach to people who have generally done something pretty bad, is a bit rich.

The final thing which was hard to reconcile was Moore dropping Ralph Nader, the green party candidate for president who Moore campaigned for in 2000 and it could be said cost Gore the presidency because of the 1 and a half % he gained in Florida. Moore is quite savage about Nader at some of the rallies – although in a comic way, it seems though that despite his previous support he has decided that the Greens are a non starter. It seems a shame that he has given up on this given the fact that John Kerry was hardly a staunch left winger in the election against Bush.

The only way I can reconcile this though is that Moore felt it more important to get Bush out of the White House than to garner support for what is, even more than the Liberal Democrats in this country, a poor third in every way. It is sad to see that America's “Democratic” system only has two parties but unfortunately that is exactly the way it is now and it is hardly Michael Moore's fault.

So in summary, the film was interesting to an extent, but to be honest told me nothing particularly new and nothing I was shocked about. Moore as a public figure is one of those characters that you either love or hate, and this film hasn't changed my opinion in that. All it suggested to me is that perhaps personally he is not a particularly likeable figure, but that isn't really an issue in the scheme of things now is it?