Artistic License

I haven’t written all that much about F9/11 because everyone else has covered that ground so beautifully. And, as is often the case, Krugman seems to have distilled the blogosphere’s CW and written a wonderful column today that everyone is talking about. He is absolutely correct that the media is bizarrely holding a known left wing polemicist to a higher standard than the president of the United States. How odd.

I only have one small point to add to all this. Susan wrote something today that I hadn’t heard anyone else put quite that way. She said the film is a work of art that tells powerful truths.

This is an important thing to realize about film as opposed to the television and journalistic he said/she said methods of persuasion. Film, like the novel, even in a documentary style, tells emotional truth. And F9/11, in the hands as it is of a powerfully talented filmmaker does just that.

The reason people are responding is because they have been terribly confused. Those of us who have been following this story in minute detail are not surprised by anything the film says, from the more conspiratorial connect-the-dots speculation to the real pain and trauma of seeing actual human beings, children and soldiers alike, hurt and maimed for reasons that make little obvious sense. These are things we’ve been seeing and feeling and trying to sort out since they happened. But, we are filled with a sense of emotional catharsis when we see it because it tells the truth in a much more real way than any news story or blog post has ever done.

And many people who are just living their lives and maybe picked up a paper or watched CNN from time to time have been buffetted by the strange hyper-patriotism, the PR stuntmaking, the reasoning and rationales that don’t seem to connect and they are left feeling oddly fractured and discontented. This movie gives them a sense of order out of chaos in which they are able for the first time to make sense of what they are feeling. A counter-narrative that brings their gut and their brain back into balance.

For instance, many people felt uncomfortable with George W. Bush’s leadership and they didn’t know exactly why. After all, the opinion makers and TV news starts acted as if he were Alexander the Great and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one for a long, long time. Who were they to argue? And yet….

Seeing him read that children’s book after his chief of staff whispered “Mr. President, we are under attack,” says everything you need to know about his leadership abilities. Until this movie, only a small handful of people had ever seen that footage and understood exactly what it meant. President George W. Bush is a frontman who sat and read to schoolchildren, waiting for further instructions, after the nation was attacked. It fits. Ah hah.

The movie has many of those moments, where what you’ve been feeling, what’s been nagging at the back of your mind suddenly makes sense.

As Krugman and others have rightly pointed out, if the media had been doing their jobs, there would be no audience for Michael Moore today. It’s because journalism failed that art has had to step into the void and tell people the bigger, universal truths. To complain that art is not explicitly factual at this late date shows more than a little chutpah.