Fahrenheit 2010
Oliver Stone has a new movie out called South of the Border, which allegedly depicts President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as some sort of humanitarian. Chavez has invested money in the poor areas of Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, and even the United States, but are his motives altruistic? More importantly what has he done for Venezuela?
Some liberal political activists really believe in Chavez. Famous pop-heretics like Sean Penn have come out publicly to support Chavez, without much understanding of how real Venezuelans feel about their leader and what they have been through.
The strong opinions people have of Chavez and socialism usually translate into the opinions they have of Obama and where he is taking America. Maybe Obama and the federal government are taking necessary pragmatic steps to revive American prosperity where the private sector has failed. Maybe they are making a huge mistake. And I am not even going to debate what socialism is, and whether it is good or bad. Whatever your opinion, I just think the new Democratic administration is perfectly vulnerable to a potential Michael Moore-like fake-umentary. However, no talented filmmakers seem to be poised to jump on this box office bang opportunity.
There are books out there that dismantle the President, but they are written by stuffy old men like Dick Morris (I actually really like Dick Morris). And did I mention they were books? You know that Stone or Moore won’t take a crack at the President. So I ask, where is the young filmmaker looking to make a name for himself by exploiting the natural turmoil and imperfections of the presidency? Like we did with W., let’s get personal.
Actually, I am glad there isn’t such a movie (yet). I do not have a great opinion of Obama, but I am trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. I am trying to be loyal. My bigger beef is with the people who are so blindly in love with him.
I don’t even wish to see artists like Moore or Stone go away. I really like Fahrenheit 911 and W. I did not agree with much of the context either film presented, but I did find them both intriguing. The concept of how much people really just hate Bush fascinates me. I just wish Moore’s and Stone’s films did not commend losers and maniacs like Chavez and Castro. And I wish Americans were not so simple as to form their political opinions based on these jaded documentaries.
Now would someone please go out and make a Fahrenheit 2010?
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The original “Fahrenheit” — “Fahrenheit 451,” published in 1953 — was putatively about a future society, but it bore marks of and commentary on the Cold War society in which it was composed. It looked back nostalgically to a vanished America (of Ray Bradbury’s boyhood), and among the things it foresaw, as part of the totalitarian society it depicted, were the corrosive effects of television.
Everybody and everything in the so-called civilization of the novel is vapid. That is a central point of the novel. Book-burning is such an outrage to our laissez-faire sensitivities that we may fail to realize it is only the most visible manifestation of a dehumanizing totalitarianism.
But “It didn’t come from the Government down,” one character tells Montag, the protagonist. “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.”
In other words, people did it to themselves. Materialism and anti-intellectualism and fear-mongering, which Bradbury could see welling up in America, brought this society about.
At that point vapidity was nowhere near the perfection it has reached in Glenn Beck, and anti-intellectualism had not come even within hailing distance of today’s Palin proportions. Thus if there were a “Fahrenheit 2010,” it would, by logic of literary heredity, not be about a socialist Obama state taking away our liberties, but about conservative conformists and Christian fundamentalists and the minority pressure exerted by Tea Party nutballs demanding that we all be like they are, directed by television (Fox News) and right-wing radio exploiting our fears to create a totalitarianism in which million-voiced corporations make America safe for the super-wealthy.
I didn’t know there was a rule for naming movies, but we can call it something else.
@Parsifal
I’ve always loved Ray. I just finished reading his ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING. It’s fantastic. Quote:
“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”
But Ray was none too pleased regarding Moore’s play on words with FAHRENHEIT 451:
“Michael Moore is a screwed asshole, that is what I think about that case. He stole my title and changed the numbers without ever asking me for permission.”
http://blogs.salon.com/0001561/2004/06/02.html
“‘He stole my title and changed the numbers without ever asking me for permission.’”
I like Ray Bradbury, too, but I also like Michael Moore. Fact is, literarily and ethically, Moore didn’t have to seek permission. Writers/artists riff of other writers’ and artists’ titles and works all the time. Sometimes they even use the same title. Bradbury was just being unreasonably snarky.
@Parsifal
I’m of two minds here. I can’t stand Michael Moore, but I think Ray’s comments were pretty goofy, especially the quote you shared. On the other hand, I think it shows laziness in terms of creativity when someone appropriates another product’s name e.g. “Calvin Krime”; “Full Devil Jacket,” etc.
Jim Goad nailed it in an old EXOTIC Magazine article when he said that this kind of name-appropriation automatically designates your own product as inferior to the original. Agreed. But one exception to the rule, I’ve always felt, was the band “John Cougar Concentration Camp.”
“I can’t stand Michael Moore.”
I can understand people not liking Moore because of his political opinions or the content of his films — things such as that. I disagree with their dislike, but I can understand it. What I can’t understand is not being able to stand him because he looks like an unmade bed. So what? How does that affect anything substantive?
John Boehner is prematurely orange and looks like a failed riverboat gambler, but that’s not why I despise him. I despise him because his ideas are harmful to Americans and other living things.
@Parsifal
My reasons for disliking Moore don’t involve his politics or his rotund frame.
I dislike him because, more than anything, his career is not about defending the Little Guy (as he claims). “Defending the Little Guy” is a convenient prop he uses to put the spotlight where he wants it — on himself.
His politics, his work…all of it comes second to making himself a spectacle.
In that sense, he is no different than Glenn Beck.
“I dislike him because, more than anything, his career is not about defending the Little Guy (as he claims).”
Hypocrisy does not bother me. It is universal. Hypocrisy is, in fact, the glue of civilization. If I were to write off public figures because of their hypocrisy I would have to write off all, or nearly all, Washington politicians, who claim to want to be elected to serve the American people but who in truth want a Really Good Job that gives public exposure and involves very little work, no heavy lifting, and terrific post-tenure pensions and perks. (For some reason they always say “the American people” rather than just “Americans”; perhaps it sounds more serious and sonorous.)
But I do not write them all off. I write off the hypocrites whose ideas are dangerous for the American people. For shorthand let us call them Republicans (and other forms of conservative life, such as Democrats like Ben Nelson). They all will and do lie to get elected, so my only recourse is to choose the liars whose promises I want to keep pressing them to fulfill. I might have a chance of getting what I want that they promised. I certainly don’t want to vote for a liar who, for instance, wants to kill Social Security or Medicare.
So that is why I like Michael Moore. He may be out mainly for No. One, but in the process he exposes ugly — one might even say inconvenient — truths. We DO have a lousy health care non-system that makes us sicker than, say, Slovenians. We DO have an insane gun culture. We DID start a war with a country that was nothing more than an international irritant but had a lot of lovely Oil. And so on.
That is the difference between Michael Moore and Glenn Beck. Moore exposes ugly truths and makes himself well known and rich. Beck babbles hogwash like “social justice leads to Nazism” and makes himself well known and rich. That and the fact that Beck does truly seem to be not very knowledgeable or intelligent — certainly he is woefully undereducated and/or underinformed.
@Parsifal
You make a good point, similar to one my journalist friend Rob, who has covered the Catholic Church in New York State for two-plus decades, made when he and I were debating the merit of “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day.” In response to my (slightly unfair) characterization of Mohammad as a pedophile with temporal lobe epilepsy who told lots of tall tales, Rob argued that there have been all sorts of devilish bastards throughout history, who, despite their objectionable qualities, ended up bringing a net effect of “good” to the world. He included Mohammad in that group.
I disagree that Michael Moore has much in common with these individuals. I rarely see much depth or insightful analysis in his work; I see lots of straw men arguments; lots of intellectual cowardice, and lots of questionable presentation of “facts.” While I think it’s too easy to call his films “propaganda,” which they certainly are to some extent, there’s an exploitive element to them that I find distasteful, one that goes beyond simple hypocrisy.
Take the Charlton Heston scene in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE. I have no problem with Moore charging into Heston’s home and bullying the senile old man. (Well, that was a little ridiculous, I suppose.) But senile or not, Heston was still the figurehead of the NRA. So be it. What I DID object to was Moore using the sad memory of a dead child as a prop to elevate himself to a level of Oscar-caliber leftist godhead. Cue applause! Everybody give the Supreme Narcissist a standing ovation. He has given us a masterwork of social commentary; let us all stand in awe!
Blah.
I maintain that Glenn Beck shares much in common with Moore. There’s a hyper-exploitive element in his work too. And it’s an assault on reason and common sense whenever Beck characterizes some fringe element “author” as a sage foreteller of the coming socialist dystopia and One World Government.
BUT…here is why I see Beck as more benign and ultimately less influential than Moore. Both guys are clowns — PT Barnum-esque carnival barkers. Both exploit “the little guy” for personal benefit. Moore is better skilled at presenting his bullshit as works of “grave importance,” whereas Beck is hilarious in an unintentional way, and prone to diatribes that are, at best, a bizarre transmutation of current events and, at worst, a mind-boggling distortion of reality based on bad information, highly questionable analytical skills, and sheer cuckoo-town craziness and chameleon-style opportunism.
Having said that, I find Beck far more entertaining than Moore, simply because I can’t for the life of me grasp how anyone with a semblance of common sense could take Beck seriously. He is an absurdist cartoon character, and I’m somewhat amazed that his audience swelled to such high numbers at one point.
But, if we are to believe the esteemed truth tellers at MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA, Beck’s audience is withering away…slowly but surely.
Which leads me to believe that FINALLY, after months of incomprehensible allegiance to Beck’s shenanigans, Tea Partiers and their ilk may be wising up and rejecting a lot of stuff that comes out of GB’s mouth.
Which gives me a bit of hope — it may demonstrate that people are not as dumb and sheep-like as they are so often characterized as.
In short, Beck is more benign than Moore because Beck is a fad; he is the Pet Rock or Parachute Pants of political discourse. In a few years, he’ll be gone — a fart in the wind. I sense that Moore will still be around, though, doing his best to drive the country deeper and deeper into the ground.
The only thing in the foregoing that a take serious objection to is statement that your characterization of Mohammad as “a pedophile with temporal lobe epilepsy who told lots of tall tales” Is “slightly unfair.”
On the contrary, there is nothing at all unfair about it.
@Parsifal
Agreed; although I pulled my punches because I seem to recall even Christopher Hitchens saying that the temporal-lobe hypothesis of Mohammad’s visions was “crude” or “callous” or something such.
But, then again, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has called Mohammad a pedophile, and I’d wager that her understanding of Mohammad is a bit more intimate than Hitch’s. Perhaps she’d agree with me on the temporal-lobe hallucinations bit too.