The Passion of Michael Moore

Some witch on MSNBC right now is enraged that Michael Moore compared the opening of F9/11 to the opening of The Passion of the Christ. She wasn't saying that Moore was out-of-his-mind wrong because her data showed The Passion to clearly be in a league of its own—no, she said that the comparison was wrong because Mel Gibson's film "hewed so closely to the Gospels." I didn't catch her name—she's with Women Influencing the Nation, whose Web site was listed as www.seethepassion.com, so, hmm, you tell me—but I thought I'd clarify two small points:

• Michael Moore's film is a documentary.
  
• Mel Gibson's film is not.

How fiction works in the realm of film seems to be causing some related confusion. It turns out that any film is a mediation on the truth—even a documentary. For example, guest caller Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, before calling Moore anti-Semitic and "an enemy of decency," wonders why Moore showed footage of children playing with kites in Iraq before the war and not Kurdi children dying in chemical-weapon attacks way back when. Of course it is true that those kids were playing with kites (and the footage exists), so Rabbi Boteach is essentially asking, "Why aren't you proving this other point that I want you to prove?" Now, Moore could've presented us with footage of everything that ever happened in Iran, Iraq, Israel, and the US, from all possible perspectives, and after watching this Borgesian extravaganza we would at least have every fact on the table. It wouldn't be a polemical documentary, which is what Moore prefers to make, but I suppose he ought to try to answer his critics.

It turns out that Mel Gibson's movie was not actually four days long—worse still, the Gospels are not film-literal minutes of his trial and punishment. And I hate to break your heart on the eve of Arthur, but even that feature is someone's take on the legend. But when Joe Scarborough closed his show by telling us that Michael Moore has called for "the deaths of more American children," that is undeniably the unvarnished truth. Most certainly not polemical invective.

Posted by Kriston at July 5, 2004 11:39 PM