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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Like the most rancorous arguments, Gibson's and Moore's movies left people who came down on opposite sides of them feeling like each other's enemies. (Several of the Jewish critics who panned Gibson's film even received death threats. ) And the arguments they touched off rarely had anything to do with the quality of the films themselves. These were movies by and for true believers. (A defender of the Moore movie even told me that it spoke to "a higher truth.") In political terms, these movies knew how to play to their base.
The refrain of the "South Park" episode "The Passion of the Jew," that those who love "The Passion of the Christ" claim that to reject the movie is to reject Jesus Christ, was no joke. Similarly, to reject "Fahrenheit 9/11" was, to an awful lot of the film's supporters, the equivalent of supporting George W. Bush. And that's how it went: Call Gibson's movie an S/M splatter-fest and you were rejecting the Son of God; call Moore's a slew of unproven assertions, dubious stunts and undisguised condescension and you were embracing the Son of Satan.
Each picture had the same things going for it. Both had topics that aroused tempers. Both were made by master manipulators who know how to work an audience into a lather. Both benefited from the myth that Hollywood had tried to suppress them. (Especially "Fahrenheit 9/11." Disney head Michael Eisner told Moore and Miramax he would not distribute "Fahrenheit" a year before its release. Moore conveniently publicized that fact a week or so before the film won the Cannes Film Festival, thus successfully making it look like a prisoner of the Hollywood gulag. Eisner never attempted to prevent its eventual sale to Lion's Gate Films.) Both had cadres of advance men exhorting the faithful to turn out (evangelists for Gibson, left-wing journalists and activists for Moore). And both gave their audience the comfort of having someone to hate -- Jews for one group, Bushies for the other. (Lenny Bruce said finding someone to hate was essential to being elected, and that the perennial Socialist candidate for president, Norman Thomas, might successfully run on the slogan "Smack a Midget for Norm.")
The enormous success of either movie is not likely to be repeated anytime soon. Mel Gibson is claiming that his next project will be the story of the Maccabees, but that material doesn't allow the sick, bloody excitement that the Crucifixion allows a shrewd exploitation filmmaker like Gibson to whip up. And though political documentaries proliferated in the fall, that was a response to an election that had the air of an emergency -- not a sudden attempt to cash in on Michael Moore's success.
It's not unimaginable that some filmmaker or producer with a difficult or controversial project on his or her hands will take inspiration from the way "The Passion" and "Fahrenheit" turned controversy to their advantages, playing right to their base, figuring that the people who care about the subject will turn out.
A movie like Ang Lee's upcoming gay western "Brokeback Mountain," for instance, could potentially use the polarization about gay rights to lure an audience. And no doubt Moore will continue his tricks with his announced projects about the state of healthcare in America and a follow-up to "Fahrenheit" that will chronicle the next four years of the Bush regime.
Therein lies the problem. Most controversial movies are made without the star power that Mel Gibson and Michael Moore bring to a project. Most will not have the resources that Newmarket and Lions' Gate Films, respectively, used to publicize "The Passion" and "Fahrenheit" and get them into theaters. (It's a fair bet that a good number of the theaters that booked Moore's movie had never played a documentary before.)
And, let's be honest, both "The Passion" and "Fahrenheit" went for the audience's gut as ruthlessly and manipulatively as any action blockbuster. The other political documentaries, pictures that included "Control Room," "The Hunting of the President," "Outfoxed," "Going Upriver," all aimed at the same audience as "Fahrenheit," didn't attract anything near its business. ("Control Room" made a respectable $2,698,919. None of the others broke a million.) For one thing, they didn't have the same distribution.
What if those documentaries had enjoyed the same visibility? Moviegoers taken in by Moore's P.T. Barnum tactics might well view a sober, straightforward documentary like "Unconstitutional," about the shredding of the Constitution under Ashcroft's Justice Department, as a hole in the screen. It doesn't demonize anyone to make its point. Hell, it even lets the audience hear from conservatives (like former congressman Bob Barr) who were bothered by the PATRIOT Act. "Unconstitutional" may benefit from the current political divide, attracting audiences scared of the threat to civil liberties under Bush, but it doesn't exploit that divide.
