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Fahrenheit 9/11’S Wide and Inclusive Lens (2 of 3)
By centrally placing African American voices and experiences, Moore breaks long standing mainstream media conventions on portraying people of color. In ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ the African American experience is not presented as some entertaining minstrel show (as in most popular films). Nor are African Americans portrayed as some interesting subculture (ala Martin Scorcese’s series “the Blues”). Instead, in ‘Fahrenheit 9/11” African Americans appear as political leaders, as experts, as participants in history, as voices for all victims, as the voice of reason (i.e., not speaking only for the ‘particular’ but also for the ‘universal.’).
But Moore does not stop at placing African Americans front and center before the camera. Moore breaks another media convention: he goes international. He humanizes the victims on the other side of the war (the sin for which Jane Fonda attempted in Vietnam and has forever since been condemned). It is worth studying how he pulls this off. Moore begins with the tale of Americans harassed by the Administration’s domestic war on terror. He lets Americans talk about their own fears and losses after 9/11. We empathize with these victims. Then Moore shows us Iraqi children before the bombing of Baghdad. These scenes are interrupted by Bush’s declaration of war and the bombing by American forces. We see the bodies of children afterwards. Intuitively we empathize with these victims too. But the film does not let us off there. We witness a nighttime raid of an Iraqi home and we witness the fear of Iraqi civilians. We witness the abuse of prisoners. And in through the interviews of American soldiers and the statements of the Administration, we are presented with our military’s complicity in the deaths and the torture.
Perhaps we have seen these scenes before on different but separate occasions. But Moore goes a huge step beyond simple reportage by connecting the stories and images. Through the film’s merging of narrative lines and images, Fahrenheit 9/11 in effect equates the suffering of Iraqis with the suffering of Americans and lays the blame on our government—an extraordinary accomplishment shown on 800 screens in this country.
