Crockumentary 101
I'd never seen a documentary (on purpose) before Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Now I watch all kinds of documentaries. Bowling for Columbine opened the floodgates for successful documentaries with its humor, conviction, and powerful editing.
I've also enjoyed various mockumentaries, which are fictional films presented as documentaries (such as This Is Spinal Tap or the recent A Mighty Wind). They look and feel like documentaries, but it's all made up (usually, they are humorous and parodying).
Don't get me wrong, I love Bowling for Columbine. It's a good film. But I'm tempted to place it under the 'mockumentary' label for all its fictional content. But of course, it's not wholly fictional; just partly. The best lies are half-truths. So, I can't really call it a 'mockumentary,' but my conscience won't let me call it a documentary. What should I call it?
Crockumentary. As in, crock of shit. Bowling for Columbine smells of stinky lies.
In case you don't believe me, take a look at these insidious tricks used by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine (respectfully stolen from Truth About Bowling):
Bowling put forth the notion that the NRA rushed to Denver just after the Littleton tragedy in order to rub guns in devdevastatedestated people's faces. Actually, that meeting was an annual meeting in Denver that had been scheduled YEARS in advance. In Denver, the NRA cancelled every single event except for the necessary voters' meeting, which could not be cancelled due to state law!
Charlton Heston's 'cold dead hands' speech was not from the Denver meeting, but from a rally a YEAR later in Charlotte! It was a thank you speech for a gift he'd received: a musket.
Heston's speech, as played during Bowling for Columbine, does not exist. The audio was spliced together from FIVE different sections of a speech, and one from entirely different speech! Another example: at one point in the movie, Heston is quoted as saying, "I said to the Mayor: As Americans, we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land. Don't come here? We're already here!" Actually, "I said to the mayor" is from one paragraph of the speech, the "broad land" actually comes from the end of the next paragraph, and the "Don't come here?" bit is a full FIVE PARAGRAPHS later in the speech. Moore covers up these giant deletions in the speech by cutting to other shots as Heston's edited voice continues. Perhaps you noticed that Heston was suddenly wearing different clothes in what was supposedly a continuous speech...
Later, Michael Moore says, "Just as he did after the Columbine shooting, Charlton Heston showed up in Flint, to have a big pro-gun rally." Actually, Heston's speech in Flint came EIGHT MONTHS later, just before the November elections, along with Bush and Gore rallies. Michael Moore himself hosted a Green Party rally a few weeks earlier.
For further examination of more boldfaced lies in Bowling for Columbine, visit Truth About Bowling.
[Note: since the original writing of this article, Fahrenheit 9/11 has released with just as many deceits as Bowling for Columbine].
Michael Moore certainly manipulates the truth to fit his documentaries, but to be perfectly honest with you, so do those ridiculous right-wing sites that bash Moore. Just as you should take a Michael Moore documentary with a grain of salt, so should you with Truth About Bowling. Neither one is 100% accurate, but I applaud Moore's guts, ambition, and ability to create a sheer emotional response.
Well, I haven't personally investigated each fact, but Truth About Bowling at least cites specific sources and appears to be accurate, a luxury Bowling for Columbine cannot afford (and indeed, probably doesn't want to, because then most of its points would be less powerful).
While Bowling For Columbine may not be backed up with sources and research you can check, Moore's two books Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country? which talk about many of the same points are extremely well-investigated and well-researched, with dozens of sources sited throughout. And while there are many deceits that are made using editing and manipulation of facts in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has backed up the actual facts themselves and cited many of the sources on his website. Just so you know...
Yup, I agree. Usually, Moore deceives not with an outright lie, but by 'saying' something without actually saying it. He really is a master at leaving a solid impression with someone about what the truth is when the situation is very different, and yet he doesn't outright lie. An example would be saying 'There is no 800 number you can reach this guy at' when instead, there is a toll-free 888 number, or whatever (in Fahrenheit 9/11).
Gimme a break. If you want to prove anything, there are at least a million sources you could cite. If you want to prove the opposite, there are at least a million sources for that too. And all these sources are more easily accessible thanks to the wonders of the Internet. As xfanatic50 said, his books always contain pages and pages of sources, and they say similar things as his movies.
I think it's naive to believe everything Michael Moore says, but I think also think it's naive to call him a boldfaced liar. There's more corruption in the Bush presidency than you think, even if there's less than Moore claims there is.
Lol, I didn't say the Bush administration weren't liars. They're just as bad as Michael Moore. But Michael Moore is a pretty bad liar (and thus, so is the Bush administration).
I was trying to see if Michael Moore had said anything about Team America: World Police on his web site, and I stumbled upon something interesting: an incredibly detailed list of factual citations to back up everything said in Fahrenheit 9/11. That still doesn't mean I believe everything in that movie is true, but it does prove my point that long lists of sources cited means very little in this crazy world we live in.
The people who made Fahrenhype 9/11 and wrote of the '56 deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11' and 'Truth About Bowling' are perhaps just as partisan and strongly opinionated as Moore.
But, I noticed the individual facts backed up on that list are different than the ones 'disproved' on the '56 deceits' list - so it's quite possible that those WERE deceits, and that's why they weren't included in the list of facts that the Fahrenheit 9/11 page could 'prove.'
And, for example, on the list you linked to, they spend time proving things like “For the next eight months, it didn’t get any better for George W. Bush.”
Both lists, though, for example, tackled the issue of vacation time. BOTH sources agreed on this: "Washington Post supercomputers calculated that if you add up all his weekends at Camp David, layovers at Kennebunkport and assorted to-ing and fro-ing, W. will have spent 42 percent of his presidency ‘at vacation spots or en route.’" It's just the anti-Moore lists points out that Camp David is fully-functional administrative and military base, not necessarily a vacation spot. They also point out that "en-route" didn't mean "en-route to or from vacation" but "en-route to or from ANYWHERE" - meaning any time he traveled the states to announce nominations, give speeches, talk to the press, or read the children in schools.
A pretty funny one in the list you linked to is this:
-----
FAHRENHEIT 9/11: “Mr. Bush just sat there and continued to read My Pet Goat.”
* “It was while attending a second-grade reading class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., to promote his education reforms that President Bush learned America was under attack. In the presence of her VIP guest, teacher Sandra Kay Daniels, 45, conducted the day's lesson, which centered on a story about a pet goat.” “9/11: A Year After,” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2002.
* President Bush listened to 18 Booker Elementary School second-graders read a story about a girl's pet goat Tuesday before he spoke briefly and somberly about the terrorist attacks. “Bush hears of attack while visiting Booker,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 12, 2001.
* See also film footage.
----
Nowhere in the supporting evidence does it say Bush read to the students (and indeed, in Fahrenhype 9/11 they did an interview with the teacher who said he never read, only listened).
Both lists ('56 deceits' was used as a major source for Fahrenhype 9/11) agree that Bush did nothing for several minutes following his being informed of the attack. Fahrenheit 9/11 argues that this was a mistake. Fahrenhype 9/11 argues that this allowed the president to take stock of the situation instead of running out of the scene or panicking or something.
There's quite a bit of truth in Fahrenheit 9/11, but a truth ratio of 2/1 is still VERY BAD for a documentary.
Hmm. I thought in the documentary, they didn't show Bush actually reading the book, but they did speculate about what he was thinking about (proposing that he was considering whether it was his daddy's oil buddies behind the attacks). I didn't remember them saying he was actually reading the book. But I guess if he attests that here, maybe they did.
Regarding Fahrenhype's argument that it wouldn't have been effective for Bush to flip out, that is one I have heard before, and I agree wholeheartedly. But what I don't understand is that no one arguing against Fahrenheit 9/11 realizes that Bush could've just quietly excused himself and calmly walked out of the room in order to attend to more pressing matters than My Pet Goat. It's not his lack of emotion that disturbs me (for he was certainly hiding his true feelings), but his lack of action. You're saying it wouldn't have been effective for him to panic and run out of the room? Of course it wouldn't, but it also wouldn't be effective for him to sit and listen to a children's book.
In any case, I don't think you can really reduce truthfulness to a ratio, but I think there are more points on Moore's list than 56, and the ones on 56 Deceits are at least half-truths, so I would call it a good deal more than 2/1. When you consider how inherently manipulative film is, and the fact that Moore's argument is pretty much just a visual form of an opinion column, I don't think the ratio is too bad.
2/1 meaning that Fahrenheit 9/11 is 66% truthful - which is still really bad. And of course, it can't be that simple of a ratio, but with the amount of deceit (are half-truths really truth?) that happens in Fahrenheit 9/11 is terrible.
I'm not sure calmly excusing himself from the room would've helped either. Had he left the room, he would been immediately bombarded by people for immediate decisions. Staying in the room, on camera, actually gave him time to let it sink in and think about the situation without a million people demanding things of him.
Well, it's not like he's leaving the room and demanding our troops to immediately bomb Afghanistan within the next seven minutes. I will avoid criticizing Bush for the many rushed, immediate decisions he made [at the moment], but all I know is, if I'm in an elementary school listening to a children's book, and I hear the news that terrorists have just crashed a plane into a building, I'm not going to sit on my fat ass and keep listening to the story. I'll have plenty of time to think when I'm en route to wherever I'm going, which is apparently how I spend a good portion of my time.
66% truthful? I don't think that's too shabby. But then again, my BS detector filters out about a quarter of the stuff in such a movie already, so that leaves about 75%, which is only a 9% difference. And there's certainly a large margin of error in all these numbers. I guess if you go into the movie expecting it to be 100% accurate, 66% sounds pretty bad. But I don't think anyone really does that.
Once again, I think we'll have to agree to disagree, here, but thanks for the interesting discussion and the nifty link.
Alright, we can disagree about the percent of truthfulness, but tell me this. If you were in Bush's situation, what would you do? Would you take some immediate action - not huge, life-altering action, but some action - or would you sit and listen to My Pet Goat for seven minutes? Maybe this is an idea for a poll...
I'm a pretty careful guy. So, I'd probably like the security of the classroom for the first few minutes after hearing that news - a 'quiet' place to gather your thoughts and emotions without opportunity for every single person on your staff to be bugging you and handing you reports and what-not.