“How the fuck did this happen?” Michael Moore asks aloud in his pointed new documentary “Fahrenheit 11/9,” the filmmaker’s rumination on America during the presidency of Donald Trump. (The title refers to the day Trump was declared winner.)
It’s a fiery film and a bleak one, filled what seem to be Moore’s conflicted emotions about where the United States is headed. It’s choppy too—as if Moore hasn’t processed all the material yet, as if he rushed to get the film in theaters so that it could affect the midterm elections.
In “Fahrenheit 11/9,” Moore—the activist director behind “Roger & Me” (1989), “Bowling for Columbine” (2002), “Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004), “Sicko” (2007)—reviews events from the eve of the 2016 elections to recent months—the campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the survivors who organized the anti-gun violence March For Our Lives, the successful West Virginia teachers strike.
Moore finds hope in recent liberal successes. He argues: “The United States of America is a leftist country,” rattling off a list of polls showing large majorities support healthcare, legal marijuana, immigration, free college. Americans are pro-choice and 78 percent don’t own a gun, he says. Fifty-seven percent of Texans aren’t white, he adds.
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But mostly the film is depressing. “If America is us and we’re the majority, how do we not hold a single seat of power?” Moore asks, from the presidency to Congress to the Supreme Court.
Moore charges that Democratic leaders’ compromises with big business set them against Bernie Sanders (“We were a real threat to the liberal establishment,” the Vermont socialist says) and left Hillary Clinton vulnerable to Trump’s (disingenuous) claims that he was the candidate of the people, the pro-healthcare, pro-childcare, job creator.
“The strongman, the autocrat, only succeeds,” Moore says, “when a vast swath of the population feels they’ve had enough and give up.”
The emotional heart of the film is the poisoning of the water supply in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan. Moore alleges that Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder covered up what was going on for a year and a half, children got sick with lead poisoning and grown-ups began to die from Legionnaires’ disease. One woman cries recalling her choice to bring her mother to a Flint hospital, where she was apparently given the poisoned water: “I wish to this day I would have taken my mama to Ann Arbor.”
Moore ends “Fahrenheit 11/9” by arguing that Trump is an authoritarian threat—along the lines of Hitler—with his demonizing of Muslims and immigrants, with his efforts to discredit those who might rein him in, from the press to the courts.
“When is it too late to turn back?” Moore asks. The United States today, he says, is a nation of paramilitary police, of opioid addiction, of the ongoing Flint water crisis. It’s an America, he says, in which teachers are paid so poorly that they have to work second jobs to make ends meet, an America that loves guns more than protecting its children.
“Why save this America?” Moore asks. “The America I want to save is the America we’ve never had.”
Moore says we can’t hope for the Constitution or impeachment or the Mueller investigation to save us. “We need action,” Moore says. “We have to get rid of the whole rotten system.”
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