Early in Fahrenheit 11/9, documentarian Michael Moore cooks up an origin story. It’s about—who else?—President Donald Trump.
Trump, the tale goes, was still hosting NBC’s The Apprentice when he learned in 2014 that former No Doubt frontwoman Gwen Stefani was getting paid more to be a vocal coach on The Voice than he was on his show. Trump was angry about that. He wanted to prove that he, like Stefani, was popular—that he, too, could draw a crowd.
Hence, according to Moore, the now-infamous Trump Tower campaign announcement in 2015—you know, the speech in which he claimed that Mexican immigrants “have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump, Moore insists, didn’t actually want to be president; the campaign announcement was a devilish hoax meant purely to drum up attention. It only became dangerous when Trump, seeing the crowds, realized he could keep drumming up attention if he maintained the charade. “He was trying to pit NBC against another network,” Moore told The Hollywood Reporter recently. “But it just went off the rails.”
Moore is far from the first to suggest that Trump’s run was predicated on his ego, rather than out of any real interest in politics. But a casual viewer, Googling the phrase “Donald Trump + Gwen Stefani” after seeing the movie, will only be led back to Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 press tour. It’s an origin story whose origin isn’t history, but rather the man telling it.
No surprise there: this is Michael Moore we’re talking about. This is unabashed propaganda—which means that the endgame of Fahrenheit 11/9 isn’t truth in its purest sense, but rather the truth of Moore’s anger. The takeaway isn’t, as Moore jests in his film, that we should credit the Trump era to the handsomely paid queen of ska. It’s that the Trump era is as arbitrary as it is dangerous, a mere pissing contest that somehow got catapulted into a presidency with devastating geopolitical consequences. The point is to say: You call this democracy?
Which is another way of saying that Fahrenheit 11/9 does what Moore has done best, or at least most, throughout his career. It’s a sprawling, big-mouthed, big-hearted mess of a polemic, equal parts righteously impassioned and unforgivably dubious. It’s a rip-roaring airing of grievances from a man who has only ever used his substantial platform to get shit off of his chest.
You could sum up the film in the same terms Moore might use to sum up our current political moment, or even politics writ large: betrayal. Fahrenheit 11/9 is about the betrayal of school-shooting survivors by the law-making adults who, after years of excess gun violence, refuse to budge on America’s too-forgiving gun laws; of Flint residents by the Michigan government and its partner in crime, the automotive industry; of the labor bloc by establishment Democrats; of the West Virginia primary voters who, in every single county, voted to nominate Bernie Sanders, but were thwarted by a late super-degelate nod to Hillary Clinton; of teachers by state governments (and, in some cases, their union leaders); of Hillary voters by Hillary’s campaign; of the American public by a media landscape too in love with the circus to see what harm it was doing the country; and, finally, of history—by all of us, who should have seen this coming.
11/9 abounds with such smackdowns and, in some cases, dire oversimplifications—all of it firing in the usual directions, buoyed by Moore’s trademark “told ya so” folksiness. Pundit complacency comes under fire. Establishment Democrats—with their fetish for political compromise—do, too. We get a précis of Election Night 2016 and the ensuing shock, searing tours of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, and an incredible (not in a good way) rehash of years of Democratic error, from the party’s history of failing the labor class and minority voters to its conservative love of big money, and brief encounters with rising local political stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.
Much of this is fairly well-mined territory; it’s too bad that Moore wields it almost entirely for its ironic value, for his ability to scold our surprise, rather than to open up new avenues of discourse or incite more actionable feelings. The overall effect is too close to Irony Twitter—gotchas that say more about the filmmaker’s ability to say “Gotcha!” than they do about the moment in itself. There’s a stretch in which Moore reviews Trump’s history of baldfaced fuckups, including, of course, the “grab them by the pussy” tape, and an uncannily creepy montage of Trump’s sexually suggestive relationship to his daughter. Over those images, Moore intones: “Does this make you uncomfortable? I don’t know why. None of this is new. He’s always committed his crimes in plain sight.” Sure . . . But is that all you’ve got?
I had the same itchy reaction to Moore’s brief overview of his and Trump’s surprisingly tangled history, which began when Trump and Moore were both invited to appear on Roseanne Barr’s short-lived talk show—an occasion on which Trump, knowing Moore’s politics, threatened to walk unless Moore promised to play nice. So they’ve been in each other’s orbit for some time; that’s more or less all Moore gets out of the anecdote (beyond making some of us wonder where the hell we were when Roseanne had a talk show). And not just Trump: Jared Kushner once hosted the opening-night party for Moore’s health-care doc Sicko—which Steve Bannon’s company distributed on home video.
Moore seems to write off these connections with a “Whaddayaknow?” shrug; he doesn’t mine them for questions or ideas, or turn the lens back on himself to wonder what role he has played in the state of things. Instead, he prefers to tell a tale that spins outward, further and further, with incendiary historical connections and a whole lot of related-but-distinct social angst.
The movie doesn’t fly off the rails so much as promise, up front, that just as the system is broken, so, too, is Moore’s ability to self-edit. What motivates everything here is pure feeling. That can be effective. The most cogent section of the film is, unsurprisingly, Michigan-native Moore’s treatment of Flint’s water crisis, and the repeat failures of C.E.O.-friendly governor Rick Snyder to do anything about it. Moore’s coverage of this event—ranging from an overview of the Legionnaires’ disease that’s run rampant through the community to a sit-down with a whistleblower who’d been asked to participate in a health-department cover-up, lying to the state, and to the parents of sick children about their lead levels—is heartbreaking.
Fahrenheit 11/9 consolidates that rage so well that even as it’s only occasionally effective, I’m hesitant to write off the film entirely. I remember what it was like to have complete faith in Michael Moore. I remember what it was like to feel that he was giving voice to our anger; certainly that was the case for me, a sixth grader when the Columbine massacre happened. Suddenly, school wasn’t safe anymore. And when I sought answers, it was Bowling for Columbine—not my parents or teachers, not TV news, not newspapers—that seemed to understand that fear, weaponizing it as a newfound political consciousness.
Like Columbine—like much of Moore’s work—11/9 raises more questions about its maker’s logic and intentions than can be ignored. But also like those films, an overbearing sense of public distrust registers powerfully. Look at those Flint residents: screwed over by their state government, and further—both symbolically and in lack of policy—by their first black president. With friends like these, the movie rightly seems to ask, who needs a government?
