"his version of the story"

[pynchonoid]

[...] Moore's persona has by now taken on a somewhat
stylized quality, but at the same  time it has receded
into the position of a mere structural device, a
functionally effective  way of getting the tale told.
The effectiveness of the telling is in a sense what
Fahrenheit 9/11 is about. Its fiction is that one
man—not a lecturer or the representative of a
political party, but somebody you might meet at a
party or in a bar—is telling you according to his own
lights what's been going on in the world lately. He's
funny, stridently opinionated, occasionally eloquent,
and on top of that he has a fund of anecdotes and
visual aids to back up his story; from time to time,
without interrupting the thread of his discourse, he
changes the music on the sound system to produce some
startling and amusing effects. What makes it all the
more persuasive is that, at every step, he reminds you
in devastating detail how ineptly or deceptively
others have told their versions of this same story.
The proof of their ineptitude or deception is that
he's telling things you haven't heard before, and
showing you pictures that seem to speak for
themselves. It's not a story about a well-hidden
conspiracy: all you have to do, he implies, is look
around. You could step outside the room where you're
sitting and pick up the trail anywhere, right on the
street.

His version of the story begins with how George W.
Bush was elected to the presidency under dubious
circumstances and settled into what promised to be a
single mediocre term until he was jolted awake by the
attacks of September 11; how his response to those
attacks was muddied by, among other factors,
longstanding business ties to the Saudi royal family;
how the Bush administration used the war on terror as
a means to instill fear in the American public and
erode civil liberties through the Patriot Act, while
failing actually to protect homeland security; and,
finally, how (for reasons having much to do with oil
profits, and nothing to do with the horrific nature of
Saddam Hussein's regime) an invasion of Iraq was
mounted after deliberately misleading the public about
Saddam's weaponry and links to al-Qaeda. The upshot is
that poor people who have joined the military for lack
of other employment end up dead and wounded in the
service of a lie. A final quotation from Orwell's 1984
is used to suggest that the Iraq war is part of a
wider and inherently unfinishable global war whose
real purpose is to keep power in the hands of
America's economic elite.

This bald synopsis, admittedly the further
simplification of a simplification, entirely fails t 
convey his film's very real power. It does not unfold
like a lecture but like the tour of a fu  house, a fun
house whose mirrors and skewed angles turn out to be a
place all too easy t  recognize as home. Strangely for
so overtly polemical a work, Fahrenheit 9/11 can be
seen as a triumph of form over content. What is least
persuasive about it is the specifics of its arguments;
what is exhilarating and often moving about it has to
do above all with the materials, many of them archival
and many not seen before, which are enlisted in
support of those arguments, materials that linger and
expand in the mind in ways that go far beyond the
sometimes casually deployed debating points. We may
never know just why the name of James Bath (a fellow
National Guardsman with whom George W. Bush trained in
Texas, and who later participated in a business deal
involving both Bush and a member of the bin Laden
family) was expunged from the officially released
transcript of Bush's military records, or whether or
not the desire of certain business interests to build
a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan
significantly impeded American response to the Taliban
and al-Qaeda; and in any event Moore as a rule only
conveys enough information to arouse suspicion, not
nearly enough to begin to make a case.

But then making a case, well reasoned or otherwise, is
not really what the movie, or Moore as a filmmaker, is
about. [...] 

from:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17315
Is It All Just a Dream?
By Geoffrey O'Brien


...thanks in part to the hysterical reaction against
it (almost as difficult to understand as, say,  the
knee-jerk resistance to reading the references and
allusions to the Holocaust with which Pynchon has
peppered his works) Moore's film has topped $100
million in ticket sales.

=====
http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"
http://neoconservadroid.org
"android warriors of the right"


		
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