I had a chance to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 while I was away. My overall reactions to it are not particularly unique, and are pretty much how I’ve felt about everything Michael Moore has ever done. I think he’s got a good comic touch, which helps distinguish him from the schoolmarm left (though I’m fascinated with how he doesn’t get attacked by the schoolmarms for some of what he does—his montage on the “Coalition of the Willing” in Fahrenheit uses loaded racial and ethnic imagery, for example). If he was content to be a humorist, he wouldn’t annoy me so much. But he’s not content, and habitually insists on sticking in every cheap shot, misleading claim, exaggeration, simplification, and agit-prop sleight-of-hand that he can get away with while pursuing very serious, accurate, important and substantial political arguments. Even when I substantially agree with much of what he has to say, as I do about the Iraq War and the Bush Administration, he still manages to irritate me.

What I find equally grating is the defense of Moore’s work as “fighting dirty” because the other side is doing so. I agree that many of the critics of Fahrenheit are astonishing hypocrites, applying standards that they systematically exempt their own favored pundits and politicians from, but the proposition that one has to play by those degraded rules to win the game repels me. If it's true, then God help us all.

Worse still is the lauding of Moore’s work as effective and therefore desirable agit-prop. The most powerful material in Fahrenheit are the images that the American public has not been permitted to see or hear, and when Moore shows those images and otherwise shuts the hell up, the film is hugely effective. When he insists on dragging the narrative line of the film to all the favored mental habitats of the most ideologically incoherent lineage of the contemporary American left, or when he unconvincingly pretends to great enthusiasm for the rapid and aggressive use of American military power in Afghanistan, or great sympathy for the young men and women in the military, the effectiveness of the film sags. Because the measure of effectiveness in this case has to be not how well the film speaks to those who are already convinced—who the hell cares if it moves me and others like me or not about Iraq or Bush, given that I’ve had deep, intense feelings on both subjects for three years—but whether it can reach those who are potentially reachable. Not the zombies and lickspittles who would apparently laud Bush as their political savior even if he ordered every ship in the Navy to sink itself, but those Americans who are wavering, uncertain, fearing terrorism but also desperately wanting to do the right thing. I believe such an audience exists, and I believe that Michael Moore’s film can’t possibly reach them, except for those few, precious, powerful moments when he has the accidental grace and wisdom to shut the fuck up. The rest of the time he insists on mugging for his usual peanut gallery, and gets the expected applause from them.

This made me think a bit about the modern history of attempted political mobilization through popular culture in the United States, about what was both effective and a memorable work of art. There’s not a lot of work that can occupy both categories, some that occupies one, and much that occupies none.

What makes a work of culture effective in this sense? That it reaches an audience which was previously unmobilized or unconcerned by an issue and crystallizes or focuses their attention on a concrete issue in a way that produces an outcome that plausibly might not have occurred but for a particular film, book, television show or other cultural work. That might be a large public audience, or some segment of the public, or it might be a particular group of politicians, bureaucrats or institutional actors. The Jungle is an obvious and prototypical example. The China Syndrome would be another. Sometimes effectiveness is less a measure of changing future policy and more a matter of changing popular consensus about a past event or policy. Roots clearly made many Americans, both black and white, intensely aware of slavery as a legacy.

What would be examples of ineffectiveness? The John Wayne film The Green Berets might be one—the crudely irrelevant, stock-character patriotism of the film could only have convinced the already-convinced about Vietnam, and probably not even them.

This is a long and complicated history to consider, but when I try (however haltingly) to take a step back from my nearly instinctive dislike of Moore’s grandstanding to evaluate the claim that he is legitimate because he is effective, I can’t help but wonder whether he persuades anyone who is not already persuaded—the only measure of historical effectiveness that I think matters, past or present. I am prepared to find out that he does persuade and thus does matter, and belongs in the class of other creators who have mattered in the past, but my gut says not. What I fear is that he reinforces instead the self-referential insularity of one particular strand of the American left, which is not excusable even though it is mirrored by a vastly more grotesque, powerful and destructive form of the same behavior on the right.