A good critical review of F911

Jason Steck and I rarely agree on anything, but his review of Fahrenheit 911 is very well written and argued. Obviously I disagree with a couple of points, but I largely agree with his description of Moore's rather forced argumentative style, and Moore's tendency to truncate his arguments (how much that's possible in filmmaking aside, since Moore chooses his arguments as well as his genre). Maybe Moore just thinks he deploys enthymemes effectively, but he would do well to ask fewer rhetorical questions and lay out his case point by point. It's not hard to do when dealing with the Bush administration.

I strongly disagree with the assertion (Jason attributes it to a student) that Moore exploited people's suffering. For me, sustained viewing of that suffering is a vital part of the message, perhaps a conduit to ethical understanding, and also is fair game in a political argument (eg, sustained and agenda-driven representations of those who suffered under Saddam--I'd have no objection to that). More about that in the second item below.

But Moore is often sloppy, and Jason capitalizes on that with cutting precision. And once again, I'm right: This movie has created a higher level of dialogue on every side.

Moore, F911 and the question of exploitation

Some have argued that Moore exploits Lila Lipscombe's tragedy of first encouraging her children to join the military, then losing her son, then questioning WHY her son and others were deployed to Iraq.

Herein lies a real epistemic and ethical paradox. One looks at those scenes and one thinks "she's being exploited" or "her pain is being exploited," which is functionally the same. The problem is that any "objective" meaning of exploitation only makes sense within certain systems perspectives, and "subjective" experiences of oppression are, um, subject-dependent.

There are, I would think, at least two ways to determine whether someone is being exploited:

1. You can construct definition and criteria of exploitation that makes sense within your system of social explanation: Marxism and certain forms of Feminism do this. You then also need a working definition of "false consciousness" in order to account for those who do not "feel" exploited, but nevertheless are from the perspective of your system. Having constructed the definition/criteria, you can then apply it to the situation, and determine whether someone is being exploited.

2. You can rely on persons themselves to express their exploitation. That is, you can take a pre-ontological ethical approach (via Levinas perhaps) of saying: If the other person says she is exploited, then I must assume she is, and the meaning of that is something I need to draw from our communication.

Obviously both approaches are problematic. You might apply some other, older tests too, such as Kant's question of whether one is being treated as a means or an end. But that seems to go back to the question of how that person sees herself, and/or how one can functionally place her in a systemic examination of how she is being treated.

Was Lila Lipscombe's tragedy exploited to make a political point? Or was it utilized, with her blessing, to make a political point? Who owns her tragedy and her pain? Every report I have read shows her to be enthusiastically embracing the film and her role in it, and she even seems willing to "exploit" her own exposure to participate in more political activism. A couple of bloggers out there have insisted she's being exploited, but their statements don't even come close to filtering through the kind of criterial tests I laid out above.

Of course, one might argue that she is, herself, exploiting her own suffering. That is a different argument, to which one might respond that she has the right to do so just as we would, and that we don't enjoy the right to judge her until we experience what she has experienced. I don't know how to resolve that question.

Is Moore exploiting others in the film? Or is he simply exploiting the pain created by the tragic geopolitical and class relations that surround and contextualize us? Is he exploiting the suffering Iraqis whose images he deploys in the film? Again, I am not sure how one could make such a judgment absent either a theory of exploitation, or a localized knowledge of the subjects themselves.

So while one should be concerned about exploitation, about the use of others' pain to further one's political agenda, carrying that concern over into a critical judgment against Moore's rhetorical choices also risks silencing or disregarding the choices, feelings, and identities of those moral agents that you're concerned for in the first place. For the record, I am not comfortable condemning Moore for it, but I am also not entirely comfortable with the fact that he does it so much in F911.

It seems to me that the ultimate exploitation here is captured by Moore's summation at the end of the film. If Iraq did not pose an immediate threat to the United States, and if whatever moral principles justifying the invasion to depose an evil dictator are applied inconsistently and without a legitimate accompanying national conversation among those affected by the decision to invade, in short, if the U.S. deployed its soldiers when not absolutely necessary, then our soldiers, and innocent Iraqis, and all of us, have been exploited. Perhaps Moore is exploiting that too. You can direct your critical judgment against him for that. I prefer to direct mine elsewhere.