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Edited on Sat Jun-26-04 03:31 AM by WillyBrandt
Just came back from the City, where we drove to Times Square and watching Farenheit 9/11 at the AMC. A big gang of rowdy people we were, charged and excited to see the film.
The AMC is a heavily black theater, and the first bits of the film confirmed the stereotype of black theaters as a place where the audience can be enthusiastic. Laughter and derision as Bush and Wolfowitz get their make up. Boos, especially harsh, at Rice. And audible disappointment--you can understand why--when Powell was on screen. An icon, a role model--disgraced.
The talking stopped about 10 minutes into the film, when the seriousness of it became clear; people laughed only when they were supposed to. But throughout the audience peppered the air with furtive surprises: "Oh, shit!" "That can't be true." "He didn't do that, did he?" Educating the people.
It was a funny movie, and Moore knows how to switch between the tragic and the absurd for comic effect. For example, switching from sobering, somber clips about war to Britney Spears saying she supports the president. Tragedy abets farce.
But I personally stopped laughing shortly into the film. The funny bits were funny only if you weren't consciouly thinking: this is true. This is happening to us, to us as Americans, and people are dying, and these fucking fruitcakes are ruining everything. I kept thinking of Shakespearean historical plays, of great folly making great tragedy and comedy at once, and that 100 years from now, all of this might be quite interesting. But not now. We're still in it.
I was surprised, but I learned yet more crap about Bush. Amazing how horrible he is.
And to those who think the film is propagandistic, that it uses the tragedy a mother suffered to manipulate its audience--you're not even wrong. You're missing the point. This suffering has been utterly obscured from almost all of us. Even the most peaceful, progressive soul knows about the death and the loss at an abstracted level, at the level of a statistic, an article, a relayed story. Seeing the human beings, in their pain and their weakness, struggle to make sense of the personal and the political--well, it fills in the contour of what we know is true with the human facts of suffering.
When the film was over, everybody was enveloped in the film still. But privately so: some talked, but most didn't, likely because there's something obscene about chitchat about the sledgehammer that just hit you all in the face.
We drove back to Connecticut at 3am or so, and talked about work--obscure issues in computers and the like. Some experiences, however shared, have to be kept private for a while.
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