Fahrenheit 9/11

Saw Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday. The theater was full, but not sold out. Just a couple of more or less random thoughts:

• Irony daily double: before the trailers started, we were treated to ads for "The Grid" and some Xbox war game.
• Several of the juicy bits in the movie I was already aware of or had seen thanks to either the web or the Daily Show. Because of that, some parts were not as shocking to me as they might otherwise have been.
• While I feel for the mother (Lilah Lipscomb) who lost her son in Iraq, it pains me that she didn't open her eyes and look critically at what was happening until her loss. Unfortunately, she's not alone in this.
• Towards the end of the film, we see Mrs. Lipscomb in DC talking with one of the proprietors of a combination shelter/message cardboard shack like one of many in the town. This homeless (I guess...I'd like to know more about these people) person was talking about the Iraq war, and Lilah was stopping to agree with her. Some other tourist poked her head in to try and steer Lilah away, saying that the whole thing was "staged." Maybe she was a Fox viewer, I don't know. At any rate it struck me that the only dissenting view many people get from the White House line is from those who appear to be on the fringes. They certainly haven't been getting it from the mainstream media, who as a rule started out in the role of jingoistic cheerleader and have only recently begun to slowly wake up. There's a particularly galling montage in the movie that illustrates the kind of garbage the media has been feeding us, and I can only hope that Katie, Dan, and the rest of the gang see this movie and think long and hard about their role in this whole mess.

Posted by Jason at June 28, 2004 10:37 AM