A Tale of Two Documentarians
And How The Way So Many Value One More Than The Other Reflects Politics and Personality More Than The Quality of Their Films
I actually heard Michael Moore’s infamous acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine the day before he gave it.
The night before the 2003 Academy Awards, the 2003 Independent Spirit Awards were given. I’d been watching them with fascination for the last four years and already enjoyed them more than the Oscars. Bowling for Columbine won the documentary prize and Moore, with one notable exception, basically gave word-for-word the most notorious acceptance speech in history.
There were two major differences. The first was that when he gave his speech he was greeting with applause and not a single negative comment which no doubt encouraged him to give it the next night. The second — and perhaps more critical difference — was his tone. Moore was not his usual confrontational self, more humble and there actually seemed a note of melancholy as he gave his speech. I vividly remember the one critical line he said at the Spirit Awards that he never said at the Oscars — and it got the most applause:
“Violence is the solution to our nation’s problems. That’s the lesson for the children of Columbine.”
Even his famous end quote actually seemed more in good humor and less spiteful. I was impressed by it. None of that was present the next night when he won the Oscar, he was back to his old self and seemed to revel in the fact that people were booing him. I now think back to his speech at the Spirits with more fondness; in hindsight that’s the last time I remember finding Michael Moore likable.
The next year the Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature was Errol Morris. At the time, this was a bigger deal than Moore’s win the previous year. Both Moore and Morris has been known for being shunned by the Oscars for groundbreaking documentaries but in the case of Morris, it had been for far longer. When he won his Oscar for The Fog Of War, he likewise got a standing ovation. Unlike Moore, he gave a much more humble speech. The movie was about Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who had been integral in the expansion of the war on Vietnam and by March of 2004, it was becoming clear just how much a quagmire the Iraq War was becoming. But the most Morris said in his acceptance was: “I fear we’re going down that same rabbit hole.” He was greeted with a huge round of applause, but that was all he mentioned to it. Later that summer, Fahrenheit 9/11 was released and would become the highest grossing documentary of all time.
Both Morris and Moore are among the most famous documentary filmmakers of all time. Yet while Moore could not have been what he was without Morris’s laying the groundwork, Moore is far more famous and successful while Morris’s fame is almost entirely among those who know documentaries.
As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of Fahrenheit 9/11 I have come to realize all of the issues I’ve had with Moore and his style of filmmaking over the years. And much in the same way Truffaut the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie, the best way to criticize a documentarian is with another documentarian. So in this article I intend to give a brief overview of the work of Morris and Moore, why one is the better filmmaker and one is more popular and their most famous films tell you about so much of how we view both documentaries and politics today.
Errol Morris revolutionized documentary filmmaking with Gates of Heaven, in which he told the story of a pet cemetery in California and the people who have pets buried there. Roger Ebert would name it one of the greatest films ever made and it is one of the most profoundly moving films ever made about life and death. In it came one of the most famous lines of all of cinema, said by the owner of the pet cemetery: “Death is for the living and not for the dead.” The famous director Werner Herzog bet his film student Morris that he would eat his shoe if he made a film about pet cemeteries. Morris did, and Herzog kept his promise.
Morris then spent the next decade making some of the greatest documentaries of all time: The Thin Blue Line argued that a man was wrongly convicted for murder because of a corrupt justice system in Texas and not only helped free Randall Adams from prison it got the guilty party to confess. Next came A Brief History of Time which made a celebrity out of Stephen Hawking and made physics understandable to the masses. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control explored the careers of four unrelated professionals: a lion tamer, a robotics expert, a topiary gardener and a naked mole rat specialist. And in Mr. Death he gave the cinematic portrait for the man who designed the most famous American execution device and then spent his career denying the Holocaust. In all of these movies Morris spend most of his time just following his subjects and interviewing people, simple work but absolutely groundbreaking.
Despite the clear incredible nature of his work, Morris was never even nominated for an Oscar for any of these films. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Documentary branch of the Oscars was known for making some notorious oversights, constantly excluding the most popular and well-made documentaries of the era, perhaps most infamously with Hoop Dreams in 1994, which many considered the best film of the year. But Morris’s continued omissions during this period are considering by far one of the biggest travesties in the entire history of the Academy Awards, certainly when it comes to non-fiction movies.
The Fog of War which bears the subtitle: “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara” covers the entire career of much of the twentieth century. McNamara shares stories with many historical figures. He tells us of an exchange with Curtis LeMay, who ordered the fire-bombing of Dresden, who told him that if Germany had won he and McNamara would have been tried for war crimes. He tells of his time in the Kennedy administration, particularly at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis. And he confronts his role in Southeast Asia through these lessons. The most pertinent ones are one we would do well to listen to, not just in war but every single element of human kind:
- Empathize with your enemy.
- Get The Data.
- Belief and Seeing are often wrong.
- Be Prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
And I have to say the most important one is the last one: “You can’t change human nature.”
The lessons that he give are clearly ones he learned the hard way and it is as close as he comes to admitting his errors during the Vietnam War. It’s not a mea culpa, the way many thought it was, but it did admit at least he learned from his mistakes.
Michael Moore is not much younger than Morris, I was actually surprised to know he’s only six years younger than Morris but the movies he made over the years don’t seem to take place in the same universe. From the start of his career in Roger & Me, Moore made it clear that he was never going to be the quiet observational filmmaker Morris was. What Moore was about from day one was confrontation and rage.
It’s hard not to watch Roger & Me, which is in a way both Moore’s best and certainly subtlest documentary and see everything we need to know about him. Watching him I can’t help but be reminded of Geraldo Rivera or so many investigative journalists then and now who seem more interest in shouting questions at the powerful and getting ‘no comment’. I don’t deny Moore’s anger is justified given how personal the subject matter is to him and much of Americans. But even from the start you get the sense that unlike with Morris, who seems content to let the truth reveal itself both to its audience and the subject, Moore comes in with a predisposition in mind and wants to make sure the audience gets it too. This is less the attitude of a great documentary filmmaker, and something that reminds me of the work of Adam McKay — and I have to say watching many of Moore’s later films, the resemblance becomes clearer over time.
Moore spent much of the next several years working in entertainment: he made his one fictional film the comedy Canadian Bacon and the failed but often fascinating series TV Nation. It’s pretty telling that Moore’s next documentary The Big One was his filming of his own book tour: it’s not a good sign when you’ve decided to say you’re going to tell the truth about business and politicians — and then openly make yourself the subject.
Moore spent much of the 1990s in what seemed to be pure self-indulgence so Bowling For Columbine seemed like a refreshing return to form as he used the school shooting to talk about guns in America. The film was less subtle but the subject demanded it. I would argue that film was also the last real documentary Moore ever made.
I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in the theaters and at the time I was impressed by it. In hindsight, I think I agree when Moore didn’t want to submit for Best Documentary for that years Oscars. The movie is many things but it’s not a documentary, certainly not in the way that Morris had been making them, definitely not in the sense The Fog of War was.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is essentially a two hour rant about the Bush administration and the Iraq War. Even the summary on imdb.com makes it clear that this is “Michael Moore’s view on what happened to the United States.” To be clear documentaries to that point were known for at least trying to be objective in their approach, certainly Morris’s were. It might have seemed impossible for feel sympathy for a man who spent his career denying the Holocaust, but in his rave review of Dr. Death, Roger Ebert seemed to come away with the idea of that the subject was a sad figure as much as a fool.
With Fahrenheit 9/11 Moore never pretends that he’s being objective or balanced about his approach. He makes no effort to talk to the Republican lawmakers or any politicians at all. All of the political figures are done through archive and are frequently manipulated to look as dumb and foolish as possible (the notorious opening credits) He makes it very clear how much contempt he holds for every single member of the Bush administration and basically every politician. He wants you to know this is why the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq happened. The fact that much of it turned out to be true is almost incidental to Moore who doesn’t bother to give any of these characters a defense.
This approach, it’s worth noting, continued during the interviews promoting the film. Moore not only didn’t bother to answer criticism about not being objective but was on attack, essentially blaming the media themselves as accomplices to this. He attacked the distributor for not wanting to release it, the MPAA for rating it R, the media for wanting to ‘bury the truth’.
I think the reason Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest grossing documentary has less to do with its quality but rather Moore’s promotion of it and diving into the controversy full-tilt; in that sense, it’s just a variation on how Mel Gibson would approach The Passion of the Christ that same year. And the cynic in me thinks that their most devoted filmgoers were both deeply devout to their beliefs in polar opposite ways: both Moore and Gibson were preaching to their respective choirs.
Moore spent the next decade becoming more and more famous and making fewer and fewer films. I’ve often ranting about all the doomporn that I see written online; there’s an argument that from Fahrenheit on Moore has been making the cinematic equivalent of it. Just like viewers went to X-rated films in raincoats during the 1990s, a certain group of people will come to see Moore rant against all of the leftist talking points: the health care system in America, the evils of capitalism, our policy of empire and of course, Fahrenheit 11/9. With each movie Moore keeps going further and further from even the pretense of objectivity; in his last film, he more or less states that Donald Trump is having sex with Ivanka, which has basically been a sick joke by so many ‘comedians’ over the years. You wonder if Moore was hoping Trump would sue him or arrest him; he must have been disappointed that neither happened.
Morris has been working more steadily than Moore since his win, as much for TV as film. He has been as political as Moore — his next major film was Standard Operating Procedure which examined what happened in Abu Gharib and he filmed a TV series when he sat down with Steve Bannon. But despite that he has never enjoyed the favoritism among the left that Moore does. This may have been made most clear in his most direct film related to the Iraq War The Unknown Known in which he basically did for Donald Rumsfeld was he had done for McNamara ten years earlier. The film was as direct a critique of him as it was of McNamara.
A review on imdb.com says that it covers much of interesting ground, but that he finds Morris’s approach of Rumsfeld sitting down and talking to the camera “inevitably boring” He also says, he still preferred it to Fog of War. Perhaps the most telling line is “others will…have to make their own mind up.”
I wonder what this viewer expected given everything we had seen Rumsfeld do over his career. Were they expecting a Robert Durst type confession at the end of it? For Rumsfeld to admit after the fact all his sins when he never had? For Morris to ask the kind of questions that would trap him into war crimes? That is not the kind of documentary Morris ever made — but it seems to be the kind this viewer was expecting.
And its clear that this viewer had already made his mind up about Rumsfeld and everything he’d done and wanted his point of view confirmed by The Known Unknown. This seemed one of the major criticisms of the movie by political columnists, if not film critics. Morris had in a sense done all of that by showing the inconsistencies in Rumsfeld’s stories and seemed to think his denials and non-statements were supposed to speak for themselves and it was for the viewer to make their own judgment. And its telling that Fahrenheit, which only shows Rumsfeld in stock footage, grossed $100 million while Unknown which actually had Rumsfeld talking only made $300,000.
By contrast most of Moore’s subsequent documentaries have always grossed among the highest of all documentaries, before and after Fahrenheit. Sicko grossed $36 million, Capitalism: A Love Story grossed $17 million and Bowling for Columbine had grossed $58 million worldwide. That of course is the other reason Moore is famous: by the standard of the free market, Moore is the best one: he is the documentary filmmaking equivalent of Spielberg.
There is a reason for this, to be clear. Morris is still making films that he hope that filmgoers will want to see while Moore’s movies have a built-in audience that will always turn out for it whenever he makes them. Most of them probably have never heard of Errol Morris or even know of another documentary filmmaker; I’m certain about this for the youngest among them. What they know is that Moore ‘speaks to them.” This is not what a documentarian is supposed to do when he is filming a subject, documentary filmmakers prior to Moore were known for being notorious in their objectivity. That very reason is why, even before the explosion of cable news and partisan politics, Moore was always popular with a certain set of people and always will be.
Even before Fahrenheit, Moore was considered by many people as a ‘truth-teller’. But he was never one the same way that great documentarians like Errol Morris are. The reason that Moore is considered one is the exact same reason the right excoriates him and the left uses him for fundraising: it is because of the truth that he has chosen to tell. He gave up any pretext to objectivity long before so many on the left said we needed to abandon it to save ourselves in the last decade. That retaining objectivity is something you can’t just give up when it suits you is something that so many in the world can’t accept — and it’s in part because of the kind of movies Moore has made that it’s become mainstream thinking.
Many might commemorate 20 years since Fahrenheit 9:11 but twenty years later the lessons that we learned from Errol Morris through Robert McNamara are infinitely more pertinent and vital to our daily lives than any message Moore has tried to tell both there and in the last twenty years. I think by far the most important one is “Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.” In the world we live in today, that’s a lesson we need to keep going if we have any chance to survive as a society. It goes against the dogma of our world, but that doesn’t make it any less true.