With the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 during the 2004 presidential campaign season Michael Moore embarked on an ambitious test of the power of the cinema. Like Sergei Eisenstein, Moore employed montage as a tool of political filmmaking to convince the masses of an ideology using what was then a relatively new tool of mass communication. In 2004, could a documentary film persuade people not already planning to vote for the opposition that the current administration must be unseated? Or was it just a moment of ideological masturbation for the affirmed blue voters? The unprecedented success for a documentary costing in the single millions to produce, and simply the amount of controversy and “counter films” in support of Bush it generated is a well-known story of the election, as is Moore’s rush of the film to DVD to ensure an even greater audience before election day. But the question that seemed most immediate was, if the movie was one so many people wanted to see, could it win the election for Kerry? Now, just a few months later, after Bush’s re-inauguration, we are left asking the same question that Michael Moore himself asks (about 2000) to start the film, “Was it all just a dream?”

The movie itself was a powerful and entertaining piece of political editorial, and in a country where the major sources of news and media are controlled by largely wealthy and conservative interests, it sent a surge of energy through voters opposing those interests, and watching the film in a public space was a political spectacle in of itself. There was raucous response by moviegoers to the baits Moore used to lace the film, ranging from indignant gasps at Bush scandals, to ironic laughter, to mute horror at the graphic footage of violence in Iraq. Now those voters/viewers are left with four more years of Bush in the White House thanks to another possibly tainted election, and the DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11 to consider—a film suddenly far out of its initial context.

Re-viewing an entire such film in inauguration 2005 week, Fahrenheit seemed more subdued, a sadder film, and less the rabble-rousing tour-de-force that had audiences shrieking and applauding. On a second, home viewing, this film seems more carefully assembled, something with a bigger plan than merely prompting affirming catcalls that can expect some sort of posterity and meaning beyond its failed attempt to affect the outcome of an election.

Perhaps the most audacious thing Moore does is to bring the big, ideologically iconicized issues down to the human level. True, Michael Moore is still the showman, lighting into the antihero Bush, but he also takes the almost radical step of never showing the towers wounded or falling, instead beginning the film post-credits with a black screen and sounds of what the viewer recalls as the horror of the titular date. Being forced to make the participatory effort to identify the sounds from context renews the horror of a set of media images trampled threadbare by media pundits and politicians. By refraining from utilizing images iconicized into near-meaninglessness Moore re-invests their circumstances with a fresh emotional impact, and the ensuing shots of weeping, shocked witnesses to the attack, still reacting to a horror the viewer can’t see, demands a reframing at the personal, individual, and not merely rhetorical level.

Even during the opening credits, Moore has intriguingly framed actions that struck me much differently on my first, theatrical, viewing. At that time, I took the footage (interspersed with the credits) of Bush and his staff being groomed by handlers in preparation for appearing live on TV as a cheap but amusing pot shot at the subjects’ self-absorption, but this second viewing yielded a more chilling feeling of calculation: the sense of almost inhuman calm and premeditation involved in their “pre-live” selves, suggests the idea that the major players in Moore’s drama are being introduced before the curtain goes up, and it lends a fatalism to their actions and the events that follow. They are not reacting to world circumstances, they are acting in them, and have the calm self-assurance of actors in a fiction without conclusion or consequence. These are people who are quite aware of the media, how to manipulate it, and how to perform for it.

Of course, Moore himself is a master manipulator, frequently accused of eliding facts that aren’t convenient to his vision of the story. However, where he shows his greatest maturity as a filmmaker, lies in how ably he builds his viewers’ trust and then dashes it down just as easily, as if to say, “Look, I can manipulate you too.” He initially provokes hostility by juxtaposing several interviews with immature, detached, bullying U.S. child-soldiers comparing the war to a video game, with graphic footage of civilian casualties. But then Moore shows us the US Army ad that seems to be recruiting us into a virtual war, and the economic circumstances of these soldiers and their families, of course, going back to Flint Michigan. And as readily as he cultured your hostility, he now provokes your sympathy for all the victims of a rotten system, clueless young soldiers included.

Moore’s new mastery is at times counterbalanced by his simplistic treatment of the situation in Iraq pre-invasion. Saying the U.S. provided no good justification for their attack is one thing, portraying Iraq as paradisiacal before we got there is entirely another. Moore wants F 9/11 to sell his side of the moral argument at stake, and though it’s a worthy argument, he loses precious credibility through shoddy moments like this. Moore is at his best when exposing the failings and hypocrisies of the powerful, and what they cost on the individual level to the powerless, and at this date I am far more compelled wondering how many of the interviewed soldiers are dead now than by his abstract rhetorical grandstanding in voiceover.

The final broad segment of the film, the “Lila Lipscomb” sequence, portraying one mother’s grief for her dead soldier son and her conversion from conservative, pro-army to anti-Bush and his terrible war, is undoubtedly intended as an instructional narrative for the undecided, but it also acts as a strange counter-text to the nightly news. The suburban, working-class living room, the grieving parents, the emblems of patriotism are familiar media elements, but there’s an immediacy of emotion that defies the nightly sentimental fluff piece. The interviews with the serving soldiers act as outtake reels, full of confessions of fear and anger at their circumstances, and resentment towards the government that sent them there.

It is this televisual element that slides into focus on viewing the film on the TV. On the big screen, F 9/11 was revelatory, exposing media shoddiness and laxity of ethics in the contrast between CNN inanities writ large and unseen footage of the atrocities of war—all human bodies in any uniform are too easily reducible to charred chunks of meat. At home, on a television, the film appears almost as a slightly “off” installment of the war news, and I realized how well television numbs and coaches viewers to not offer it their full attention, in exact opposition to the fixating awe of the projected image. In the theater, I was riveted. On the television, it seemed like more of the same, and I constantly had to refocus. The small screen allows complacency and resignation—so much of what we see on the nightly news would shock us on the big screen, in a much more visceral way than any fictional blockbuster.

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