"What is it all just a dream?" - Was it all just a dream, Michael Moore asks in television pictures from the eve of the recent US presidential election: Thousands chant in downtown Philadelphia "Hillary, Hillary" and are happy about their supposedly safe victory.
But what is announced then, in the early hours of 9 November 2016, has since become absurd reality: Trump, not Clinton, won the election. "How the fuck did not happen this?" How the hell could that happen, Moore concludes the intro of his film "Fahrenheit 11/9", the two-hour diagnosis of a political-social crisis.
Exaggerated alarmism?
The question of the evil awakening, Moore 2004 already once. These are also the first words in his film "Fahrenheit 9/11". At that time, the Oscar-winning docu-activist showed how the attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the questionably motivated war in Iraq. With "Fahrenheit 11/9" (the date similarity is a fortunate coincidence), he now again holds the Zeitgeist thermometer to a feverish nation.
Moore's Requiem on the American Dream is as depressing as it is entertaining: who is to blame for Trump? "Yes, it was the Russians," Moore explains, "but above all it was Gwen Stefani." Trump had come up with the idea to start a candidature as US president, because he had found out that the US singer as juror of the casting show "The Voice" gets more money than he himself in the talent search "The Apprentice". His goal: more money from NBC. The station then fired him for his political rabble-raff, so Trump pulled the presidential number.
One may ask the question whether Moores is still needed as a suggestive, highly agitational farce arranged analysis two years after the election. Especially when he swings the Nazi club at the end of his movie, his alarmism seems exaggerated. Moore underscores scenes of a Hitler speech with Trump rhetoric and then puts something conspiratorially in connection with the Reichstag fire with 9/11: Extreme situations enabled the autocrat in spe special emergency regulations, with which he finally abolished the separation of powers, he insinuates.
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"Fahrenheit 11/9": The Trump thermometerComfort and ignorance would have helped Trump to the office. No one, says Moore, had taken any action against his rise before the election, not even he. Everything that makes Trump an imposition in the highest state office, his racism, his misogyny, his lies, was always open. "Do you feel uncomfortable now?" Asks Moore maliciously. "Why is that? None of this is new".
They all get their revenge: the powerful old Network men who quotaed with Trump, the narrow-minded New York Times, and the establishment democrats who, according to Moore, faked preselection scores in West Virginia to push Clinton, though actually Bernie Sanders won all districts. At one point, the filmmaker is even right his villain: The political system was manipulated, this was one of Trump's campaign slogans.
Young radicals as hopefuls
Is optimism really dead in the Trump era, as the "New Yorker" asked at the turn of the year? Have not the Midterm elections in the US banned the greatest danger in the meantime? Perhaps. But Trump's recent speech from the Oval Office, in which he just refrained from explaining an alleged immigration crisis on the border with Mexico to national emergency, suggests that Moore is not late with his reminders, but maybe just right.
Moore, the eternal social romantic, meets with the students from Parkland, Florida, who are campaigning against the gun lobby after the massacre at their high school. He travels to West Virginia and portrays worker-driven teachers who do not want to be harassed and underpaid by the state. And he's looking for young, radical politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York and Rashida Tlaib from Michigan to show that the lobbying worm is not everywhere yet in the Democrat party. America, Moore postulates in a funny montage, is actually a majority of a "leftist country"!
His examples of moral courage give courage, but most of all Moores ancestral clientele from the left-liberal spectrum. However, "Fahrenheit 11/9" does not receive an emotional grounding over ideological trenches until Moore, as once in "Roger & Me," deals extensively with a scandal in his hometown Flint. The predominantly African-American industrial site in Michigan has been suffering from contaminated drinking water for years.
In Flint, Moore is not only literally at home, but also brilliant in his wet-agitational staging of Bürgeremission: With a fire engine he drives in front of Governor Rick Snyder's estate and begins when the politician does not open his garden with the poison broth to sprinkle on the river. In 2016, at the peak of the crisis, then-US President Obama fled to Flint, as the "last hope", but then shockingly disappointed.
In the video: The trailer for "Fahrenheit 11/9"
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But what has the misery of Flint, once planned as an independent film, to do with Trump? He looked very closely at what was possible in Michigan and is: "If Snyder gets away with all this, what could he (Trump) still allow anything?" Moore asks. What he does not mention is that, in spite of everything, Michigan narrowly voted for Trump in 2016, as well as, unequally, West Virginia.
Therefore much more force would unfold "Fahrenheit 11/9", if Moore had given Trump sympathizers space to reflect on their positions during his travels through the shattered country - and thus his film and his legitimate concerns and reminders for to open this audience. The crisis of the system affects all Americans, not just frustrated leftists.