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54  Jennifer L. Borda Documentary Dialectics or Dogmatism? Fahrenhype 9/11, Celsius 41.11, and the New Politics of Documentary Film Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This observation also may be used to describe the landscape of political documentaries during the 2004 presidential election season. The initial action was the release of Michael Moore’s much anticipated, much hyped award-winning and unapologetically outspoken film Fahrenheit 9/11 in June 2004. Grossing more than $119 million in the United States and $220 million worldwide, Moore’s film broke documentary box office records, and its opening weekend showing on 868 screens (which alone grossed more than $23 million) made national headlines.1 However, the unprecedented public interest in Moore’s manifestly political film—and the subsequent publicity it generated—was met by an equally impassioned response from those on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Even before its release, Fahrenheit 9/11 had become a target of both mainstream and conservative critics’ attempts to discredit the film, Michael Moore, and his alleged polemicist tactics. Critical reaction to the film became an industry all its own. Several books intending to discount Moore’s allegations and produce counter-publicity were published in the summer and fall of 2004, including Fahrenheit 9-12: Rebuttal to Fahrenheit 9/11 by Aaron I. Reichel, Esq., which claims to replace “‘ad hominem’ discord with rational discourse”;2 and Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man by David T. Hardy and Jason Clark. Countless Web loggers also were moved to deconstruct Documentary Dialectics or Dogmatism? 55 Moore’s propaganda in an effort to reveal him as a fraud and manipulator of American audiences. One of the most ambitious of these was an on-line article titled “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11,” which David Koppel, research director of the Independence Institute, published on his Web site with a preface that urged readers to photocopy it as often as they would like as long as they gave it away for free. Other Web sites devoted to Moore-bashing include Findoutmoore.com, Moorewatch.com, Mooreexposed.com, Moorelies.com, and Fahrenheit 411 (f411.com). Some critics chose to respond to Moore via his modus operandi: the documentary film. However, because of these conservative -political-pundits-turned-filmmakers’ lack of Hollywood industry connections and clout (and often relatively small budgets), the films became the projects of little-known directors and achieved either a very limited theatrical release or went straight to video. Two of these documentaries were produced during the summer of 2004 in an effort to capitalize on the publicity that Moore and his film had received and also as an entry into the political debates that had begun to define the 2004 presidential election. Fahrenhype 9/11 went direct to video on October 5, 2004 (coordinated to coincide with the DVD release of Fahrenheit 9/11), and Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die was released in a small number of theaters on October 22, then quickly released in DVD format just a few weeks later. Both Fahrenhype 9/11 and Celsius 41.11 were billed as explicit, point-bypoint rebuttals that would function as a cinematic counterstrike to Moore’s film. With taglines such as “Unraveling the truth about Fahrenheit 9/11 and Michael Moore,” “You knew it was a lie . . . and now you’ll know why,” and “The truth behind the lies of Fahrenheit 9/11,” Fahrenhype 9/11 and Celsius 41.11 were marketed as nonfiction films intending to set the record straight and refute the allegedly fictionalized and propagandistic accounts in Moore’s film. Neither film, however, achieves the level of rational debate it claims; instead, both films fall victim to the same dogmatic tactics of which they accuse Moore. These films, in relation to Moore’s precedent, provide a case study of how political documentary recently has evolved as a rhetorical form and pose the question of whether this medium is capable of meeting the rhetorical challenge of political dialogue in a participatory democracy. This chapter examines the 2004 documentary films Fahrenhype 9/11 and Celsius 41.11 as models of conservative American agitprop (or in Time film critic Richard Corliss’s words, “agit-doc”) cinema.3 These recent examples of a rapidly emerging subgenre appropriate documentary filmmaking convention —the construction of visible evidence—in an effort to...

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