A New Market for Bravehearts?
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 11, 2004
AS of this writing, "Fahrenheit 9/11," having won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, having landed its director on the covers of both Time and Entertainment Weekly, having dominated talk radio, the op-ed columns and the cable blusterfests for the last month, has just concluded its second weekend in theaters, where it has made more than $60 million so far. By the time you read this, that number will have grown, as the movie, which became the top-grossing documentary ever by the end of its first day of national release, ascends toward the $100 million mark.
By any available measure, and whatever you think of Michael Moore or "Fahrenheit 9/11," these numbers represent the climax of an extraordinary story: a filmmaker, shunned by a major studio, uses his contentious celebrity and his controversial subject matter to turn his movie into a major news story. Arguments rage and opinion hardens before most people have had a chance to see the movie. Once they do, the controversy grows hotter as the grosses expand. Film critics, meanwhile, scratch their heads, alternately bemused and amazed to witness the affirmation of something they often say and rarely believe: that movies have the power to influence political debate, to engage issues of paramount public importance and even to influence the course of events.
But what may be most remarkable about "Fahrenheit 9/11" is that it is the second movie released in the last six months to generate this kind of attention. It has become something of a commonplace to note the symmetries between Mr. Moore's movie and Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ," and to see them as equal and opposite cultural phenomena, converging on the public from the left and right ends of the ideological spectrum. Their similarities, however, are if anything more striking, and not only because the main character in each case is a fellow who went into his father's line of work.
For an R-rated political documentary to make $100 million would be a show business anomaly, surpassed in strangeness only by an R-rated scripture-based foreign-language film making three times that much. It is unlikely that either picture signals the beginning of a trend, since the success of each was leveraged by the stardom of its maker. But Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibson did not succeed simply through their fame or their knack for using the news media as an engine of publicity. It was clear long before anyone had seen a frame of either "Passion" or "Fahrenheit" that what audiences would witness was the uncompromised, unfiltered vision of a strong-willed, stubborn and bloody-minded director.
<b.Is it too idealistic of me to think that this freedom from compromise is part of what attracted audiences? Perhaps more than ever before, the movie studios are ruled by timidity, anxiously tailoring their releases to avoid giving offense. Yes, they sometimes engage in the mock-provocations of sex and brutality, but these tepid buttons are pushed much less forcefully than they were 30 years ago. For the most part, movies, intent on maintaining an illusion of consensus, tread cautiously around the thornier thickets of our civic life. Homosexuality no longer need be euphemized out of existence (though it's best not to place too much emphasis on the sex part), but abortion can scarcely be mentioned. War can be depicted with unvarnished savagery, but also with lump-in-the-throat speeches about valor and sacrifice (and also with period costumes to camouflage any uncomfortably topical implications). The social injustices of the past are ringingly opposed and soundly defeated, enforcing the view that the present is a land of eternal sunshine. Above all, the local multiplex follows the code of an old-line country club, in which religion and politics are not to be discussed.
The justification for this kind of bland cowardice is economic, and follows a marketing logic that is hard to refute. Why risk alienating potential customers? But the movie-going public can be alienated as much by boredom as by distaste, and it may be that the studios should be more afraid of our indifference than of our anger. At the moment, we are in a state of spiritual and political agitation, and while we may still be looking for entertainment to distract us or calm us down, we also clearly have an appetite for entertainment that does the opposite, that focuses our attention and raises our blood pressure. We worry about the health of the body politic and the state of our immortal souls and, at least some of the time, we want a culture that responds to these concerns. In other words, we are willing to pay good money to be provoked, enraged, exalted and challenged.
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