F9/11: The Personal Impact

I saw FAHRENHEIT 9/11 in the upper west-side of Manhattan -- probably as sympathetic an audience the movie could hope to get. I watched with my older brother -- who hasn't been in a movie theater for 4 years -- and we were surrounded by Kennedy-coiffed women. I was surprised the 11am Saturday showing had sold out; I expected liberal democrats all slept in (Bush is an early riser). But I was expecting cheers, jeers and shouts of "Impeach! Impeach!" That is not what happened.

During the presentation, the audience was quiet. They laughed heavily at the scenes which were included to depict Bush as buffoon, but largely watched silently through most of the film.

The largest audience reaction came when a Flint, MI mother reads the last letter from her now dead son, written from Iraq. Fully a third of the audience was crying, wiping their eyes, sniffling. When this mother traveled to Washington DC to go to the White House, the audience fell back into tears. On the mall, she walks past a marginal character -- some shrill, high-pitched and frail lone-wolf protester in a tent, a shrunken woman surrounded by signs haranguing against the Iraq war as unjustified and illegal. The mother, crying, approaches the protester and says, "My son was there, my son died there" -- and the protester, hardly connected to reality, begins her anti-war speech. An unprompted third woman steps into the frame to declare to the camera "This is all staged! None of this is real". The grieving mother declares "This is real. My son was there, my son died there." "What day? Where did he die?" The grieving mother walks away, and as the camera follows her, we hear the indignant accuser assert "There are others, too" -- apparently under the idea that the number of surviving U.S. soldiers is directly proportional to the justification of the war.

Here we have a microcosom of the public debate: the ignored protester, the family who pays the price for Bush's war, and the unreasoning denier.