Why Moore is Less

Most people are reluctant to change their religions, their world views, or their political allegiances. Doing so usually involves admitting being wrong about something very fundamental and very important. It’s hard, and its painful. Because changing our mindset is so hard and painful, we have automatic mental defenses to keep it from happening too easily or too often.

When it becomes clear that a particular argument or body of evidence represents a threat to our current way of thinking, our mental shields are instantly activated. It’s the psychological equivalent of jamming your fingers in your ears and saying “blah, blah, blah, I’m not listening.”

That’s why analytical essays so often fail to persuade people to change their minds on serious issues. And that’s why art can more often succeed. Good art—novels, poetry/songs, movies—can slip in under our intellectual radar. Through analogy, subtlety, and indirection art can bypass our psychological filters and communicate some underlying truth that we might refuse to see or to accept if it were presented in the cold light of reason.

Rather than explicitly say that discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity is a bad idea, Arthur Miller’s play Focus recounts the experiences of a man who gradually starts to be mistaken for a member of an ill-regarded group due to a change in his physical appearance. Miller doesn’t bash the reader over the head with his message, he allows the message to be indirectly communicated by the incremental changes in the way the main character is treated by his soon-to-be-former friends.

That’s art.

A glance at the trailer for Michael Moore’s upcoming film Fahrenheit 9/11 suggests that he doesn’t understand this principle. It’s about as subtle as a prostitute on display in a shop-front window in Amsterdam’s Red Light district. He might as well just scroll some text across the screen to the effect of: “Bush bad. Iraq war bad. Corporations bad.” Moore’s movie has about as much chance of slipping by people’s intellectual defenses as he has of slipping through a turnstile.

Fahrenheit 9/11 may delight Moore’s base of supporters, but if the trailer is any indication it’s not likely to win him any new ones.