Michael Moore first made his name as the director and namesake star of 1989’s critically touted Roger & Me,
about the effects of General Motors’ plant shutdown in Moore’s hometown
of Flint, Mich. He then parlayed that to-scale success into two
television series and a flourishing life as an author and guest
lecturer. After the turn of the century, Moore would further hone his
own particular brand of “shanghai journalism” in the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine and the all-time box office documentary champ, Fahrenheit 9/11.
For years fairly consistently lampooned by the Rush Limbaugh set because of the left-leaning nature of his political views, it was around this time — in 2002, leading up to the Academy Awards in the spring of 2003 — that the level and volume of vitriol directed
Moore’s way became downright deafening. If we were a nation in the
midst of a cultural war, 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was regarded outright as a weapon by the Republican right, and all sorts of measures were taken to blunt its impact.

This cottage industry of politicized “response” (read: retaliation) is
nothing new, really, and despite the level of chatter, Moore was only
the latest in a long line of public figures to feel the sting of
righteous reaction — novel, perhaps, merely because he was a successful
filmmaker. But if teenage crushes burn bright and long, the same could
be said of political grudges. So as things got worse and worse in Iraq,
Moore — and his pointy-headed reasoning — became a point-of-comparison
whipping boy for those who would assail the decisions or policies of
the Bush administration. With no Democrats of note in positions of
significant power (until the midterms of 2006), if you wanted to either
insult a dissenter or (more likely) rally the base, you dragged out Moore’s name.

What does that do, though, moving forward, for Moore’s viability and
stature as a filmmaker? Regardless of the message in his latest film, the health care documentary Sicko, he’s
the main story wherever he goes, and his high negatives — while almost
certainly topping Bush’s numbers — aren’t exactly the foundation on
which to build a populist progressive agenda. It’s so bad that
otherwise perfectly reasonable adults I know — both folks who’ve voted
for Bush twice but now consider him adrift, those who voted against him
in 2004, and those who never voted for him at all — speak of Moore with
conspicuous malice in their voices, and talk, sight unseen, of not
going to see “movies like that.” For more on Moore, in the form of a feature from FilmStew, click here.