What is it about this guy? It’s not just that Moore has a talent for being hard on his homeland at a time when hard feelings against the United States are running high. And it’s not just the way Moore bashes President George W. Bush in “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The appeal is more subtle than that, says Delafon, and more conflicted. “The problem for the French is that they don’t want to appear anti-American, even if they are. So they like Michael Moore because they can say, ‘Look, he’s an American who’s anti-Bush!’ " Delafon sips his espresso and smiles. “And because Moore is fat and ugly, he also fits their stereotype of Americans.”
Prejudices are always reassuring to those who hold them. (Just look at the way Americans embrace, as solemn truth, the most appalling cliches about the French as unwashed snobs.) Moore offers Europeans an all-you-can-eat stereotype buffet. His America has the violence and cupidity, the social injustice and simple-minded religiosity, the fearmongering and the feckless foreign policy that Europeans have come to expect from a nation of gun-slinging cowboys and money-grubbing capitalists. But Moore, ever the hero of his own films, also has the energy and irreverence and directness that many Europeans find so inspiring and so appealing about Americans. In the Danish tale of the emperor who had no clothes, which is a very Old World story, only a child dared speak the truth. Europeans like to think that in the United States, people are blunt all the time (however childishly), and have decided Moore is their perfect American enfant terrible. “Moore represents an honest–or at least demagogical–voice which perhaps we [British] lack,” says Rob Blackhurst of London’s Foreign Policy Centre.
As Nicolas Bourcier wrote recently in Le Monde, “Europe venerates him.” And Moore returns the favor: France and Germany are America’s great friends, he says, because they worked to keep the United States out of Iraq. “They were trying to say the truth about the folly of this war,” Moore told a press conference at Cannes. In the preface to the German edition of “Dude, Where’s My Country?” Moore writes that it’s time for his German readers to respect themselves again. They are, after all, “leaders of the coalition of the unwilling.” As Wieland Freund wrote in the Berlin daily Die Welt, Moore has made Germans feel like “point men for the good cause–finally, for once.”
On his last tour through Germany, Moore was treated like rock-and-roll royalty as he played–or, rather, spoke–to packed houses. “Thank you, Berlin!” he screamed like Meat Loaf, and the 3,000 cheering fans in the Columbiahalle ate it up when he praised Old Europe. “When one of you gets sick, other people help him,” Moore said. “When one of you bleeds, the others suffer too.”
Indeed, from a European point of view, this American friend is almost uniquely sympathique. How many other public figures in the United States identify themselves, these days, with the proletariat? Most Americans–even those who think of themselves as poor working stiffs–don’t say they’re “working class.” But many Europeans do, and part of Moore’s essential shtik is to play up his blue-collar credentials. At Cannes, he even joined striking film workers protesting plans to cut their benefits. “For many people he is the voice of America’s downtrodden, of the ’losers’,” wrote Bourcier. Along the way, Moore has come to seem an American avatar of the anti-globalization movement, a sort of Jose Bove in a baseball cap. And Europeans, like Americans, don’t seem to care if the books and tickets they buy make this voice of the poor (and the corporations that promote him) a whole lot richer.
In Germany, Moore’s book “Stupid White Men” sold more than a million copies. At one point last winter, three of his books were in the top four slots of the German nonfiction best-seller lists, and one, in English, was No. 6. In Britain, “Dude” even bested the autobiography of metrosexual football god David Beckham. (The score for 2003: Moore 481,343 copies, Beckham 438,175.)
And now: “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Few in Europe have seen this epic of Bush-bashing. The release on the Continent is not until July. But when it screened at Cannes last month, journalists rushed the doors of the theater, bruising bystanders, even scuffling on the floor as they fought for seats. At the end, the crowd gave the film an unprecedented 20-minute standing ovation, and the jury awarded it the Palme d’Or.
For all that, Moore’s works, which so conveniently confirm the prejudices that already exist, probably won’t do much to help Europeans understand the political or social realities of the United States. “The French used to think the average American guy was [wacky comedian] Jerry Lewis,” says Gilles Delafon. “Now they think he’s Michael Moore. They never think the average American guy is George Bush, oddly enough, when he’s the most average guy of all.” But there is, in Delafon’s judgment, one positive note. “At least the French are now able to say openly, ‘God, we love America. We love… Michael Moore’.” Clearly, the feeling is mutual.
