I saw my first R-rated movie twenty years ago, when my parents took me to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. As a 9-year-old, I was far outside of the target audience for a nonfiction political film about the War on Terror. Yet I  found myself deeply engaged. Moore’s film revealed the truth about the world in which I lived in an unusually entertaining fashion.

Fahrenheit 9/11 does not shy away from extremely serious topics. A harrowing montage preserves the pain and fear people felt in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. We learn how the legislative branch subsequently got away with passing a civil liberties-suppressing bill like the PATRIOT ACT without bothering to read it. (“We don’t read most of the bills,” Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan tells Moore in the movie.) We are heartbroken seeing the damage and carnage that innocent Iraqis experienced when the U.S. invaded. (“They have no conscience! […] They slaughtered us! They destroyed our houses!” an Iraqi woman screams.) Moore also sympathetically profiles Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq. In the course of the film, Lipscomb goes from being an unquestioning, patriotic citizen to someone who cannot hide her grief and her growing anger at a government that caused her son’s death by launching a war under false pretenses.

Still, Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a somber and depressing slog. The Philadelphia Inquirer describes Moore’s style as a mixture of “aggressive reportage with goofy humor,” and the film does not disappoint. Interspersed are moments of hilarity and absurdity. I still remember my mom laughing in the theater when, after recapping President Bush’s first few months in office, Moore abruptly cuts to a montage of Bush’s seemingly endless golfing trips, set to “Vacation” by The Go-Go’s. Any viewer is bound to chuckle when they see that Bush learned of 9/11 during a classroom photo op and instead of leaping to action, chose to awkwardly stare at a book called The Pet Goat. Similarly, a viewer is shocked to see Bush making funny faces at the camera just moments before going on live TV to announce the start of combat operations in Iraq. 

Fahrenheit 9/11 soon became the highest-grossing documentary of all time, bringing in over $220 million at the box office, and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. But its success should not have been a surprise. At the time of the film’s 2004 release, the then one-year-old invasion of Iraq had already turned into a blood calamity. That, along with a dearth of anti-Bush administration voices in the media, created a politically hungry audience that was all too eager to see a polemical film directed against the president. Good timing aside, Moore succeeded because instead of making a simple documentary, he made a fun and engaging political statement and packed it into a feature film. 

In fact, the first thing Moore tells aspiring filmmakers in his 13 rules for making documentaries is, “Don’t make a documentary! Make a movie!” Movies, Moore reminds us, are fun, exciting pieces of entertainment that thrill people as they eat their popcorn and Goobers. Moore never felt that the nonfictional nature of documentary films meant they had to be boring and depressing. As Moore explains:

Many of you will say, “Well, I make documentaries because I think people should know about global warming! They should know about the War of 1812! The public must be taught to use forks, not knives! This is why I make documentaries!” Oh, you do, do you? Listen to yourselves. You sound like a scold. Like you’re Mother Superior with a wooden ruler in your hand. “I Am The One Who Knows All And Must Impart My Wisdom To The Masses Or At Least To Those who Watch PBS!” Really? Oh, now I get it. This is why tens of millions flock to the theaters each week to watch documentaries—because they are just dying to be told what to do and how to behave. At that point, you aren’t even documentarians—you’re Baptist preachers.

Moore’s entire body of film and television work showcases world injustices and advocates for systemic change. At no point does Moore preach to his audience. Instead, he deploys attention-grabbing stunts and hijinks that entertain in order to convey his message. The result is that people cannot help but want to learn more about the serious topics he presents and repair the broken world they have been forced to see.

In his first show, TV Nation, Moore had real TV sportscasters Bob Costas and Ahmad Rashad narrate a “Health Care Olympics” in which the U.S. healthcare system faced off against Canada and Cuba (the U.S., of course, trailed). Moore upped the ante multiple times for his next TV show, The Awful Truth. For one episode, Moore ran a ficus tree for Congress as a write-in candidate (among the ballots that were counted, it had a 4-1 lead on the Republican incumbent) and brought lung cancer victims to Philip Morris’s corporate headquarters to sing Christmas carols through their electronic voice boxes. Moore tormented Fred Phelps’s homophobic Westboro Baptist Church by sending a “Sodomobile” filled with LGBTQ activists to a WBC protest. In the 2000 election, Moore lampooned the primaries by promising that his show would endorse the first candidate to jump into a mosh pit (Republican candidate Alan Keyes dived in). 

In a very memorable Awful Truth episode, Moore profiled a diabetic father in his 30s, Chris Donahue, who faced imminent death from pancreatic failure. Donahue had dutifully paid his insurance premium to Humana for over seven years. However, Moore explains in his show that Humana refused to cover a much-needed pancreas transplant operation. This is despite Humana’s statement in Donahue’s plan that they would cover “all problems related to his diabetes.” 

If a Gen-Z charity YouTuber like Mr. Beast covered Chris Donahue’s problem today, Donahue might have had his pancreas cost covered by the video’s sponsor (perhaps Shopify), so long as he thanked them by name. Zero mention would be made about insurers like Humana penny-pinching while earning billions in revenue annually. Nor would the video examine the fact that insurers reward doctors for denying treatment to people like Donahue.

 Moore, on the other hand, identifies the villain. In his quest to illustrate Donahue’s situation, Moore had Donahue file his own obituary with the Palm Beach Post and select his own coffin and then handed bystanders at Humana’s headquarters invitations to Donahue’s upcoming funeral (date and time “Any Day Now”). Moore also forced Humana’s Head of PR into a handshake, promising to include him in a recurring segment for his show called “If Chris Was Still Alive.” Oh, and they left the hearse outside of the headquarters and performed a funeral service with a bagpipe player. Thanks to Moore, it took less than a week for Humana to reverse their decision and agree to cover the cost of a pancreas transplant. 

Such stunts were in Moore’s blood. Before he was ever on camera, Moore stuck it to Ronald Reagan. When Reagan decided to lay wreaths on the graves of Nazi soldiers in Germany, Moore and his friend faked press credentials, outsmarted the thousands of police officers surrounding the graveyard, and flashed a giant banner to Ronald and Nancy that said: THEY MURDERED MY FAMILY. Years later, Moore directed a music video for Rage Against The Machine set in New York City. The city had demanded Rage stay off of the sidewalk adjacent to the New York Stock Exchange. Naturally, Moore told Rage to perform on the sidewalk adjacent to the New York Stock Exchange. No matter what, Moore instructed the band: do not stop playing. Moore got arrested, Rage led a crowd to rush the NYSE, and the building’s metal riot doors were activated, forcing the traders to stop trading. All of this can be seen in the actual music video. 

Humor and gutsy antics were far from Moore’s only unique contribution to nonfiction filmmaking. He also taught filmmakers to avoid using clichés and overplayed images when directing viewers to heated issues. 

Moore’s first film, Roger & Me, is about the struggles of Flint, Michigan, in the 1980s era of deindustrialization. Moore wanted to show audiences what brutal economic hardship really looked like in Flint. General Motors had shut down their domestic auto-manufacturing factories (outsourcing their labor for cheap in Mexico) and killed countless Flint jobs. Audiences might have been numb if Roger & Me had only shown miserable Flint residents waiting in a sad unemployment line, a stale image that Moore specifically refrained from including. It’s much harder to be numb when Moore, instead, shows us Flint locals who, desperate to make ends meet, find themselves performing as human statues at a “Great Gatsby” party or selling rabbits for “pets or meat.” Laid-off autoworker Ben Hamper speaks about having a breakdown while listening to the sunny Beach Boys song “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” on the radio, followed by the song playing over a montage of Flint’s destitution. Moore even follows a local sheriff who evicts people on Christmas Eve, tossing their tree and presents to the curb, all for being as little as $150 behind on their rent. Despite the sheriff admitting to Moore that he evicts people around Christmas every year, the local Flint news never covered this apparently common occurrence. Instead, they spent every Christmas predictably tracking “Santa’s sleigh” and the Pope’s midnight mass. 

Ultimately, Moore’s one crucial piece of advice is this:

Don’t tell [your audience] the things they already know. […] We need to show them something that will make them sit up in their seats saying, “Jesus, this is not the America I want to live in!”

Moore never relented in showing the ugly sides of America that the mainstream media avoided highlighting. In Fahrenheit 11/9 (Fahrenheit 9/11’s spiritual sequel), Moore takes the time to call out Barack Obama’s discomforting PR stunt of lightly “sipping” poisoned Flint water to prove that it’s drinkable (in response, Moore sprayed Flint water on the Michigan governor’s mansion). In Capitalism: A Love Story, he shows Ronald Reagan giving a speech, only to be told by a banking executive to speed it up, showing where power truly lies. In Bowling For Columbine, his Oscar-winning film about gun violence in America, Moore confronts NRA president Charlton Heston about his insensitivity to mass shootings, signs up for a bank account that comes with a free gun (“Do you think it's a little dangerous handing out guns at a bank?”), personally calls out a frightened Dick Clark for exploiting “welfare-to-work” mothers at his restaurants, displays law enforcement and the media’s open preference for attacking poorer people of color over (much worse) white-collar criminals, and brings shooting victims to Kmart so they can return the bullets lodged in their body to the store from which they were purchased. In Sicko, Moore’s film about the American healthcare system, he took 9/11 first responders to Cuba to get free medical care, and in Where to Invade Next (about which countries America should pilfer social democratic policies from), he disgusted French children by showing them horrible, everyday American school lunches. 

Of course, even when showing how ugly a nation America is, Moore still seizes the chance to be funny. We see this when he searches in vain for the billing department in a British hospital and when he tests whether acclaimed Black actor Yaphet Kotto was more likely to catch a New York City cab than a white felon. 

Illustration by Tom Humberstone

In addition to exposing audiences to original humor, creative stunts, and never-before-seen footage, Moore educates them by offering reminders of events easily consigned to the memory hole. Fahrenheit 9/11, for instance, starts with a very fast-paced explanation of everything that went wrong in the 2000 presidential election and why George W. Bush’s victory was likely illegitimate. As wacky “hillbilly” music plays, you can’t help but be astounded as Moore explains that Fox News called the election for Bush off a tip from Bush’s cousin, Bush’s brother was the governor of the state with contested votes, the Florida secretary of state was a co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, and the shady voting count company she hired suspiciously purged the votes of African American voters. In their efforts to forcibly shut down the vote recount, the Republicans essentially did January 6 before January 6. Then the Supreme Court rigged the election for Bush anyway. Moore explains all of this in less than five minutes. 

Moore’s method has been described as manipulative or misleading. A.O. Scott of the New York Times accused Moore of “slippery logic, tendentious grandstanding, and outright demagoguery.” The late Christopher Hitchens and David Edelstein both called Moore a “propagandist.” Some details in the films can indeed leave viewers with mistaken impressions. Roger & Me was criticized for arranging the events of the ’80s out of chronological order; for example, Flint’s failed attempts to boost economic activity with a hotel and theme park happened before General Motors laid off their American workforce, not after, as Roger & Me implies. Roger Ebert defended Moore’s editorial choice, though, because the film isn’t supposed to be a literal chronology. It's Moore showing us what everyday people who are experiencing economic despair look like. Critics called the “bank handing out guns” scene from Bowling for Columbine inaccurate because the bank didn’t typically hand the guns out at the bank itself; they did that just for Moore’s cameras. But the offer of a gun for a bank account was very real! 

Often, the criticisms are minor, and the major points Moore makes still stand. Yes, in Bowling, Moore makes it look like the NRA came to Colorado in 1999 to mock victims of the Columbine shooting without mentioning that the NRA, not wanting to seem insensitive to the tragedy, canceled much of their already scheduled “World Class Guns & Gear Expo.” However, secret recordings revealed that following Columbine, the NRA knew they faced a PR crisis and a public eager for stronger gun control laws. Rather than cancel their entire Colorado Expo (which they felt would be accepting responsibility for the massacre), the NRA defiantly held their convention, blaming politicians and the media for using Columbine to “politicize” gun ownership. Therefore, Moore was correct in framing the NRA as callous. Likewise, Moore might not have gotten every single detail correct about the Bush family’s ties to the Carlyle Group and Saudi Arabia, but the reporter behind House of Bush, House of Saud still contends that $1.5 billion in funds ties the Bush cabinet to powerful Saudi families.

More recent criticisms of Moore come from leftists who think Moore’s films can be unfocused in their arguments. Luke Savage and Will Sloan from Michael and Us (the film podcast that initially began as a Michael Moore movie retrospective) criticize Moore’s films for not having clear consistent theses and for lacking a call for systemic change. But Moore deserves enormous credit for popularizing leftist ideas and critiques and for using creative filmmaking techniques to spark conversations on war, deindustrialization, healthcare, gun violence, capitalism, and more. 

Moore learned his message was not welcome everywhere, even in supposedly “liberal” Hollywood. Bowling for Columbine won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature three days after the U.S. invaded Iraq, and I can still recite Moore’s short acceptance speech to this day:

I’ve invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and [...] they are here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that [elect] a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the [fiction] of duct tape or the [fiction] of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you. And any time you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up.

Moore recalled that as soon as he mentioned Bush, a “cacophony of boos” began among the audience, and he could not even hear himself. One stagehand screamed “asshole” in Moore’s ear backstage (he apologized to Moore many years later). 

At the time of the speech, anti-war sentiment was not popular. In early 2003, President Bush had a 71 percent approval rating. A similar percentage of Americans supported plans for the nation to start a war with Iraq. Twenty-nine Democratic senators agreed with them and the Bush Administration. The media was no help. Sixty-three percent of on-air talking heads were government sources, and only six percent were anti-war. Networks including those owned by Viacom and Clear Channel refused to air advertisements from anti-war groups, and CBS threatened to “pull off the air” any artist mentioning the war during that year’s Grammys. Perhaps sealing the deal for Iraq was the New York Times’ supposed confirmation of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As Moore explained in his memoir, Here Comes Trouble, “The New York Times had given Bush the cover he needed and the ability to claim, ‘Heck, if a liberal paper like the Times says so, it must be true.’”

As soon as Moore returned home after the speech, he faced violent threats and attempted attacks. One couldn’t help but see the parallels in 2024, when director Jonathan Glazer upset the entertainment industry for offering the most milquetoast criticism of U.S.-backed genocide in his Oscar acceptance speech. But Moore was right to speak up when he did. The Iraq War displaced millions, created further violence and economic stability, and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The war was waged for fictitious reasons. Invading Iraq wasn’t a mistake. The Bush administration lied outright by frequently claiming that intelligence reports and nuclear weapons experts had conclusively confirmed the existence of WMDs, when, in fact, they had found the opposite. 

While Moore was known for his scathing criticism of Bush, Moore was equally critical of establishment Democrats. In his book Stupid White Men, he lambasts Democratic hypocrisy: “The Democrats say one thing (‘Save the planet!’) and then do another—quietly holding hands behind the scenes with the bastards who make this world a dirtier, meaner place.” 

He’s right. Bill Clinton, Moore points out, was actually the greatest Republican president of the ’90s. Clinton allowed federal funds to go to “faith-based charities” that supported anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ causes, expanded the death penalty, opposed same-sex marriage, deprived millions of welfare benefits, supported lowering the capital gains tax, built prisons, restricted abortion access, and undermined environmental regulations. Moore continued to criticize conservative Democrats during the 2004 election, refusing to endorse John Kerry despite his urgent mission to unseat George W. Bush. Moore fittingly showed no mercy to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024.

All the way back in 2000, Moore supported Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy, vehemently rejecting the idea that Nader cost Al Gore the presidency by “stealing” votes from Gore’s would-be supporters. Nader, in Moore’s mind, was responsible for “nothing other than inspiring over a million new voters.” Gore completely blew the debates with Bush by failing to “unmask Bush’s ignorance and stupidity,” and Ralph Nader to this day contends that Gore alienated progressive voters by being too boring and cautious. Voters, meanwhile, blamed Gore for siding with the Republicans on issues like the death penalty and healthcare. It did not help that during the debates, Gore stated his desire to invest in so-called clean coal technology and vowed to spend more than Bush on the military. 

Moore’s characterization of Nader’s 2000 campaign sums up the same terrible choices we’re given in every election: 

Everyone knew [Nader’s effort to campaign] in the swing states could cost Gore the election and put Bush in the White House, but when you’ve seen the administration you voted for side more often with the Republicans than the traditional Democrats, when you’ve watched as these Democrats make life harder for the poor, paving the way for the rich to have their biggest orgy in history, when my hometown ends up losing more GM jobs during the eight years of Clinton/Gore than during those twelve years of Reagan/Bush—well, here’s your choice: Do you want to get fucked by someone who tells you they’re going to fuck you, or do you want to get fucked by someone who lies to you, and then fucks you? 

Moore acknowledged that, yes, George W. Bush ended up being a worse president, but Bush only succeeded because Democrats like Clinton already “laid down the groundwork.” 

Moore’s criticism of both parties’ establishments made him particularly perceptive about Donald Trump. Moore was one of the few people (this magazine’s editor-in-chief was another) to predict that Trump would win in 2016. Trump’s victory was inevitable, Moore thought, because voters now had an opportunity to make a “good practical joke on a sick political system,” and he predicted that all Trump needed to do to win the election was to obtain the electoral votes of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “Rust Belt Brexit”). American bigotry and misogyny aside, Moore pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a seriously unpopular candidate whose track record included supporting NAFTA and voting for the Iraq War. He was right: Trump not only won the exact states he predicted, but Hillary Clinton barely campaigned in the states where she most clearly needed to. 

By the time his documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 came out, Moore agreed that Donald Trump was bad but always insisted that Trump was only a symptom of a much bigger problem. He also refused to accept the idea that our political system had any form of “deus-ex-machina” in place to take Trump down. When the Mueller Report came out in 2019, Moore said, “All you pundits and moderates and lame Dems who told the public to put their faith in the esteemed Robert Mueller—just STFU from now on.” 

Moore could not tolerate the press and establishment Democrats accepting Trump as another standard public figure. “Our media has no idea what it is up against,” Moore stated in 2018. “They’re getting steamrolled by a tyrant because Trump understands the media and understands the country he lives in more than those that cover him do. This puts us all in grave danger.” 

Moore has been vindicated all these years later. The press continues to rationalize Trump’s bizarre behavior while subjecting his rivals to bogus “both-sides” fact checks. At the same time, Democrats warmly accept endorsements from neoconservative warmongers like Dick and Liz Cheney.

When examining the issues that would motivate Americans to vote for a person like Trump, Moore notes that the Democrats brought it upon themselves. They screwed themselves in 2016 with their frequent compromises and for interfering when popular candidates like Bernie Sanders ran in their primary. The Democrats’ real problem, Moore notes, is that they get “handed” a progressive population that is eager to vote them into office but then are simply unable to win critical elections.

 In Fahrenheit 11/9, Moore cites statistics showing that 71 percent of the public supports abortion, 82 percent want equal pay for women, 74 percent support stronger environmental laws, 61 percent want to raise the minimum wage, 60 percent support free college and childcare, and 61 percent support reducing the military budget. Oh, and 75 percent believe that immigration is good. Sadly, we do not live in a nation with robust funding for social services, environmental protections, and free education and childcare. In his work, Moore has always asked, “What happens when these resources are absent in a community?” 

The answer: breakdown and backlash. Moore not only shows how the failure to fulfill basic social needs creates an opening for far-right politics. He also exposes the denial that Democrats and media elites have chosen to live in. 

At the peak of his films’ popularity, Moore became a ubiquitous media presence. The South Park creators parodied him in Team America: World Police, as did the director of Airplane! in a dreadful right-wing spoof of A Christmas Carol.

The success of Moore’s documentaries encouraged a string of conservative “response” films such as Michael Moore Hates America, FahrenHYPE 9/11, and Celsius 41.11. Michael and Us podcast co-host Luke Savage observed that while these conservative filmmakers ostensibly hated Moore, they still could not help but imitate Moore’s style, making themselves characters in their own documentaries and alleviating their tense scenes with comedy sketches.  

To this day, you can’t say the name “Michael Moore” without instantly conjuring a picture of the man in a baseball cap and glasses who always pointed his camera and launched targeted questions at uncomfortable-looking, often powerful people. Moore genuinely seemed to be looking out for the interests of the American people. As Michael Scott from The Office said when confronting his own boss with a camera: 

This is exactly what Michael Moore does, famous documentarian. He goes up to people with a camera and he's like "Why did you do this? Why did you pollute? You are bad. You're a bad person." It's very dramatic. 

Moore’s work has enduring lessons for us. If we really want to change the world we live in, it might not hurt to think like him. As Moore stresses, people need to let their anger motivate their activism. Do not trust the establishment media. Freak the powerful out with your tough questions and pointed actions, all while using your creativity! 

Moore ominously asks, during the ending of Fahrenheit 11/9, “When was the moment we could have turned things around before it was too late?” Well, it’s definitely too late to go back in time and change the results of the 2016 and 2024 elections. We have no choice but to face our country as it is. Thankfully, Michael Moore has provided a playbook for how we can fight back.