Michael Moore: A Biography

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

Schultz’s biography covers the life and work of the increasingly
infamous documentarian and political activist Michael Moore. The author
provides a brief examination of Moore’s childhood and early days in
journalism, and then goes on to explore each of his major works,
focusing especially on their reception by critics and the general
public.

This is a thoroughly mediocre, even submediocre, biography. Schultz
delivers very little information about Moore that is not already widely
known, and she is reluctant to engage seriously with any of the ideas
forwarded in his films and political screeds. In reviewing his work she
is happy to conclude with variations on the observation that, love him
or hate him, the man certainly creates a stir. In place of considered
analysis of the man or his ideas, Schultz favours a kind of
cheerleader’s approach to the drama of his provocations: “[I]t
is,” she writes, “fascinating to see the hubbub.” Many of
Moore’s highly suspect assumptions about, for instance, the
inscrutable evil of corporations, the influence of America’s supposed
“culture of fear” on gun violence, and the significance of political
dealings between the Bush family and various Saudi Arabians are simply
taken as givens. When Schultz does direct her attention to the
criticisms launched against Moore, she tends to focus on the personal
ones (magnanimously conceding that they may contain some truth), while
ignoring the substantive ones having to do with her subject’s often
muddled thinking and notorious tendency to manipulate facts in order to
create dramatic effects. Broad, provocative, and unsupported claims are
scattered throughout the text: “[After] September 11, 2001 […] the
world beyond the United States would welcome all opposition to the Bush
administration.” This book is also marred by some sloppy copy-editing.


Little insight is ultimately granted into Moore’s personality by this
book other than the suggestion that the man can be cranky on occasion
and dictatorial with employees. What we are asked to conclude about
Moore, finally, is that he is “not always well-liked, but always
successful,” something anyone familiar with his public persona already
knows.