Bowling for Columbine
Review
by : Eric Barker
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Starring:
Michael Moore, and featuring George W. Bush,
Dick Clark, Charlton Heston, Marilyn Manson
Produced, Written,
and Directed by: Michael Moore
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 Relentless,
amiable provocateur Michael Moore is commonly called a documentary
filmmaker, but his films are really the cinematic equivalent
of the personal essay. Agreeably confrontational, filled with
Moore’s own assumptions and observations about the world
around him, his movies are stream-of-consciousness ruminations
on various aspects of what it means to be a thinking American,
encouraging laughter at corporate hubris and man-on-the-street
ignorance, while nudging viewers toward a sympathetic awareness
of the forgotten and downtrodden in the richest country the
world has ever known. Subtlety is not his forte, but neither
is it the province of his subjects; he often uses sledgehammer
tactics, ambushing unwitting targets to force his own dramatic
moments, but because he attacks the privileged classes exclusively,
he gets away with it. And he should: too many of our debates
are being defined and controlled by the privileged, now that
a handful of corporations own every media conduit in the country.
With Bowling for Columbine, Moore has raised the
level of his own private cinema, making a sincere, feature
length examination of gun violence in America, using the April
1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado
as a springboard. But the film is not about Columbine, per
se; it is an investigation of the culture surrounding the
event, Moore asking questions, not only of clueless dinosaurs
like Charlton Heston, eminently protected in their guarded
estates, but of himself as well, undertaking a quest to discover
just what the hell it is that makes a country with everything
so recklessly belligerent toward the world, and ultimately
its own people. For once, Moore doesn’t let his urge
to entertain eclipse his filmmaking instincts: Bowling
for Columbine is often hilarious, but it uses laughter
as an anesthetic for the painful truths in its frightening
real-life images.
A former
shooting instructor and champion marksman in his youth, Moore
grew up in Michigan, where guns are plentiful and hunting
is a way of life. He opens Bowling for Columbine
with a brief history of his own naïve involvement in
the subculture of firearms, and he actually knows a lot about
guns and ammunition, making his evolving critique of weapons
and their everyday use all the more believable. As the film
unfolds, with initial visits to a Michigan militia camp, then
to the creepy home of John Nichols, brother of Oklahoma bombing
suspect Terry, Mr. Moore shapes a superb mechanism for exploring
the questions at hand. Genuinely interested in what makes
us kill each other, he’s not willing to accept just
any answer. He restlessly cuts back and forth across the whole
continent, and across key acts of deadly violence from the
past decade -- Columbine, of course, which receives gruesome
attention through uncut footage from the school’s security
cameras and police videos of the aftermath, but also Oklahoma
City, the South Central LA riots, the Gulf War and last year’s
World Trade Center horrors -- expanding the focus of his inquiry
to debunk all current myths about violence in America.
In Moore’s
ambition to be encyclopedic, Bowling for Columbine
wanders through many seemingly disconnected side trips, but
it is an appropriate strategy for a film that is trying to
answer the unanswerable. For instance, Moore cites the famous
statistics about yearly handgun deaths in other developed
nations, from Japan to Europe to Australia, and naturally
he finds people elsewhere are dying in the mere tens or hundreds
from flying bullets, while the American toll runs to a little
over 11,000 people annually. We all know it’s because
of the proliferation of easily accessible weapons and ammunition,
right? Wrong: thousands of Canadians own guns, they just don’t
freakin’ shoot each other to settle parking disputes
and marital squabbles. They don’t reach for a weapon
at the slightest provocation (even when they see an American
camera crew approaching).
What is
it, then, about America? Bowling for Columbine doesn’t
give a hard and fast solution. Moore visits with National
Rifle Association president Heston, in an interview that makes
Moses look all-too-human, mean and small; then he draws loose
parallels between the presence of Lockheed-Martin, just down
the road from Columbine, and the hopelessness that Gen-Y teenagers
feel living in the perpetual shadow of adult hypocrisy. For
much of the film he seems to be casting about for a direction.
But finally, brilliantly, uncomfortably, Moore turns the challenge
on the viewer, asking why, exactly, are we so doggoned afraid
of everything, everything, especially our friends and neighbors.
Moore
takes the media severely to task, and rightly so, for promoting
nothing but violence, sudden death, and beer on newscast after
newscast, and on ludicrous “reality” TV shows
like Cops. But even worse, he finds that Canadians, by contrast,
are extremely cavalier about locking their doors, and about
letting black men and other kinds of suspect people walk around
unmolested on their streets. Just as in previous films, Moore
deconstructs the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps ideology
of corporate America, but here he digs deeper than ever into
the unfathomable gulf between rich and poor in the United
States, a country that has always insisted on Social Darwinism
as its guiding principle, no matter who was in office.
The problem
isn’t disaffected youth, who live everywhere, or boneheaded
presidents using military strikes on foreigners to deflect
attention from the economy, and it certainly isn’t provocative
rock singers pushing middle class buttons. In one of the film’s
best moments, Moore interviews Marilyn Manson, who was castigated
by the media and right-wing extremists when the massacre first
happened, because it was learned the killers had listened
to his music. Manson turns out to be the most articulate,
intelligent person interviewed in the film, quietly and succinctly
listing Moore’s major themes for him, apparently without
prompting.
Bowling
for Columbine reveals an America that is all too willing
to sacrifice anything and everything for short-term profits,
easy answers and the bottom line, including and most significantly
its citizens. We’ll sell our grandmothers for a sliver
of the pie.
Such a
conclusion is not particularly news, except for those who
still buy into the propaganda that we can be anything we want
to be, if only we work hard enough. The sad reality is, most
people still live lives of quiet desperation while the rich
have continued to become richer, and fewer than ever, and
the social machinery of iniquity grinds away unimpeded. Inner
city women are bussed miles from home to serve the wealthy,
yet they still can’t afford to pay their own rent or
be with their children, and the U.S. remains the only industrialized
nation on the planet that refuses to provide healthcare for
its citizens. Richest country in the world won’t even
bother to take care of its own sick people. It’s a land
only Ebeneezer Scrooge could love.
Bowling
for Columbine has been winning over audiences at film
festivals around the world, particularly at Cannes, where
it was given a special 55th anniversary judges prize, the
first documentary allowed into competition in over four decades.
I was able to see the movie on the closing night of the Denver
International Film Festival, where a capacity audience of
several thousand cheered on the film’s daring intelligence.
Afterward, Moore fielded questions from the audience, and
brought out two young men who survived the Columbine massacre
(and who appear in the film’s most uplifting sequence),
to share the stage with him. It was clear that Michael Moore
has been transformed by making this movie, which he began
planning the day after the Columbine tragedy. His replies
to the audience remained pithy, his attitude still jaunty
self-righteousness, but there was a humility in his acceptance
of the standing ovations, a sense that he is doing something
worthwhile with his clout as an entertainer that is new to
Michael Moore, a welcome gravity both in person and on the
screen.
Bowling
for Columbine leads us by the shoulders to the edge,
forces us to look out over the abyss and face our own culpability
in an unsafe America, and to come to grips with why we let
the news media and the politicians bully us into believing
there’s danger on every street corner. The film is flawed
to be sure, but it’s also incalculably rich with observations
generally kept out of “mainstream“ discourse.
It is possibly a great movie; if it is, it is because no cherished
assumption gets out alive, whether it’s from the right-wing
or the left, urban legend or official story. Bowling for
Columbine reframes the debate, suggesting that if the
answers haven’t been found yet, it’s because thus
far the questions have been wrong.
As Moore
himself explained at the screening in Denver, discussing and
portraying violence honestly, in all its ugliness, is not
the same thing as condoning it. When a well-meaning woman
from the audience asked if he ever planned to make a film
that promotes nonviolence, he said, “I think I just
did.”
Notes:
The title
is most likely a pun on the phrase “gunning for...”
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