Bowling For Columbine

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE

Rating: B-

Raises some good questions, but succumbs to Michael Moore's self-promoting shtick.

I have a love/hate relationship with Michael Moore. I often find myself on the same side of political issues, but I resent his frequently using them as a forum for holier-than-thou self-promotion. 1989's Roger and Me is a perfect example; while documenting the decimation of his hometown of Flint, Michigan by General Motors corporate decisions, Moore never misses a chance to mock the humanity of the people whose suffering he's showcasing. (By the way, here's a Net-Monster Tip® : if you liked Roger and Me, hunt down Tony Buba's contemporaneous but lesser known detailing of the collapse of the steel industry in his hometown, Lightning Over Braddock. The similarities are chilling.)

Anyway, Moore is back again, this time using the Columbine High School shooting to question the values of American society. The theatrical trailers trumpet gun control as the most controversial issue facing our country. Personally, I can think of a couple of others higher on the list, but the bigger point is that Moore's film really isn't about gun control, anyway. Except when he wants it to be. He states right off he's a member of the NRA, and as a teenager won several awards for his rifle marksmanship. Several times he cites statistics that other countries (such as Canada) have more firearms per capita than the U.S., but don't have nearly as many annual firearm deaths. Fair enough, on both counts. So then why does he show us mocking interviews of NRA members, and juxtapose clips of Charlton Heston's NRA speeches with clips from Columbine and other gun tragedies? As far as I can tell, it's because they're easy targets, and Moore is about nothing so much as seeking cheap laughs at the expense of his subjects. He's basically playing to those members of the audience who enjoy feeling superior to other people. So be it, but that stance always gets in the way of his message.

Moore raises interesting points when he classifies American society as being built around fear. For example (and as others have also noted), nightly television news programs have an annoying and potentially destructive habit of using fear to incite viewership (e.g., "Could your drinking water be killing you? Tune in at eleven..."). When he stands in the "center" of south central Los Angeles and shows us that, contrary to popular belief, hordes of African-Americans don't materialize to rob him and beat him senseless, I have to admit I was guilty of thinking that they would. Moore then suggests our society's seeming obsession with fear may explain our propensity for violent outbursts and our lack of protest when our leaders use fear to promote their own warmongering agendas. I'm not sure about the first part, but the second sure would explain a lot which is otherwise inexplicable.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of low points in Moore's latest offering. First of all, while he tends to avoid simplistic arguments such as "control the guns and you'll stop the murders," at the same time he doesn't go into sufficient depth with the statistics he cites. The obvious complaint is he offers no per capita comparisons between the firearm deaths in the countries he compares. Since the U.S. has a much greater population than Germany, England, or Canada, it's not necessarily meaningful that our yearly firearm homicide total is higher. More importantly, he ignores the fact that school shootings and other homicides are in the distinct minority in this country, too. The vast majority of our citizens display the same imperviousness to violent movies, video games, and mindless television that he credits to foreign residents. So if our culture is the source of the problem, why are most people unaffected by it? Even the Canadian gun statistic mentioned earlier may not be meaningful, since I suspect most of those guns are probably hunting rifles. I'm not a hunter, but I'm inclined to believe hunters and their rifles are not the problem in this country, either. Details such as this are woefully absent from the broad strokes which Moore paints. He raises questions, but balks at any serious attempts at answers.

Then there are the typical "Mooreisms," such as when he visits Charlton Heston and inquires about Heston's NRA rally near a town where a six-year-old girl had been accidentally shot by a classmate a day earlier. Heston claims he was unaware of the tragedy at the time, which might be the truth. (Curiously, Moore fails to ask him about a similar NRA rally held in Colorado only five days after the Columbine shootings.) But here Moore is confusing two separate issues: the deliberate massacre at Columbine, and an accidental shooting resulting from a chain of unfortunate circumstances. He's already stated several times that the events at Columbine are not related to gun control, so why is he dogging Heston about this little girl's shooting, or the actions of the NRA? I can picture Moore in the editing room, pouring over his vast quantities of 16mm and 35mm footage, and selecting those scenes which best satisfy his self-righteous yearnings, and which best push the emotional buttons of his audience. Which might not be so bad, if a coherent movie wasn't sacrificed as a result. (I'm actually wondering if this film started out being about gun control, then morphed into something else halfway down the line.) As Moore leaves Heston's estate, he places a photograph of the deceased girl against a wall of the building. Not only is the symbolism misguided, since Heston can't reasonably be blamed for the events which resulted in her death, but they're such annoyingly self-conscious theatrics that Moore loses any credibility he may have had.