Bowling For Columbine


A documentary about the American culture of fear and its peoples' love of guns. Written and Directed by Michael Moore.

Michael Moore is America's left-wing, guerilla documentarian. He started with the irreverent Roger and Me, an indictment of General Motors, and by extension, corporate America's lack of concern for the devastation to American working people caused when a community is abandoned for a third world location more easily exploitable. Moore has launched TV shows and written books about corporate greed and bad behaviour, including the American and Canadian number one best-seller "Stupid White Men".

Bowling For Columbine is an uneven but often brilliant examination of American culture, asking why the United States has over 11000 gun killings per year (and this number is going down - it has been worse) while every other major democracy, from Canada to Japan to Great Britain, have gun killings in the low hundreds or less. Each has a murder rate less than 1/10 the U.S. murder rate and often lower. Canada has almost the same number of guns per capita, in the millions, and all the democracies have access to the same violent video games, movies and pornography. Some countries have even more of it than America. So why all the killing, and killing sprees in the United States?

Like his books and TV shows, Moore specializes in confronting corporate spokesman and others, and trying to pressure them on camera. He is also quite good at giving interviews and drawing responses the interviewee did not wish to make that are very revealing. Charlton Heston looks like an idiot, and a rascist one at that, during the interview he gives to Moore before Heston cuts it off. What was he thinking? Of course, what was Heston thinking going to into Colorado and Michigan immediately after the massacres of innocent children those communities had just experienced, holding NRA rallies there.

But not all of Moore's tactics are fair, and Moore is not above manipulation and fudging the facts for a good story. He depicts Canada, including Toronto, as a socialist paradise without race problems, slums or real poverty, where virtually no one locks their front door, where there are no indigent people and everyone is taken care of. With the likes of Mike Harris, Ralph Klein and the influence of the Canadian Alliance, Canada too often emulates the worst elements of American culture and policy, as Moore himself acknowledged during his press conference at the Toronto Film Festival, saying his film is perhaps a warning for Canadians to take notice.

Bowling For Columbine is very entertaining, and it alternates between laugh-out-loud hilarity over some of the unintentionally funny and ludicrus lines given by the interviewees, and stone-cold silence during the tragic and horrifying sequences, such as the viewing of the security camera tapes during Columbine High School massacre. The film is like a rambling conversation that is not always cohesive, jumping from topic to topic and the connections are not always obvious. Some of the connections he tries to make, such as trying to pin Dick Clark because one of his restaurants employed the mother of a 6-year old who shot another 6-year old in class, are tenuous and unreasonable. Moore could have used an editor in a few places such as that one.

Despite all this, the film forcefully makes the case that there is something wrong in America that allows it to accept the continual devastation due to firearms. The theme of the film is best summed up by a very articulate Marilyn Manson who suggests that the media, corporate America and current government policy work together to maintain a continual cycle of what Manson describes as fear and consumption. Americans have learned to fear "the other" - blacks and minorities, their neighbours, killer bees from Africa, Muslim and Arabic people. Murder and other crimes are significantly dropping, yet guns, security devices and gated community purchases have been significantly rising. Being bombarded with advertising that plays on peoples' fears and personal insecurities, Americans are induced to consume to feel better.

If your views coincide with President George W. Bush and his buddies, the NRA, or the arms industry, you are not likely to enjoy Bowling For Columbine, but for others the film could prove to be an interesting, entertaining and often illuminating examination of America and its love of guns.




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