Bowling for Columbine 2002
Michael Moore won an Oscar for this documentary about gun violence in the United States. I really enjoyed his previous feature film documentary Roger and Me about unemployment and corporate greed in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. I also like his short-lived TV series where he did smaller pieces (including a funny piece where he went to visit an old Soviet missile silo, pointing out that the Keep Out signs were in English. Of course they’re in English, he said, they weren’t worried about Russians wanting to get in there!). So it was almost a foregone conclusion I would like this.
The movie combines a lot of different types of filmwork but is centered around interviews. Moore has become a target of the right-wing hate-mongers and I heard that parts of the movie were staged. Maybe some of it was (when he opened unlocked front doors in Canada), but those people are missing the point. Moore interviews an impressive and varied group of people from Charlton Heston and the brother of Oklahoma bomb conspirator Terry McNichols to some victims of the Columbine shootings as well as freaky rocker Marilyn Manson, the Michigan Militia, and city and state officials trying to figure out why Americans are so violent.
Throughout the movie Moore tries to find out why Americans shoot each other in so much larger numbers than people in other countries. He skips over places like Liberia, Somalia, and Afghanistan and instead compares us with countries like Canada, the UK, France, Germany, and Austrailia. All of those places have guns. All of them have violent movies and video games. All of them have poverty and ethnic minorities, but none of them shoot up more people than we do. He focuses on fear. And Marilyn Manson makes one of the best points which is that corporations want to sell products through advertising and we will be more susceptible to that advertising if we live in fear of *not* buying it. So the media (who wants to sell advertising) keeps the fires of fears stoked. And the biggest corporate giant after your money, the US government, does the same so that you won’t question why they are spending your money.
A lot of interesting but not necessarily cohesive points are brought up. One of them is how parents and the morally upright wanted to blame Marilyn Manson’s music for driving the Columbine killers. But he points out that before they went to school that day they first went bowling. But nobody is blaming bowling for society’s ills.
It is a good movie and it will make you think, laugh, and cringe (Warning! there is also intense and graphic newsreel footage of people being shot peppered throughout the movie). I’m looking forward to his next movie. Given his Oscar acceptance speech, maybe it will be about the Bush administration’s propaganda machine where fear and manipulation again played a big role.
I’ll give it a B+.
Owned on: DVD