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bowling 4 columbine
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE REVIEW
by Rose Helin & Adam Ritscher
Michael Moore, the maker of the irreverent movies
“Roger and Me” and “The Big One”, has put out a new
political film – Bowling for Columbine. Despite the
fact that it has opened in only a limited number of
theaters, and there are even some states where it’s
not being showed at all, Moore’s film has already
become the country’s best selling documentary of all
time.
Bowling For Columbine is a much needed examination of
American culture, asking why the United States has
well 11,000 murder per year while every other major
western country, from Canada to Japan to Great
Britain, have gun killings in the low hundreds or
less. In fact, each has a murder rate less than 1/10
that of the U.S. The film, for example, points out how
Canada has almost the same number of guns per capita,
7 million guns for 10 million families, and that
people in all of the western countries have access to
the same violent video games, movies and pornography
that Americans do. Some countries have even more of it
than America. So why is there such a dramatically
higher level of gun violence here?
Unlike most attempts to tackle this question, Moore
makes sure to look at all levels of American society
for the answers. Like his well known books and TV
shows, he specializes in confronting corporate PR
hacks, 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. National Rifle Association
president Charlton Heston looks like an idiot, and a
racist 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 only does Moore not settle for blaming working
people, and the often given flimsy reasons for the
high levels of gun violence in America – violent
movies and video games, Marilyn Manson, etc. – he also
appropriately points to the racism that is integral to
much of the paranoia about crime, the blatant
opportunism of the media and the violence of U.S.
foreign policy.
In a very effective segment of the film on the April
20, 1999 Columbine High School shootings, Moore shows
Bill Clinton giving a press conference on the U.S.
bombing of Yugoslavia (April 20 was the heaviest day
of U.S. bombings during the Kosovo war, on which a
hospital and several residential buildings were hit).
Then, wearing the same suit even, he shows Clinton
giving another press conference, just an hour later on
the Columbine tragedy.
Another segment deals with the fatal shooting of 6
year old Kayla Rolland by one of her 6 year old
classmates at Buell Elementary School back in 2000.
His mother at the time was working two jobs through
Michigan’s “work-to-welfare” program (a program which
Michigan has hired arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin
to oversee) , which entailed her traveling hours every
day on a bus to the wealthy community of Auburn
Heights. Despite working 70 hours a week, she was
unable to keep up with rent, and had to move in with
her brother, where her unsupervised son found the gun
which he shot Kayla with.
Bowling For Columbine is definitely entertaining and
thought provoking; it alternates between
laugh-out-loud hilarity over some of the
unintentionally funny and ludicrous 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 overall theme of the film is best summed up by
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 neighbors,
killer bees from Africa, and of course Arabs. Murder
and other crimes are significantly dropping, yet guns,
security devices and gated community purchases have
been significantly rising, and media coverage of
violent crimes has rises 600% during a time when the
actual levels of these crimes have dropped 20%. The
film makes the case that by 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
the rest of us this film is an important contribution
to the discussion on who controls our culture, what
causes our fear and paranoia of one another, and who
is the ultimate source of violence in our society.
