Still
outraged that the world's largest corporation, General Motors,
closed down operations in his hometown, Flint, Michigan, Michael
Moore tries to assign responsibility for the death of a six-year-old
to the effrontery of the corporate closing in Bowling
for Columbine, which he writes, produces, and
directs much in the manner of his Roger &
Me, which won a Political Film Society award
for best film exposé of 1990. Full of facts and figures,
anecdotes and aphorisms, Bowling for Columbine
asks one fundamental question: Why are there some 11,000 gun-related
deaths in the United States each year? His quest to find the
answer takes him to Littleton, Colorado, the home of Columbine
High School, and to the Beverly Hills estate of Charlton Heston,
but much of his documentary is filmed in Michigan. As a boy,
he grew up within the "gun culture" of his native
state not far from a town in Michigan where Heston grew up.
Also among Michigan's native sons are Timothy McVeigh and
the two responsible for the deaths at Columbine. In a previous
reincarnation, Moore learned how to shoot a gun, won a medal
for marksmanship, and became a life-member of the National
Rifle Association, that is, before Flint became a depressed
city. But across a Great Lake (and in the case of Detroit,
across a river) is the great country of Canada, where 70 percent
of the households have guns yet gun-related deaths are about
one-fourth as common as in the United States. Seeking an answer
to his question, he uses the Sherlock Holmes technique of
developing several theories, and then ruling out all but one.
Theory #1 is that the widespread presence of guns in the United
States is responsible for all the carnage. He rules out Theory
#1 because Canadians have more guns; they just shoot wild
animals, not people. Theory #2 is that the United States has
a violent history, so there is a culture in which guns are
used more often than elsewhere. Moore responds that Britain
and Germany have violent histories, but they have few gun-related
deaths; Moore even persuades Heston that Theory #2 is not
a satisfactory explanation. Theory #3 is that violence in
the media is responsible, but Moore points out that filmgoers
all over the world flock to America's violent films but do
not bring to their streets what they see on their screens.
Theory #4, articulated by Heston, is that the United States
has a high percentage of minorities; Moore counters that Canada
has 13 percent minorities. (The theory of Heston's National
Rifle Association, however, is that police are at fault for
not enforcing existing laws.) Theory #5, that Americans buy
and use guns because they live in a crime-infested country,
is refuted by the fact that gun purchases went up in the 1990s
as violent crime went down. Then Moore comes up with Theory
#6, thanks to social scientist Barry Glassner's thesis in
The Culture of Fear (2000), namely that Americans
are trigger-happy because they are conditioned by the media,
including advertising, to be fearful of all sorts of things,
from bad breath to African American males. But why are children
doing some of the shooting? Moore invokes Theory #7, based
on the death of a six-year-old at Buell Elementary in Flint,
namely that the six-year-old murderer was a son being reared
without much parental supervision, as the income from the
welfare-to-work program required her to commute far away from
home during most hours of the day. But my review is tidier
than the film, which occasionally contradicts its own thesis,
even diverting attention to some muckraking of American foreign
policy. The title of the film, however, suggests Theory #8.
Moore points out that the two responsible for the Columbine
massacre were bowling together (for course credit, no less)
just prior to taking aim at their classmates. Moore evidently
did not examine Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000),
which argues that American society has become so fragmented
and distrustful that the poor have little time to devote to
politics, and social conflict is increasingly resolved by
confrontation rather than negotiation. But Putnam's theory
needs to be informed by Moore, whose analysis of the mother
of the Buell murderer suggests that social fragmentation is
a deliberate policy to keep the poor bewildered. (I might
add, based on the circumstances of the Buell mother, that
the poor cannot be mobilized politically to make American
society more humane if they spend most of election Tuesdays
a long bus ride from their voting precincts.) Moore's main
triumph in the film comes when he takes two Columbine victims
to Troy, Michigan, the corporate headquarters to K-Mart; both
have bullets inside their bodies that cannot be surgically
removed. Moore asks the company to stop selling bullets, and
twenty-four hours later K-Mart agrees to do just that. Never
retreating from filming the absurd, Moore goes to a Colorado
bank where a free gun is the incentive for buying a certificate
of deposit and to a Utah town that requires all citizens to
own a gun. In any case, regardless of which theory is correct,
Moore has asked an important question and has provided a lot
of thoughtful information that will infuriate the villains
whom he depicts so vividly. MH
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