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What's the biggest problem facing US society today? This is the core question that filmmaker Michael Moore addresses in his quasi-satirical documentary about the American gun culture, Bowling for Columbine. But as the film tries to figure out why so many Americans shoot each other to death every year, watching it, I noticed a larger problem in American culture: the tendency to go to extremes. This - more than guns, poverty, the media, rock music, or bowling - is the single biggest problem that our neighbours to the south will have to address. And the film Bowling for Columbine never even saw it coming.
You see, this could have been a great film if it stuck to merely asking the questions. It does a fantastic job of exposing just how nuts the "gun nuts" really are. At times it is funny - for example, when members of the Michigan Militia state, completely straight-faced, that anyone who does not own a gun is irresponsible. At times it is horrifying - such as when the school shootings at Columbine High were shown from tape captured by a security camera. At all times it is provocative, and it raises most of the important questions relating to guns, the NRA, and the extreme right, to whom nothing is more sacred than the second-amendment "right to bear arms" - not even life itself.
Instead, however, Michael Moore attempts to impose some of his own answers. And that's where this film loses its way. I hate guns, granted, and I have serious problems with the extreme right. But that doesn't make me any fan of the extreme left, either. The problem is that Moore injects his own social agenda and, frankly, quite radical politics into this film in a subtle, manipulative way that made me feel somewhat used.
Moore's blanket critiques of US foreign policy and of government, corporations, and the media in general ring bring forth uncomfortable comparisons to some of our *ahem* friends at the CSU. Using logic as ingenious as it is fallacious, Moore attempts to link gun violence to racism and oppression of blacks by the media, to all US war and aggression, and even to the state of Michigan's "Welfare to Work" program. (In case you're wondering how that last one fits in, the mother of a six-year-old boy who shot and killed a first-grade classmate in an elementary school was in that program. Moore spends a disproportionate amount of the movie explaining how she was working two jobs as part of the program that, in Moore's words, "forces single mothers to ride a bus for an hour and a half each day to serve fudge to rich people"). Never mind that the boy got his hands on a gun in his uncle's house that was obviously carelessly lying around. No, it must be Dick Clark's fault - after all, his restaurant employs single moms. And how dare a society ask its people to work?
To be sure, Moore has guts. Actually, a better word is that he has chutzpah. Bringing victims of the Columbine shooting to K-Mart to persuade the chain to stop selling handgun ammunition takes chutzpah. Finding actor and NRA spokesperson Charlton Heston's home from a Beverly Hills star map and wrangling an interview to ask him why the NRA staged rallies in Littleton right after the Columbine shooting, and in Flint right after the six-year-old was shot, takes chutzpah. Making this movie in the first place takes chutzpah.
The fallacy of blaming a host of ridiculous "reasons" for the Columbine High School shootings was illustrated clearly enough. Moore interviews Marilyn Manson, the shock-rocker whose music many people tried to link to the killings. The lack of school prayer is another favourite. That's so tenuous it's ridiculous, is Moore's message; we might as well blame bowling! After all, the Columbine shooters went bowling on the morning before they opened fire on their classmates. Hence the title of the movie, of course.
Canada played a significant role in this film too, and not surprisingly. Moore is from Michigan, but has built his filmmaking career north of the border. He uses the town of Sarnia, Ontario, as well as Windsor and Toronto, to make a funny - if overly simplistic - comparison to the United States. Why, he asks, are there so many fewer gun-related homicides in Canada? Less poverty? Nope. Less violence on TV? Nope. Less guns? Nope, Moore claims (although in giving his statistic of 7 million guns for 10 million households, he fails to mention that, thanks to gun control, it's much harder to obtain even hunting rifles here, let alone semi-automatic handguns or M16s like our neighbours to the south). Actually, Moore does a poor job of explaining the difference at all. He might as well blame it on the extra "u" in "neighbour", for all the sense his reasons really do make.
The truth is, as most Canadians will be quick to affirm, we do have less guns, and certainly less of a gun culture. Moore argues that it's not less guns but less fear that causes a lower homicide rate. To illustrate, he walks around a Toronto neighbourhood testing people's doors to see if they're unlocked. (An astonishingly high percentage of them are indeed open, leaving this door-locking Canuck wondering just how many securely locked doors ended up on the editing floor.) The other truth is, we're behind but we are catching up, unfortunately. We've had our share of crazies with guns. Shortly after the Columbine massacre, a boy shot up his school in Taber, Alberta. Closer to home, Marc Lepine shot up the École Polytechnique in 1989, killing 14 women, and Valeri Fabrikant went on a shooting rampage at Concordia, killing 4 people. Sure, the last two killers were mentally unhinged adults, not kids, but we Canucks do have our share of problems. Moore should know better than to portray Canada as this one-dimensional non-violent stereotype.
Stereotyping Canada, however, is the least of this film's problems. The main problem is that the answers it tries to provide fail to fit the questions it asks. Why is the American society so violent? We don't know, but clearly Moore doesn't either. And in a movie that is loved by worldwide audiences for its America-bashing more than anything else, it seems dishonest for Moore not to be up front about his underlying agenda. Bowling for Columbine is an extremely important movie. I'm just not sure it's important for the reasons that Michael Moore intended.
Leftist social criticism is presented as the logical alternative to gun ownership. Paradoxically, the movie does not seem to conclude - as is suggested by its anti-NRA stance and opening position - that guns are to blame for violence. At times, he even seems to imply the opposite. At one point, in an effort to support his claim that Americans have created an irrational, unjustified "culture of fear", Moore cites a statistic that in the past decade, crime has dropped while gun ownership has increased. But . . . look at that the other way: doesn't that mean that there are more guns and less crime? I thought the point was to show that the gun culture is to blame for the high homicide rates.
Of course, that isn't the point at all. A favourite NRA slogan is that "guns don't kill people; people kill people". Moore's version of that one should be "guns don't kill people; Republicans, government, the media, evil corporations, globalization, and capitalism kills people". How is this anything other than another way to pass the buck? Marilyn Manson may not be at fault. Bowling is in the clear. But rich people are all evil, of course, as Moore implies when he hunts down the producer of the TV show Cops and asks him why he doesn't do a show about white-collar criminals, or when he uses the Enron debacle as a way to illustrate that corporate giants are trying to "get away with just about anything".
The bottom line is, everyone comes away from this film realizing that the gun fanatics are nuts. But that's somewhat of a given, even before going in. I have no problem with being asked to accept that the extreme right has problems - after all, anyone who admires the Michigan Militia or the Oklahoma City bombers ought to check into a mental institution, pronto. I do have a problem being asked to accept that the only solution is to move to the extreme left. After all, Stalin killed just as many people as Hitler, and once you get far enough to either side of the political spectrum, what side you're on really becomes moot. I'm not suggesting that Moore's brand of social criticism is akin to Stalinism. But the problem with the Democrat-Republican duality is, well, that it's a duality. What do the Repubocrats do?
If the United States has a problem bigger than social inequalities or violence, it's that people are so committed to the two-party, "either or" system that they can't see their own noses. There is a happy medium out there; the trick is to find the balance.
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