Bowling for Columbine

ByThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

Bowling for Columbine is identified, billed, and marketed as a documentary, but that's just because people don't know what else to call it. Really, what Michael Moore does is not documentary so much as agitprop--and I don't mean that to be a disparagement. The film is not an attempt to construct a neutral and historically accurate narrative about the Columbine school shootings. It's an argument about why they happened, and it uses a variety of techniques, some familiar from traditional documentaries and some that take the film far outside the box. Taking us from the hilarious to the terrifying and back again, Moore starts from a fairly simple proposition: These shootings demonstrate that something is very wrong with American culture, and we have to find out what it is. The film is an attempt to do that, starting with the gun control issue but branching out as Moore tries to account for, say, Canada, a country with 7 million gun owners and almost no gun-related murders; or, say, England, a country whose imperial history could arguably rival ours for bloodiness but which does not seem to have brought as much of that violence back to the home turf. Although the film does point us toward an answer by investigating the American culture of fear--there's a hilarious sequence in which a number of Canadians insist that they never lock their doors, and an incredulous Moore takes to the streets of Toronto to find out whether this is true--in the end, even that can't explain everything, and we're left to sort it out on our own. But at least, by then, even if we don't know the answer, we at least have a better idea of what the questions are.

When the film is funny, it's right up there with the best moments from Roger & Me and The Big One. For humor value, it's worth it just for a 30-second bit promoting the never-to-be-made show "Corporate C.O.P.S.," in which a donut-chomping Moore wrassles a bunch of scared and screaming white executives to the ground and manacles them. But as usual, the humor is coming out of a very dark place, and the film makes us spend a fair amount of time there. There are two things in this film that are very, very hard to watch. One is a montage of archival footage documenting America's history of deposing popularly elected rulers in order to establish dictators who will be favorable to us and the West. It starts in 1953 with the U.S. installing the Shah in Iran and gets worse from there, as our civilian death toll mounts and the dictators we install turn on us and have to be replaced with new dictators in a transition that produces a fresh crop of civilian dead. After watching footage of our casualties in Chile, in Vietnam, in El Salvador, and everywhere else, the montage ends with the image of the second plane crashing through the second tower while the first one burns. Moore is going to take a lot of shit for that sequence, because its argument is so obvious: the September 11 attacks are the culmination of a pattern that we set in motion by arming and funding Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, and anyone else we thought would advance our interest on the backs of his own people. But it's worth the shit he's going to take for the emotional effect: by the time you get to 2001, you are certain that you are already as horrified and sick and depressed as you can possibly be...but then you find that you aren't. Because no matter how disturbed we are by seeing all those other bodies, we still reserve that final shudder for ourselves. After all, we are Americans.

The second thing that's hard to watch is the footage taken by the security cameras in library during the Columbine shootings. It's just horrifying. The worst thing to me was the way the other students all dive for the tables--they look like a school of fish changing direction, as if the danger has washed out their individual identities and wills and they have become a herd of prey. The two shooters are the only ones walking around upright as if they own the place, apparently calm and in control. It's eerie, it's awful, it's deeply, deeply disturbing, hence I'm still up at what is now 3:00 in the morning.

Moore is going to take shit for that, too; but putting us through that is part of the movie's argument. Throughout the film Moore emphasizes the contrast between the people who have lived through the violence, and are still physically and emotionally ravaged by it, and the corporate mouthpieces who answer Moore's questions with meaningless corporatespeak or political boilerplate that is completely uninflected by any emotional response or indeed awareness of irony. This strategy reaches its apex in the interview with Charlton Heston, who is filmed at two NRA rallies that take place in Littleton and Flint soon after the school shooting that took place in each community, brandishing his rifle and delivering his "out of my cold dead hands" line. Like an idiot, Heston agrees to let Moore interview him, and comes off kind of as a slightly sharper Ronald Reagan, reading his script and playing his part and refusing to let Moore draw him deeper into any kind of real conversation. In the end, he walks away while Moore is trying to show him a picture of the 6 year old girl who was shot by her 7 year old classmate at Buell Elementary School in Flint. It's a setup--what could Heston do, at that point, that wouldn't indict him?--but that's the point. Presumably the milk of human kindness flows in Heston's veins as well as in Moore's; but in his position as the NRA's spokesmodel, Heston is structurally prevented from caring about her. That's what Moore's films are good at: using our own emotional responses to teach us the evils of a system that refuses to share them.

He's been doing this for a long time, and Bowling shows him at his best. There's a lot good about this movie, but I think the smartest thing in it is what initially looks like a throwaway point about the "killer bees" that were supposed to be coming for us a few summers ago. Initially, the "killer bees" panic is introduced just as one example of the millions of things that local news is constantly trying to make us afraid of. But after doing a lot of work on the media portrayal of black men, Moore goes back to the killer bees again, and now all of a sudden it's a whole different story. See, the killer bees are Africanized bees--and as we watch what we would normally think of as just a harmless informational piece, we suddenly realize that fear of African-Americans is absolutely saturating this stupid little spot. The Africanized bees are more aggressive and dangerous than the kindly and productive European bees, "the ones we're used to"--and it just goes on and on. This is a masterpiece of contextualization, and it brings home the major point the film makes: that while we focus on strange and terrifying manifestations like Marilyn Manson, we don't notice that what we think of as "mainstream" American culture is laden with sinister implications. The same point is reinforced by Moore's interview with Marilyn Manson, who comes across as far more intelligent, reasonable, and concerned about today's youth than George W. Bush ever will--even in full makeup.

It's the insistence on seeing the shootings as systemic--as a function of foundational aspects of our militarist and capitalist society, manifested in things like the welfare-to-work program that forced the Buell Elementary shooter's mother to work two jobs in a mall an hour away and have almost no time at home with her children--that makes the film valuable. That's what I mean about knowing the question. Moore doesn't ever interview anyone really connected with Harris and Kleebold; but again, that's part of the point. This isn't about them; it's about us. This film is going to make it harder for people to explain things like Columbine away as an example of individual pathology and force people to understand them as symptoms of what's making America sick. For that reason alone, it's valuable; and I'm glad I went to see it, even if it is going to keep me up all night.