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Bowling for Columbine is a documentary film directed by and starring Michael Moore. It won an Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary, and has received praise, controversy, and criticism, both for the genre of the film (creative documentary), and the claims Moore makes in it. The film opened on October 11, 2002, and internationalized Moore's previously cultish American status.

The film won the 55th Anniversary Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, and received a 13-minute standing ovation at the end of its screening at the festival.

Summary

The film's purpose is to explore what Moore suggests are the reasons and causes for the Columbine High School massacre, and other acts of violence with guns. Moore focuses on the background and environment in which the massacre took place, and some common public opinions and assumptions about different particular points. The film takes an informal, artistic and up-close-and-personal look into the nature of violence in the United States, focusing on guns as the controversial symbol of both American freedom and its paradoxical self-destruction.

In Moore's discussions with various people, including South Park co-creator Matt Stone; the National Rifle Association's president, Charlton Heston, and musician Marilyn Manson, he seeks to answer, in his own unique style, the questions of why the Columbine massacre occurred, and why the United States has higher rates of violent crimes (especially crimes involving guns) than other developed nations, in particular Germany, France, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and especially Canada.

Bowling

The film title originates from the early myth that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two boys responsible for the Columbine High School massacre, went bowling early that morning, at 6am, before they committed the attacks at school starting at 11:18 am. However, that assertion has turned out to be a myth that originated from several testimonies of distressed witnesses who accidentally forgot that they had been absent that day. Moore suggests that it is as reasonable to blame their actions on bowling as it is to blame them on violent video games, movies, and music (during the aftermath of the shooting, many used the opportunity to denounce Marilyn Manson and The Matrix, claiming a connection between violence in the media and violence in schools).

Moore incorporates the concept of bowling in other ways as well (beyond the 6 am rumor). Ironically, a militia in Michigan uses bowling pins for their target practice. When interviewing former classmates of the two boys, Moore notes that the students took a bowling class in place of physical education. Moore notes this might have very little educational value and the girls he interviews generally agreed. The girls note how Harris and Klebold had a very introverted lifestyle and a very careless attitude towards the game and nobody thought twice about it. This calls into question the state of the school system (a fact strongly reinforced by Matt Stone). Moore asks the question of whether the school system is responding to the state of today's troubled youth or if they are simply reinforcing the concept of fear to the children and allowing the youth to wallow in this façade. Moore also interviews two young residents of Oscoda, Michigan, in a local bowling alley and in the process learns that guns are relatively easy to come by in the small town. Eric Harris spent some of his early years in Oscoda while his father was serving in the US Air Force.

"What a wonderful world" segment

In one particularly controversial segment of the film, Michael Moore lists a series of military, clandestine, and diplomatic actions by the United States (set to "What a Wonderful World," by Louis Armstrong).

Michael Moore critic, Richard Bushnell, states that Moore deceptively exaggerates historical facts and disputes some of his claims.

On the website accompanying the film, Moore provides additional background information.

The following is an exact transcript of the onscreen text in the Wonderful World segment:

  1. 1953: U.S. overthrows Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran. U.S. installs Shah as dictator.
  2. 1954: U.S. overthrows democratically elected President Arbenz of Guatemala. 200,000 civilians are killed.
  3. 1963: U.S. backs assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem.
  4. 1963-1975: The Vietnam War, supported by the U.S. military, kills an est. 4 million people in Southeast Asia.
  5. September 11, 1973: U.S. stages a military coup in Chile. Democratically elected president Salvador Allende assassinated. Dictator General Augusto Pinochet installed. 3,000 Chileans murdered.
  6. 1977: U.S. backs military rulers of El Salvador. 70,000 Salvadorans and four American nuns were killed.
  7. 1980s: U.S. trains Osama bin Laden and fellow terrorists to kill Soviets. CIA gives them $3 billion.
  8. 1981: Reagan administration trains and funds Contras. 30,000 Nicaraguans die.
  9. 1982: U.S. provides billions in aid to Saddam Hussein for weapons to kill Iranians.
  10. 1983: The White House secretly gives Iran weapons to kill Iraqis.
  11. 1989: CIA agent Manuel Noriega (also serving as de facto military leader of Panama) disobeys orders from Washington. U.S. invades Panama and removes Noriega. 3000 Panamanian civilian casualties.
  12. 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait with weapons from U.S.
  13. 1991: U.S. enters Iraq. Bush reinstates dictator of Kuwait.
  14. 1998: Clinton bombs “weapons factory” in Sudan. Factory turns out to be making aspirin.
  15. 1991-date of the film: American planes bomb Iraq on a weekly basis. U.N. estimates 500,000 Iraqi children die from bombing and sanctions.
  16. 2000-2001: U.S. gives Taliban-ruled Afghanistan $245 million in "aid."
  17. The final instance in the montage depicts the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, with a title card adding that Osama bin Laden uses his expert CIA training to murder 3000 people.

Criticism

The film is highly controversial, and some of its critics have gone so far to call for a revocation of the Academy Award because they do not consider Bowling for Columbine a legitimate documentary. Some of the film's defenders, on the other hand, view these criticisms as symptomatic of the highly emotional atmosphere that characterizes the gun rights debate . Criticism has been made by both pro-gun and anti-gun groups.

Accusations of editorialism

Critics of Moore such as National Review's Dave Kopel claim it is deceptive to call this film purely a "documentary;" they say it is more accurate to describe it as selective documentary, or as Moore has at times called another of his films, an "op-ed" piece that displays his own views. Kopel says the film omits key facts while stringing together other facts to lead to a conclusion, which he says is blatantly untrue, or at the least somewhat deceptive.

For example Kopel points to an early scene that has Moore visiting a savings bank which had advertised a complimentary firearm upon the customer's creating a bank account. Kopel points out that Moore shows us his completing of the savings account application, and then the film's next scene shows him wielding a gun (specifically, a rifle) in front of the bank. Kopel argues that this sequence may lead one to believe is that it is possible to obtain a free gun immediately upon signing an application, without a waiting period, and that the guns are kept at the bank. Kopel states that what actually occurred behind the scenes is that Moore had to deposit thousands of dollars into the account and produce photo identification, then wait at the bank for an FBI background check. In March 2003, John Fund reported in a Wall Street Journal diary page that the bank employee who handled Moore's account, Jan Jacobson, claimed that Moore had arranged the transaction weeks in advance, and that customers have "a week to 10 days waiting period" before collecting their guns. While the use of "free" firearms as a marketing ploy may be legitimately questioned, Kopel questions the means by which he makes this argument.

However later in 2003, Moore responded to these criticisms in a posting on his website. To the claim that the transaction had been arranged weeks in advanced he said that "Nothing was done out of the ordinary other than to phone ahead and ask permission to let me bring a camera..." He also states that the background check took less than 10 minutes and he was handed the rifle 5 minutes later. To back up his version of events, he posted outtakes from the documentary. The video shows Jacobson explaining the process to Moore, including that the rifles are held in the bank's vault.

Criticism from pro-gun groups

The gun-rights lobby believes that Moore unfairly portrayed lawful gun-owners in the USA as a violence-prone group. While few dispute that the gunshot homicide rate is higher in the US than in other countries, Richard Bushnell claims his statistics as presented in the montage of other countries sequence are ambiguous on two counts: first, they maintain Moore's statistics are not adjusted for smaller population of other countries; second, Bushnell claims that most of the other countries' numbers do not include accidental deaths and shootings performed in self-defense, while the US figure does include these. Finally, David Hardy argues that other types of violent crime (such as assault with knives or other deadly weapons) were not mentioned, which tend to take the place of gun violence in countries where guns are not prevalent.

In the film, Moore berates the American media for creating a culture of fear in the American public. Dave Kopel and David Hardy argue that his own movie is geared towards creating fear of guns and gun owners, and accuse him of hypocrisy on those grounds.

Critics also claim that Moore makes misleading statements in the movie. For example, Moore conducted an interview with Evan McCollum, Director of Communications at a Lockheed Martin plant near Columbine, and asked him, "So you don't think our kids say to themselves, 'Dad goes off to the factory every day, he builds missiles of mass destruction. What's the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?'" McCollum responded: "I guess I don't see that specific connection because the missiles that you're talking about were built and designed to defend us from somebody else who would be aggressors against us." The comment then cuts to a montage of questionable American foreign policy decisions, with the intent to contradict McCollum's statement, and cite examples of how the United States has, in Moore's view, frequently been the aggressor nation.

McCollum has later clarified that the plant he works for does not still produce missiles (the plant manufactured parts for intercontinental ballistic missiles with a nuclear warhead in the mid-1980s), but rockets used for launching satellites. Indeed, the plant was also used to take former nuclear missiles out of service, converting decommissioned Titan missiles into launch vehicles for satellites. Since the interview was conducted in the plant, and on the backdrop of these rockets, David Kopel makes the charge that Moore was misleading his viewers by implying that this particular plant still produced nuclear missiles. Moore later added to his statements from the movie, to say that satellites were equally responsible as nuclear missiles for US-instigated violence, to maintain this point.

It should be noted that McCollum, in the part of the interview that is shown, does not refute Moore's statements about Lockheed's weapons manufacture, which implies Moore is attacking (and McCollum is defending) Lockheed in general, not specifically the Littleton plant. As of 2005, Lockheed was still the world's largest defense contractor by revenue, which Moore states in the film.

Moore is also criticized by Richard Bushnell for a cartoon depicting a Ku Klux Klan member becoming the NRA and saying that the NRA was formed "the same year that the Klan became an illegal terrorist organization." While supporters claim that this is satire, critics charge that this misleads the viewers into thinking that the KKK became the NRA or that the NRA was founded by former KKK members. In fact the NRA was founded by anti-Confederate, anti-KKK Union officers, and Ulysses S. Grant, who as U.S. President signed the order declaring the KKK illegal, later became the NRA's eighth president.

Another criticism of Moore has to do with his editing of several Charlton Heston speeches. He juxtaposes Columbine pictures with footage of saying "from my cold dead, hands" and says that Heston held a rally ten days afterwards, then shows footage of Heston saying that he is refusing demands that he "don't come here" because "we're already here". David Hardy makes the charge that this juxtaposition implies that Heston deliberately held a rally after Columbine. The NRA however cancelled all Denver events (except for an annual meeting required by the group's bylaws, which NRA officials say is enforced by a New York State law mandating that the Colorado event could not be cancelled). The "cold, dead, hands" remark was from a different meeting a year later, and the "we're already here" remark was edited in from a different part of the speech, while Moore edited out lines where Heston says he is cancelling the events.

Regarding the shooting of Kayla Rolland, David Hardy also accuses Moore of misleading editing when he says "Just as he did after the Columbine shooting, Charlton Heston showed up in Flint, to have a big pro-gun rally." Hardy points out that Moore does not mention that the rally was eight months afterwards rather than immediate, nor that the rally was a "get out the vote" rally done at a time when Bush, Gore, and Moore himself were at rallies. Moore also shows a web page saying "48 hours after Kayla Rolland was pronounced dead" which, Hardy charges, implies that Heston had the rally 48 hours after the shooting, when the full quote from the web page refers not to Heston, but to Bill Clinton appearing on The Today Show 48 hours after the shooting.

Richard Bushnell also accuses Moore of omitting facts about Kayla Rolland's shooter when he says that "no one knew why the little boy wanted to shoot the little girl". Bushnell points to reports in the Dayton Daily News and Deseret News that suggest that the boy had already been suspended once for stabbing a student with a pencil, that his father was in jail, and that his uncle (from whose house he got the gun) was a drug dealer and the gun had been stolen and exchanged for drugs.

Bushnell also points to a part of the movie where Moore quotes Charlton Heston as saying that the US has a violence problem because "we had enough problems with civil rights in the beginning," implying that he and the NRA are racist. Heston's supporters say he was a strong supporter of civil rights in the 1960's and that Heston's remark most likely refers to racism being a cause of violence, not to a racist belief that blacks are the cause of violence.

Criticism from anti-gun groups

Moore argues that high gun ownership is not responsible for violence in America, and instead attempts to argue that there must be something about the American psyche that makes the nation uniquely prone to high rates of murder and shootings. Gun control advocates argue that it is the higher rates of gun ownership, especially handgun ownership, that are to blame for the higher gunshot homicide rate in the US.

In support of his claims, Moore argues that Canadian gun ownership levels are as high as the U.S. Ben Fritz in Spinsanity considers this misleading because "Moore ignores the fact that Canada has significantly fewer handguns and a much stricter gun licensing system." The 1996 International Crime (Victim) Survey from the Canada Department of Justice found that handguns were owned by 6.02% to 16.07% of households, depending on the province (the remainder being shotguns or long guns)."Firearms in Canada and Eight Other Western Countries: Selected Findings of the 1996 International Crime (Victim) Survey" Canada Firearms Centre. Accessed: 2006-06-29.. By contrast, gun deaths in the U.S. are generally related to handguns in inner cities. It is easier to legally purchase a handgun in the United States than in any other industrialized nation. In Bowling for Columbine, Moore claims that it is easy to buy guns in Canada too, and attempts to prove this by buying some ammunition. Conservative opponents of Moore rebuke this, claiming the purchase of a hunting rifle is well regulated in Canada, and that obtaining a handgun is even more difficult.

Criticism from liberals

The American Prospect published a piece by Garance Franke-Ruta criticizing the movie for ignoring the role that municipal governance plays in crime in America, and ignoring African-American urban victims of crime to focus on the unusual events of Columbine. "A decline in murders in New York City alone — from 1,927 in 1993 to 643 in 2001 — had, for example, a considerable impact on the declining national rate. Not a lot of those killers or victims were the sort of sports-hunters or militiamen Moore goes out of his way to interview and make fun of."Garance Franke-Ruta, Moore's the Pity, The American Prospect, November 22, 2002

Canada

Moore's critics also attack his comparisons of the United States and Canada. In attempting to depict Canada as a more equitable society, he describes a Toronto housing cooperative as the nearest Canadian equivalent to a "slum". Canadian cities, in fact, can and do have slum-like areas. Several neighbourhoods in Toronto, including Jane and Finch, Regent Park and St. James Town, are significantly less safe and clean than a housing cooperative.

When comparing the ethnicities of Canada and the United States, Moore states that "Canada is 13% non white" and "we're pretty much the same." The United States population is actually more than 30% non-white, since Moore counts Hispanics, which comprise approximately 13% of the U.S. population, as 'non-White'. Canada's minority demographics also differ from those of the United States — overall, Canada has a much smaller population of blacks and Hispanics, while at the same time having a higher percentage of Chinese and other Asians.

When comparing American and Canadian television news, Moore contrasts American local 6 p.m. newscasts with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's The National, which is a national news program on a public broadcasting network, similar to those of the BBC and PBS. Many Canadian local newscasts focus on crime and violence just as much as American newscasts do.

Unnamed media critics have also pointed out that leaving the front door unlocked is not, in fact, the norm in Toronto which Moore portrays it as being, and that at the time Moore was in Toronto, the province of Ontario had a work-for-welfare program similar to the one he blames in the film for a shooting in Michigan. However, it should be noted that Toronto is a very large city with a level of ethnic diversity Statistics Canada, 2001 Census, December 14, 2005 almost unparalleled in any other Canadian city (and the second highest in the world behind Miami), and can generally be regarded as an exception to the rule. Most other areas of Canada do exhibit the kind of situation depicted in the film (unlocked cars and homes, or less violence-oriented newscasts, etc.), but this is also true in many parts of the United States.

Non-gun related criticism

Critics point to a passage saying that the US gave $245 million to "Taliban-ruled Afghanistan" (see above). Although literally correct in the sense that the US did give the aid, its placement in a list of evil acts by the US and its careful wording suggest that the US gave the aid to the Taliban, when in fact this was humanitarian aid that was sent through the UN and nongovernmental organizations, and was intended to bypass the Taliban.

In the same "What a Wonderful World" sequence Moore claims that the United States trained and gave money to Osama bin Laden's terrorist groups. However, the bipartisan 9-11 Commission concluded in chapter 2 of its final report that the United States gave bin Laden himself little or no money or training. 9-11 Commission, THE FOUNDATION OF THE NEW TERRORISM They cite a passage from Ayman Al-Zawahiri's biography "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner" in which he denies accepting any money from the US. (note this may be propaganda and not true) 9-11 Commission, NOTES Bin Laden has also denied receiving money from the US, however he and his associates are well-known for their radically anti-American agenda and attempt to emphasize their greivances with, rather than their existing connections to, the United States. Large factions critical of American Foreign policy have maintained that the United States government in all probability supported and even funded bin Laden's Maktab al-Khadamat organization following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (as the MAK and the United States both opposed the Soviet presence there), though the US government and the CIA have denied this, claiming they gave aid only to Afghan fighters, not the MAK.

Former CIA officials have denied distributing any aid. "While it is impossible to prove a negative, all available evidence suggests that bin Laden was never funded, trained or armed by the CIA," said Richard Miniter in a Fox News report. The CIA, however, is well-known for keeping an enormous amount of information confidential, making this assertion less than absolute.

Moore's critics say the claim that CIA training somehow helped bin Laden plan the 9-11 attacks is doubtful, mostly due to the repeated denials on the part of United States officials following bin Laden's rise to notoriety. Many argue that the mastermind of the plot was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and not bin Laden, though at the same a majority of Americans identify bin Laden as the primary figure associated with 9-11.

Critics also take issue with Moore's reference to the ruler of Kuwait as a dictator, arguing that a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament logically cannot be a dictatorship.

Moore was also criticised by Dave Kopel of misrepresenting the contents of a plaque on the B-52 Bomber's display at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and accused of trying to equate "fighting enemy pilots and perpetrating war crimes against civilians" by showing the Vietnam War era B-52 Bomber immediately after showing footage of airplanes hitting the World Trade Center. Brendan Nyhan, writing for Spinsanity, has directly criticized Moore on the grounds that his "phrasing insinuates that the plaque praises the bombing of civilians"

Moore states that "...the plaque underneath it proudly proclaims that this plane killed Vietnamese people on Christmas Eve 1972..." while according to the Colorado-Mall website the plaque reads: "Dedicated to the men and women of the Strategic Air Command who flew and maintained the B-52D throughout its 26 year history in the command. Aircraft 55,003, with over 15,000 flying hours, is one of two B-52's credited with a confirmed MIG kill during the Vietnam conflict. Flying out of Utapao Royal Thai Naval Airfield in southeast Thailand, the crew of 'Diamond Lil' shot down a MIG northeast of Hanoi during "Linebacker II" action on Christmas eve 1972."

Criticism from Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Bowling for Columbine includes a brief interview with South Park co-creator Matt Stone, who suggests that South Park was largely inspired by Stone's childhood experiences in Littleton, Colorado. Stone presents a vision of Littleton as painfully normal, and highly intolerant of non-conformist behavior. In a segment that followed, an uncredited cartoon in a style strongly reminiscent of South Park is featured, depicting the National Rifle Association and Ku Klux Klan as interchangeable evil organizations. However, this sequence was not the work of Matt Stone, nor that of Trey Parker. It became a point of contention between the two and Moore, as they believed Moore meant to imply they had contributed to his film beyond the interview. Associated Press, ‘Team America’ takes on moviegoers, MSNBC, October 15, 2004 Subsequent releases attempted to distance this implication by delaying the animation until ten minutes later in the film, and correctly crediting the animation. The animation was in fact made by FlickerLab and written by Moore. According to Stone and Parker, the appearance of Moore as a suicide bomber in their 2004 film World Police is their sardonic response to this incident.

Awards and nominations

Gross

With a budget of only $4,000,000, Bowling for Columbine grossed $40,000,000 worldwide, including $21,575,207 in the United States. The documentary also broke box office records internationally, becoming the highest-grossing documentary of all time in the U.K., Australia, and Austria. These records were later eclipsed by Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

References

References

See also

External links

Critical views

2002 films | Columbine High School massacre | Best Documentary Feature Academy Award winners | Documentary films | Films directed by Michael Moore | Gun politics | Independent films | United Artists films | Political films

Bowling for Columbine | Bowling for Columbine | Bowling for Columbine | Bowling a Columbine | Bowling for Columbine | ボウリング・フォー・コロンバイン | Bowling for Columbine | Bowling for Columbine | Bowling for Columbine

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Bowling for Columbine".

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