February 15th, 2003

Bowling For Columbine is an attempt by Michael Moore to get some answers behind America’s gun culture and it’s affects on the nation’s society. Its title is a reaction to how rock music was cited as a cause of the Columbine massacre, and Moore highlights a little known fact that on the morning of the shooting the killers went bowling. Moore’s point is “those scapegoats make about as much sense as blaming bowling. After all, Eric and Dylan were bowlers, they took bowling class at Columbine -was bowling responsible for their evil deeds?” Fundamentally, this is a film about responsibility.

Moore looks at the media and cites their role in creating a ‘culture of fear’. He shows us TV news crews chasing police for murders in South Central Los Angeles “If it bleeds, it leads”. And shows how disproportional their reporting is. Moore talks to Barry Glassner, author of Culture of Fear and they discuss some of the facts in relation to the unfounded fears. “Why, as crime rates plunged throughout the 1990s, did two-thirds of Americans believe they were soaring?”1. In the beginning Moore talks to a group of gun enthusiasts called the Michigan Militia. He portrays them as paranoid; “Who’s going to defend your kids? The cops? The Federal Government?” says one of the militia. But Moore does not explain that this group “was created in the wake of the Ruby Ridge massacre in Idaho in 1992. At Ruby Ridge a young boy and his mother – who was armed only with an 18-month-old baby – were murdered by Federal snipers in a bungled and wholly inappropriate raid on a peaceful (if slightly paranoid) white separatist family. The exact same snipers committed a similar atrocity a few months later at Waco, Texas.”2 With this in mind, it would seem Moore is guilty of manipulating the media to promote his own concerns.

The story of a six year old child who took his uncle’s gun and shot dead Kayla Rolland, one of his classmates, serves to attack America’s substandard welfare system. Moore contends that it was the demands of America’s welfare to work scheme that meant this child was not properly supervised because his mother had to work long hours, which included an eighty mile bus ride to and from work. Having spent much of the film clarifying that the majority of American’s with guns aren’t urban blacks, but suburban white males, Moore undermines his point by showing us the case of Kayla Rowland and thus reinforces the link between under-privilege and gun crime.

Moore could be forgiven for contradicting himself. It’s clearly an extremely complicated issue, and there are points where Moore seems genuinely confused with his findings. But ultimately Moore’s film conveys a worrying message that Americans are victims. Victims of the media and the ‘culture of fear’ it promotes. Victims of a poor welfare system. Even victims of their own freedoms; guns being a constitutional right for American citizens. In the end Moore chooses to blame corporations like Wal-Mart and organisations like the National Rifle Association (NRA). In an interview in the Observer Moore said “I believe in the first three words of our constitution: ‘We, the people.” (The Observer Newspaper Sunday October 27, 2002) But clearly this belief does not extend so far as to credit the people with responsibility for their nation.

Posted on February 15th, 2003 by Truphtooph
Filed under: Film