Bowling for Columbine

Bowling for Columbine
IMDB 8.3/10 (44,772 votes)
Directed by	Michael Moore
Written by	Michael Moore
Produced by	Michael Moore
Starring	Michael Moore Matt Stone Charlton Heston Marilyn Manson
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date	October 11 2002
Running time	120 min.
Language	English
Budget	$4 million

Bowling for Columbine is a 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 been thoroughly debunked. Moore suggests that it is as reasonable to blame their actions on bowling than 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).

Moore's critics state that he deceptively exaggerates historical facts and dispute some of his claims , while defenders argue that he describes well-established historical facts in colorful language. Others have simply questioned the relevance of including such material in the film, since the rest of the documentary has very little to do with American foreign policy.

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 the 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 died. Dictator General Augusto Pinochet is installed leading to the disappearance and death of 3,500 Chileans.
6. 1977: U.S. backs military rulers of El Salvador. 7,000 Salvadorans and four American nuns are killed.
7. 1980s: U.S. trains Osama bin Laden and fellow Muslim terrorists to kill Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan War. CIA gives them $3 billion.
8. 1981: Reagan administration trains and funds Contras to fight communist government. 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 and illegally gives Iran weapons to kill Iraqis.
11. 1989: CIA agent Manuel Noriega (also serving as president of Panama) disobeys orders from Washington. U.S. invades Panama and removes Noriega.
12. 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait with weapons from U.S.
13. 1991: U.S. enters Iraq. Bush reinstates dictator of Kuwait.
14. 1998: U.S. bombs “weapons factory” in Sudan. The factory turns out to be making aspirin.
15. 1991-date of the film: U.S. planes bomb Iraq on a weekly basis. The United Nations estimates that 500,000 Iraqi children die from bombing and sanctions.
16. 2000-2001: U.S. gives Taliban-ruled Afghanistan $245 million in aid for famine relief.
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's expert CIA training helped him plan the attack.

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 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. Moore's critics say the film omits key facts while stringing together other facts to lead to a conclusion, they say, is blatantly untrue, or at the least somewhat deceptive.

For example, an early scene has Moore visiting a savings bank which had advertised a complimentary firearm upon the customer's creating a bank account. Moore records his completing of the savings account application, then the film's next scene shows him wielding a gun (specifically, a rifle) in front of the bank. This sequence may lead one to believe is that it is possible to obtain a free gun immediately upon signing an application and without background checks/investigations. What actually occurred between the scenes is that a thorough background screening over the course of weeks was performed on Moore before he was allowed to receive a gun (also not given at the bank). Moore filmed disparate occurrences and strung them together to persuade viewers to conclude the gun was received shortly after opening the account. While the use of free firearms as a marketing ploy may be legitimately questioned, Moore's critics question the means by which he makes this argument.

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, Moore's critics claim 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, his critics claims 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, Moore's opponents argue 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. Many of his detractors 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, gee, dad goes off to the factory every day - he builds missiles. These are weapons 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, critics charge that Moore was misleading his viewers by implying that this particular plant still produced nuclear missiles. Some critics have also incorrectly claimed that Moore actually makes that statement. However, he does not, which is why McCollum does not balk at his statement in the interview. (Moore later changed his claim on the DVD, to say that the satellites were equally responsible for US-instigated violence, attempting to maintain this point.)

Moore is also criticized 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". Critics charge that this juxtaposition implies that Heston deliberately held a rally after Columbine. The NRA however says they 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.

Conservatives also accuse 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." He 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, critics charge, implies that Heston had the rally 48 hours after the shooting, when the full quote from the web page refers to Bill Clinton on The Today Show, not to Heston.

Moore's opponents also accuse him of omitting facts about Kayla Rolland's shooter, saying that "no one knew why the little boy wanted to shoot the little girl" without mentioning 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.

Critics also point 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. However, Moore's critics instead claim that high gun ownership in Canada and some other countries is mainly related to hunting rifles, which, they say, are stringently regulated by the government, and mostly owned by people in small towns and rural areas. 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. They say obtaining a handgun is substantially more difficult.

Criticism from progressives

The American Prospect published a piece 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."

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." Moore's opponents take issue with this, claiming the United States population is actually more than 30% non-white (assuming Hispanics, which comprise approximately 13% of the U.S. population, are counted 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 Latinos, while at the same time having a much larger Asian population.

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 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. However, the bipartisan 9-11 Commission concluded in chapter 2 of its final report that the United States gave bin Laden little or no money or training. 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.

Bin Laden has also denied receiving money from the US, and former CIA officials have denied distributing it. "While it is impossible to prove a negative, all available evidence suggests that bin Laden was never funded, trained or armed by the CIA," says Richard Miniter.

Moore's critics say the claim that CIA training somehow helped bin Laden plan the 9-11 attacks is therefore highly doubtful, arguing the mastermind of the plot was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and not bin Laden.

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.

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 NRA and KKK 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. 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 Team America: World Police is their sardonic response to this incident. Moore's critics claim that many unnamed people have tried to credit the animation to Parker & Stone without any research.

Awards and nominations

• 2002 Winner, 55th Anniversary Prize, Cannes Film Festival
• 2003 Winner, Cesar Award, Best Foreign Film
• 2003 Winner, International Documentary Association (IDA), - Best Documentary of All Time
• 2003 Winner, Academy Award, Best Documentary

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

• The United Nations International Study on Firearm Regulation has country-by-country statistics about both gun ownership rates and death by firearm rates.

See also

• Moore's other documentaries Roger & Me, The Big One and Fahrenheit 9/11
• List of documentaries

External links

• Official Bowling for Columbine homepage
• Michael Moore's homepage
  • Michael Moore's defense of his film against criticisms
• New York Times review of the film
• Bowling for Columbine at IMDb

Critical views

• "Factual errors and staged scenes in Bowling for Columbine" from spinsanity.org
• "Bowl-o-Drama" from Forbes Magazine, charges that several claims in the film are misleading
• "Bowling for Truth" by Richard Bushnell, criticism of several key scenes and arguments of the film
• "The Truth About Bowling for Columbine: Documentary or Fiction?" by David T. Hardy.
  • "A defense of Michael Moore and Bowling for Columbine". An open letter to David Hardy by Erik Möller. Published and discussed at Kuro5hin
• A Moore-style documentary that aims to show the distortion in Bowling for Columbine
• "BFC Criticisms" - seventeen criticisms of the movie