Bowling for Columbine

Bowling for Columbine
Directed by	Michael Moore
Written by	Michael Moore
Produced by	Michael Moore
Distributed by	MGM Distribution Co.
Release date	October 11 2002
Running time	120 min.
Language	English
Budget	$4.3 million

Bowling for Columbine is a controversial documentary film written, directed, produced by, and starring Michael Moore. It won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for Best Documentary Features and the César Award for Best Foreign Film. The film opened on October 11, 2002 and brought Moore international attention.

Film content

The film explores what Moore suggests are the 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 related issues. The film looks into the nature of violence in the United States, focusing on guns as a symbol of both American freedom and its self-destruction.

In Moore's discussions with various people, including South Park co-creator Matt Stone, the National Rifle Association's then-president Charlton Heston, and musician Marilyn Manson, he seeks to explain why the Columbine massacre occurred and why the United States has a higher number of violent crimes, especially crimes involving guns and charges that the occurrence of violent crimes in the US is relatively higher than other developed nations.

Bowling

The film title originates from the story that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two students responsible for the Columbine High School massacre, attended a school bowling class early that morning, at 6:00 am, before they committed the attacks at school starting at 11:18 am. Later investigation showed that this was based on mistaken recollections, and Glenn Moore of the Golden Police Department concluded that they were absent from school on the day of the attack.

Moore incorporates the concept of bowling in other ways as well. For example, a Michigan militia 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. Moore asks if the school system is responding to the real needs of their students or if they are reinforcing fear. Moore also interviews two young residents of Oscoda, Michigan, in a local bowling alley and 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 U.S. Air Force.

Moore suggests that bowling could have been as responsible for the attacks on the school as Marilyn Manson or even Bill Clinton, who launched bombing attacks on several countries around that time.

Free gun for opening a bank account

An early scene narrates how Moore discovered a bank in Michigan that would give customers a free hunting rifle when they made a deposit of a certain size into a time deposit account. The movie follows Moore as he goes to the bank, makes his deposit, fills out the forms, and awaits the result of a background check before walking out of the bank carrying a brand new Weatherby hunting rifle.

Just before leaving the bank, Moore asks if it is not dangerous to hand out guns in a bank.

Michigan Militia

Moore visits a target practice session for members of the Michigan Militia. He gets their general views on gun ownership, including "You can't expect the police to protect you," and "If you're not armed, you're not responsible." One militiaman says he has an M16 rifle as a personal weapon at home.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun montage

About 20 minutes into the film, the song Happiness Is a Warm Gun plays during a violent montage

• people buying guns
• residents of Virgin, Utah, a town that passed a law requiring all residents to own guns
• people firing guns at carnivals and shooting ranges
• footage of Denise Ames firing an Assault rifle while wearing a bikini bottom
• footage of Carey McWilliams, a blind man who is a gun enthusiast
• We see a man shoot another man as he walks by; this is footage of Gary Plauche murdering Jeff Doucett, a man who had kidnapped his son and possibly molested him
• The suicide of Budd Dwyer
• The suicide of Daniel V. Jones
• A 1993 event in which Emilio Nuñez shot his ex-wife Maritza Martin to death during an interview on the Telemundo program Ocurrio Asi
• a man who takes his shirt off and is shot during a riot

Weapons of mass destruction

Early in the movie Moore links the violent behavior of the Columbine shooters to the presence in Littleton of a large defense establishment, manufacturing rocket technology. It is implied that the presence of this facility within the community, and the acceptance of institutionalized violence as a solution to conflict - be it real, implied or potential - contributed to the mindset that led to the massacre.

Moore conducts 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."

"What a Wonderful World"

The movie then cuts to a montage of 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 (set to the song "What a Wonderful World" performed by Louis Armstrong).

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

1. 1953: U.S. overthrows Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq of Iran. U.S. installs Shah as dictator.
2. 1954: U.S. overthrows democratically-elected President Arbenz of Guatemala. 200,000 civilians killed.
3. 1963: U.S. backs assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem.
4. 1963-1975: American military kills 4 million people in Southeast Asia.
5. September 11 1973: U.S. stages coup in Chile. Democratically-elected President Salvador Allende assassinated. Dictator Augusto Pinochet installed. 5,000 Chileans murdered.
6. 1977: U.S. backs military rulers of El Salvador. 70,000 Salvadorans and four American nuns 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 of dollars 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 President of Panama) disobeys orders from Washington. U.S. invades Panama and removes Noriega. 3,000 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 to present: 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. Sept. 11, 2001: Osama bin Laden uses his expert CIA training to murder 3,000 people.

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

Climate of fear

Moore's central theme is that the Columbine massacre is not attributable to the easy availability of guns in the US, but is instead a product of the "climate of fear" he contends is engendered by the American media. He illustrates this with news clips, each tending to indicate the prominence given to violence and crime in news reports. Interviews also illustrate the "security-minded" attitude of US residents.

Moore attempts to contrast this with the attitude prevailing in Canada, where he states that gun ownership is at similar levels to the US. He illustrates his thesis by visiting neighborhoods in Canada, near the Canada-US border, where he finds front doors unlocked and much less concern over crime and security.

In this section, a montage of possible causes for gun violence are stated by television persona. Many claim links with violence in television, cinema and computer games; towards the end of the montage, however, a series of statements all claim Marilyn Manson's responsibility. Following this is an interview between Moore and Marilyn Manson. Manson shares his ideas about America's climate with Moore, stating that he believes U.S. society is based on "fear and consumption," citing Colgate commercials that promise "people aren't going to talk to you [if you have bad breath]" and other commercials containing fear-based messages; "girls aren't going to fuck you [if you have acne.]" When Moore asks Manson what he would say to the killers if he could have spoken to them on the day of the shooting, Manson replies, "I wouldn't say a thing. I would just listen to them ... and that's what nobody did."

Kmart refund

Moore takes two Columbine victims to the American superstore Kmart headquarters in Troy, Michigan, ostensibly to claim a refund on the bullets still lodged in their bodies. After a number of attempts to evade the issue, a Kmart spokesperson says that the firm will change its policy and phase out the sale of ammunition. "We've won," says Moore, in disbelief. "That was more than we asked for."

Charlton Heston

At the end of the movie Moore secures an interview with NRA president Charlton Heston, who presided at an annual NRA meeting at Denver, near Littleton, shortly after the Littleton incident, despite having been asked to stay away by the mayor and other leaders. Moore describes himself truthfully as an NRA member when securing the interview, but does not give the purpose of the movie he is making. He questions and challenges Heston about the NRA's presence and its appropriateness. Heston reacts to these challenges by walking away from the interview (with the cameras still rolling). Moore leaves a photograph of six year old school shooting victim Kayla Rolland in Heston's house when he departs.

Reception

Reviews for the film were overwhelmingly positive, with a 96% rating on rottentomatoes.com, thus earning a "certified fresh" award. Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune wrote, "It's unnerving, stimulating, likely to provoke anger and sorrow on both political sides—and, above all, it's extremely funny."

Some reviews were not as unequivocally glowing. A.O. Scott of the New York Times warned, "The slippery logic, tendentious grandstanding and outright demagoguery on display in Bowling for Columbine should be enough to give pause to its most ardent partisans, while its disquieting insights into the culture of violence in America should occasion sober reflection from those who would prefer to stop their ears." Desson Thomson of the Washington Post thought that the film lacked a coherent message, asking "A lot of this is amusing and somehow telling. But what does it all add up to?"

Specific criticisms

Free gun when you open a bank account

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.

Moore later responded to these criticisms, writing,"Nothing was done out of the ordinary other than to phone ahead and ask permission to let me bring a camera in to film me opening up my account." He also states that the background check took less than ten minutes and he was handed the rifle five minutes later. Moore posted a compilation of out-takes from the documentary to support his version of events. This video shows Jacobson explaining the process to Moore, including that the rifles are held in the bank's vault. The footage in which an employee states that the guns are stored in the bank's vault appears in televised broadcasts of the film.

Gun ownership

Moore argues that high gun ownership is not responsible for violence in America, and instead that there must be something about the structure of American society, the American psyche or the media that makes the nation uniquely prone to high rates of murder and shootings. In support of his claims, Moore argues that Canadian gun ownership levels are comparable to those of the U.S. In the online blog Spinsanity, Ben Fritz asserts that "Moore ignores the fact that Canada has significantly fewer handguns and a much stricter gun licensing system."

Ignoring the role of municipal governance

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 violence while focusing 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."

The American history cartoon

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 recalls Littleton as painfully conformist and intolerant, turning teenagers into frustrated outcasts.

Later in the film, an animated segment, written by Moore and produced by FlickerLab, attempts to link America's enthusiasm for guns to racism, and at one point depicts the National Rifle Association and Ku Klux Klan as interchangeable institutions of white supremacy. Matt Stone and Trey Parker were first asked to animate it. Stone and his Team America co-creator Trey Parker have objected to what they believe are close similarities between the style of the cartoon segment (which they played no part in producing) and that of South Park. Matt Stone later took out his frustration on Moore by portraying him in the movie Team America: World Police as a gibbering, overweight, hot-dog eating buffoon who straps explosives to his body to blow up the American do-gooders. The puppet was stuffed with ham when it blew.

Weapons of mass destruction

After the release of the movie, McCollum has clarified that the plant no longer produces missiles (the plant manufactured parts for intercontinental ballistic missiles with a nuclear warhead in the mid-1980s), but rockets used for launching satellites. The plant was also used to take former nuclear missiles out of service, converting decommissioned Titan missiles into launch vehicles for satellites.

As of 2005, Lockheed was still the world's largest defense contractor by revenue, which Moore states in the film.

What a Wonderful World

In the "What a Wonderful World" sequence, Moore claims that the U.S. trained and gave money to Osama bin Laden's terrorist groups. The official position of the United States Department of State is that the U.S. never trained, armed or funded bin Laden, or the Arab mujahedin group of which he was a founding member, the Maktab al-Khidamat, or M.A.K. The U.S. State Department asserts that military aid went exclusively to Afghan combatants, and that there was no relationship whatsoever with Osama bin Laden. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission concluded in chapter 2 of its final report that the CIA had little or nothing to do with bin Laden, because the CIA regarded his Arab group as having been "militarily insignificant". They cite a passage from Ayman al-Zawahiri's biography Knights Under the Prophet's Banner in which Al-Zawahiri denies accepting any money from the US. This is not accepted universally. Former British Secretary of State Robin Cook believed the CIA had provided arms to the Arab mujahedin including bin Laden, and in an interview with CNN's Larry King, Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia divulged that Osama bin Laden was appreciative of his personal efforts in bringing the United States to Afghanistan to help him fight the Soviets.

The CIA also denies staging the Chilean coup, though there is considerable evidence for their involvement, and some dispute whether Allende's death was a suicide or homicide. See also: United States intervention in Chile

Charlton Heston

Moore has been accused of editing several recordings of Heston's speeches, including speeches from long before Columbine, to create the impression that Heston made all such statements in a single speech and all with relation to Columbine. Moore is also accused of editing Heston's remarks during his interview to make him appear to be racist; such critics point to Heston's early and continued support for civil rights (including public appearances for and with Martin Luther King, Jr.) as evidence that Heston is not a racist and that Moore is not portraying him accurately. Heston literally states on camera "I'm exercising one of the rights passed on down to me from those wise old dead white guys that invented this country". There is a cut immediately preceding this remark, so there is a chance the viewer does not get to hear what was said by either Moore or Heston immediately before it. When Moore explains his findings about the USA inexplicably being the country with the highest rate of gun violence in the developed world, Heston states "Well, we have probably a more mixed ethnicity than other countries." In an interview for British television on the DVD, Moore claims he, in contrast to certain other media personalities, deliberately avoids influencing his interviewees, but just asks his questions and lets them answer whatever is on their mind.

Awards and nominations

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

During the screening at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival the film received a 13-minute standing ovation. It also won "Most Popular International Film" at the 2002 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Saying, "We do not want this war, Mr. Bush," Michael Moore used his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards on March 23, 2003 as an opportunity to proclaim his opposition to the United States led invasion of Iraq, which had begun just a few days prior.

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 in the U.K., Australia, and Austria. These records were later eclipsed by Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

See also

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

External links

• Bowling for Columbine Movie site
  • Bowling for Columbine library and sources
• Bowling for Columbine at IMDb

• United Nations International Study on Firearm Regulation Country-by-country statistics
• "Bowl-o-Drama" Forbes Magazine charges that several claims in the film are misleading
• "The Truth About Bowling for Columbine: Documentary or Fiction?" by David Hardy
  • "A defense of Michael Moore and Bowling for Columbine". An open letter to David Hardy by Erik Möller. Published and discussed at Kuro5hin