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Trampling Our Values

Cash on Delivery
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
by Mae Bunagan

Page Inflation
The Rising Cost of Textbooks
by Lily Huang

Democrats' Dilemma
Finding a Message in Opposition
by Eli Sprecher with Danny Schlozman

Courting Disaster
The Case of Rehnquist v. Liberties
by Patrick Taylor Smith

Starving for Treatment
Inadequate Coverage for Eating Disorders
by Leah Litman

Introspective
Deconstructing the T
by Danny Schlozman

Salmagundi

The Back Page
Moore Strikes Again
by Brendan Connors

In his most provocative film yet, Michael Moore applies his aggressive journalism and caustic wit to the issue of gun violence in America. Bowling for Columbine seeks to answer Moore's question of America: “Are we a nation of gun nuts, or just plain nuts?” Moore seeks primarily to explain why the United States is so violent a country in relation to the rest of the world.

In a typical year, France has 255 firearm homicides. Canada has 165. The UK has 68. Japan, a nation of 127 million people, has only 39 gun murders a year. In the United States, that number reaches a staggering 11,127. Why this huge discrepancy? Do Americans have too many guns lying around? Are we just more violent than people in other countries? Moore's answers to these questions come as a hodgepodge of anecdotes, interviews, and the “ambush” style journalism for which he is so well known. Peppered among these are interludes that range from the deeply moving to the truly bizarre, including a cartoon featuring an extremely condensed history of the US hosted by a talking bullet.

Bowling for Columbine is certainly Moore's most ambitious film yet, though his simpler but more focused previous films, Roger & Me and The Big One often got their point across much more clearly. Moore considers the problems of gun violence against the backdrop of Littleton, Colorado, home to the nation's deadliest school shooting at Columbine High School just four years ago. Moore sits down with James Nichols, brother to Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City bombers. James is a firm supporter of gun ownership, maintaining that “once people realize how they have been enslaved by the US government, they will revolt… with anger” (emphasis his). He also professes to sleep with a loaded weapon under his pillow, which he at one point, when showing it too Moore, points it at his own head as a joke. Later, Moore presses him as to the limits of gun ownership. Though the Constitution grants the right to bear “arms,” Nichols concedes that Americans do not have an inalienable right to stockpile weapons grade plutonium. As he puts it: “There are some wackos out there.”

As Moore delves deeper into these issues, he explores many common explanations for why America is so much more violent than the rest of the industrialized world. Many blame violent movies, music, and television shows, often singling out shock rocker Marilyn Manson with particular venom. Yet America exports its culture all over the world, and it doesn't seem to have the same effects elsewhere. To the argument that poverty in America breeds violence, Moore responds that Canada and Western Europe have unemployment rate around twice that of the US but do not have the same levels of gun violence. Moore fails to mention, however, that Canada and most Western European countries tend to have a much better social welfare system than the US does and thus may have few incidences of extreme poverty. An overabundance of guns cannot completely explain the situation, either. Though countries such as Great Britain have outlawed the use of handguns entirely, Canada still has an estimated seven million guns among thirty million Canadians. And as Moore demonstrates, ammunition is easy to come by at the local Canadian Wal-Mart even for a foreigner such as himself.

In one point that Moore tries to drive home throughout the film, he contends that Americans live in a culture of fear that sets us apart from the rest of the world. American news media seem to have a fixation on violent news stories. Americans live behind locked and alarmed doors, some even in gated communities. When the news isn't announcing the latest homicide or shooting, it's instructing us on what else we should be afraid of, whether it be shark attacks, killer bees, or escalators gone awry. The ever-present threat of terrorism doesn't help very much either. And over the last several decades, Americans have bought a quarter of a billion guns to keep us even safer. According to several Canadians he interviews, Americans are simply too quick to reach for their guns in a moment of trouble. One woman remarked that her sibling's family had moved to the US some time ago, and the change in their levels of paranoia changed drastically.

Of course, a movie of this scope and ambition is going to raise many more questions than it can answer in its two hours, and Moore sometimes overextends himself and oversimplifies his arguments. Moore also tends to go off on tangents that aren't always directly related to the central theme of the movie; when this is done for humor value, it's certainly entertaining, but when it degenerates into a rant it can be distracting and occasionally sound preachy. Moore places heavy blame on “war hawks,” those who push for military aggression to support the America's political interests regardless of the loss of civilian life. He cites the irony of a Lockheed-Martin weapons production facility's proximity to Columbine High School, implying that Washington policy makers' indifference to human life on the international scale might translate to indifference at home. He mentions repeatedly that on April 20, 1999, the day of the Columbine massacre, the US killed more people in the bombing of Kosovo than any other day of the war. While such a hypothesis is intriguing, Moore offers absolutely no evidence to back up this claim, save a concurring opinion from Marilyn Manson.

Moore also dismisses somewhat out of hand the argument that America's violent history figures into our violent present, citing Britain and Germany as counterexamples. Though the British Empire certainly relied on force to rule a quarter of the globe, this systematic violence did not play a role in the lives of ordinary British citizens. It happened thousands of miles away, leaving its brutal impact on what are some of the most war ravaged parts of the world today. And while Germany's Third Reich has become a historical paradigm for state sanctioned violence, that country went through a purging of such violence from its culture in the postwar years. Yet America's violent past has been allowed to continue through to the present day, without interruption and without rebuke.

Most frustrating of all, Moore expresses great hopes to change society but doesn't say how. The closest he comes is that we should be more like Canada. But unlike his previous movies, in which there are clearly defined ‘bad guys' that he tries to go after, Bowling does not blame any single person or factor for our troubles. Perhaps as a result, Moore engages in less of the ambush journalism for which he has sometimes been criticized. In his past films, Moore spent most of his time badgering receptionists and public relations people when CEOs and other senior management refused to speak to him. Moore was able to keep these encounters to a minimum in Bowling, and his one confrontation at K-Mart resulted in its administration deciding to phase out the sale of ammunition from all of its stores.

As Moore admits, the arguments that he makes are no more plausible than blaming poverty, violent movies, or Marilyn Manson. Or perhaps no less plausible than blaming tenpin bowling, which Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris played on the morning of April 20, 1999, before murdering fourteen of their classmates and teachers and injuring dozens more. Perhaps it is a combination of all of these factors that have made the most powerful nation on earth one of the most violent. One cannot expect a two-hour film that has made it into the semi-mainstream to analyze these issues in the depth that they truly require. But it is admirable enough that Moore brings these issues to the public-and Bowling for Columbine can and should serve as a starting point for much further discussion.

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu