I know, you’re probably getting sick of all my posting about guns and gun control. (What can I say…it’s summer, I’ve been shooting a lot…it’ll pass.) But actually this thread has nothing to do with debating gun control or any other social or political issue, which is why I put it here and not in GD. This is about the simple fact that as an effective film, Bowling for Columbine is a miserable failure which does not successfully flow together or make convincing arguments.
I’ve been watching it (just for the hell of it - saw it when it first came out, forgot it) and I really am awestruck by how terribly strung together all of its arguments are.
The militia members that Moore interviewed come off as extremely nice, intelligent, logical, and level headed men - whether or not you agree with their views, they do not present the viewer with a particularly negative view of militias at all.
The transition to talking about McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing is a pointless diversion that does not really connect to the Columbine shooting at all - the only thing they have in common is that they were highly publicized acts of violence. They were done for totally different reasons, under completely different circumstances - one was an of terrorism by men who were fighting for a specific political cause, and one was a shooting by two deeply disturbed kids with severe mental problems spurred on by their being bullied at school.
Interviewing the Lockheed Martin guy at the missile factory? What has that got to do with anything? Moore seems to be trying to make some kind of connection between military rockets and the fact that they were being built in Littleton, with the desire to kill that the Columbine boys felt. It doesn’t make sense. There are factories that make military vehicles and equipment all over the US and because ONE town that hosted one such facility was the site of a shooting, all of a sudden there’s a connection? Clutching at straws.
“Wonderful World” montage that displays all the different acts of aggression or atrocity on the part of the American military (in response to the Lockheed boss’s admittedly shaky claim that America only fights defensive wars.) This goes on for way too long and has nothing to do with Columbine, gun control or anything else. And then later on Moore goes on to seemingly contradict this montage by displaying all the atrocities committed by other countries as well.
Interview with Marilyn Manson. This is the only good part of the movie. Manson is awesome.
Oh boy. In my opinion the most truly illogical part of the film - the cartoon “American history lesson.” This is in NO WAY an accurate summary of American history, whatsoever. It’s simplified and falsified to the point of absurdity. The Puritans did not flee to America because they were “afraid of being persecuted.” They fled because they WERE being persecuted. The Pilgrims were not, as the cartoon showed, immediately greeted by Indians holding out friendly hands who were then gunned down for no reason at all. There were a lot of Indian attacks on the early settlers, they weren’t just hippies or something. The Second Amendment didn’t say “every white man could keep his gun” - maybe that’s what it was in practice, but bringing up the race card serves no purpose here. The white Americans did not “kidnap thousands of Africans because they were afraid of doing work!” as the narrator says - the white Americans purchased slaves (which had been enslaved by their fellow Africans, in most cases, and then SOLD, not kidnapped) out of economic motives, mostly because white indentured servitude was thinning out for various reasons (the abolition of debt bondage, better conditions in Britain, and other factors - I wrote my senior history thesis on the transition from white to black labor in the colonies.) It had nothing to do with anyone being “afraid.” And the NRA had absolutely nothing to do with the KKK, as this cartoon implies.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of American history can see that this is a really terrible way to try to argue a point - in this case, the point being that America is a nation ruled by “fear.” Or something.
The whole portion shortly after this part about “black males” and how the nation is supposedly terrified of black male criminals, how blacks are all over the news, etc etc…this has NOTHING to do with Columbine! It’s a complete digression and waste of time! What on earth is it doing in this movie?
The end, with Michael Moore beleaguering Charlton Heston in his own home - the man already suffering from early stages of Alzheimer’s, most likely - and badgering him about some random girl who was shot to death which has absolutely no connection whatsoever with Heston, the NRA, or anything that either of those two groups represent. Moore does NOT come off as a class act here - he comes off as a really, really annoying shmuck.
OK. There it is. I’m not arguing against gun control here, I’m not even criticising Moore’s politics - I’m just objectively pointing out some major flaws in this movie, and when I say major flaws, I mean like the San Andreas Fault, the Grand Canyon and the Marianas Trench all rolled into one. It’s ridiculous. Why was this movie so well-liked and considered such a masterpiece? It is simply not an intelligent, persuasive piece of propaganda.
When I say propaganda, I’m not ascribing a negative connotation to that word. Propaganda is something that’s intended to convince an audience - relying on a mix of emotional appeals and logic, statistics or other arguments. This film has none of those in any significant quantity.
I think you’re working from a false premise, namely that the movie is solely and specifically about Columbine. It’s not. It’s about American violence in general.
Even if that’s true, it makes no coherent argument. It doesn’t really explain why America supposedly has so much violence. There’s no strong evidence to support him.
The question of evidence is a completely different issue. You said that this thread is not about any social or political issues, but about how Bowling from Columbine does not work as a piece of propaganda.
As for the film’s argument, I believe it’s that American violence is self-perpetuating. America is violent, which causes violence, which means its people must be violent to defend themselves, and so forth. The root cause is, according to the film, a deep culture of fear.
Yeah, how people got “anti-gun” from this movie is beyond me. What it did criticize was a casual attitude towards guns, which I’m sure any sane person agrees is a bad thing, no matter how pro-gun you are. Guns should be used and stored with great care and gun safety should take first priority.
As noted, there’s nothing wrong with a documentary having a bias, and serving an agenda. And Moore started with a really interesting subject – why is there so much more gun violence in the U.S. than in other countries where there’s a lot of legal gun ownership? But he used a scattergun (so to speak) technique that didn’t really add up to a coherent picture.
If I were going to use a history lesson to talk about the subject, it would probably concentrate more on the linking of genocide with Westward expansion in the 19th century, the legacy of the Civil War, the big boost given to violent organized crime by Prohibition, and the even bigger boost given by the current Prohibition of about every recreational drug except alcohol.
Lot of different kinds of people have different kinds of guns. I wouldn’t think that ordinary, otherwise peaceful hunters or hobbyists have much to do with the criminal use of guns.
Anyway, it’s a huge subject, hard to cover in a single documentary.
Even though I might otherwise be inclined to agree with Michael Moore about a few things, he is such an anal fistula that I’d prefer to be wrong if being right meant agreeing with him.
Well, there are some good points raised here, I’ll admit, but then I’ll ask - why did Moore introduce the issue of guns and gun control into the movie at all? If it’s supposed to be about the sensationalistic American media and culture of fear, why bring gun laws into it? It dilutes the message.
To me, Bowling for Columbine was simply an examiniation of the culture of violence and fear in the US, and Moore’s way of starting a discussion of why things are the way they are. I think he brought guns and gun laws into it for two reasons:
A) Gun ownership is often blamed for the United States’s crime rate, and he painted a picture of a peaceful, safe Canada with comparibly high gun-ownership to challenge that belief.
B) Moore does see the culture of gun ownership in the US as a symptom of our facination with violence. Hence the inclusion of the bank offering hunting rifles to new account holders, and the “Happiness is a Warm Gun” montage.
I guess this movie got the reputation of being “anti-gun” because Moore is a lefty, but I think it’s anything but.
I thought it was quite a good movie. The Charlton Heston part made me squirm (not because I’m fond of Heston; it just didn’t work), but the Marilyn Manson and James Nichols interviews made up for it.
I don’t think Moore comes anywhere near explaining why we’re so violent. Even though he claims to be looking for the causes, all he does is trot out a bunch of potential reasons that have been gone over a thousand times. I don’t have a big problem with that, though: if it were easy to figure out, maybe we’d do something about it.
That said, I think it was an interesting examination of the pervasiveness of violence in American culture, and about people’s blind spots concerning it. I thought the Lockheed guy who couldn’t see how his great big missiles could possibly be related to murders was priceless, as was James Nichols’s declaration that there are a lot of crazy people out there.
Propaganda isn’t supposed to make coherent sense - it’s supposed to motivate its audience in a given direction. And bullshit usually gets people moving better then logic. A lot of what Moore says is wrong but he convinces people. Obviously not everyone but he does sway the opinions of people in the middle who previously hadn’t had an opinion on a subject.
And he was right. His missiles aren’t related to murders. At all.
What Moore misses, probably because, for all his skill in amusing, is that Americans are by nature violent. Ben Franklin said it himself (cough as a character in a movie who totally nailed the man cough) “Rougher, simpler; more violent, more enterprising.” It’s part of the whole; you can have no glory without flaws.
Aside from which, America is quite pacificistic compare to a great many nations. probably most. We are not prone to group violence, and probably less prone to social vengeance. By the same token, there are fewer social restrictions on human behavior and people like Michael Moore have been busy taking down as many of the rest as they can.
AT, you left out the “buying bullets at K-Mart” (wasn’t it K-Mart?) section, which as far as I could tell had nothing to do with anything.
Which is to say: I agree with you totally, the movie made no sense. It seemed to me a randomly assorted bunch of scenes relating somehow to violence, or guns, or culture, or something else.
I think part of why you thought it was so bad is that you went in assuming that it was anti-gun propaganda. At which point you were looking at every scene and thinking “what? What does this have to do with being anti-gun? Haha! This movie is awful!”.
Except that it’s not anti-gun propaganda. In fact, it’s not really anti-anything. It’s (as I recall) just bringing up issues about the culture of fear and violence in America. The part that I remember being most interesting and effective was where they were just standing on a streetcorner in one of the sections of LA that is supposedly the worst and most violent. And look! No one was killing them!
Now, I don’t necessarily think it’s a great movie, and some parts don’t work at all, but it’s definitely NOT just an anti-gun polemic. And parts of it are interesting and entertaining.
(I think taglines are taken directly from the marketing used to draw audiences to see the movie. You can see those lines in the movie poster picture to the left.)
The first tagline might be seen as addressing a greater violence-in-America question, but EMMV.
The only thing I have to add here is that, as a Canadian, in my experience, the whole “Canadians don’t lock their doors” thing is total bullshit. Everybody I know locks their doors all the time whether they’re at home or out. That’s one thing that really bugs me about that movie.
I really liked Sicko, though, although I don’t think it portrayed the Canadian health care system entirely honestly, either.
I know you weren’t the first to use the word propaganda in here, but seeing it again has me thinking.
I liked the movie, but I can see where detractors who say it’s just Moore making a movie about Moore are coming from. He does seem to spend a lot of time arguing without an actual position, especially if you compare the film to his vastly superior Sicko.
But the propaganda charge I don’t get. Sure, Moore is very selective about what info he chooses to discuss (or make up), and that’s an attribute of propaganda. But what political agenda do you think he’s trying to convert people to with this film?