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Bowling For Columbine is, as June says, a very funny film. It's also a very upsetting film, particularly for Americans. I cried or nearly cried not less than 3 times during the film, and its not because Moore was purposely pushing any buttons - there are some incredibly moving images/stories in the film that have become part of the national character for those of us who came of age in America in the 1990s.
Gun violence, and the proliferation of guns, are really only tangental to the main thesis of the film. I don't think Moore believes that a complete ban on guns is an answer to solving the problem of American violence. Beyond some common-sense measures (background checks, waiting periods, trigger locks, assault weapon ban), all of which the Heston-figureheaded (those interview scenes...oh boy) NRA opposes, there's little the government can do to stop someone who is determined to wreak violence on his neighbours, and aside from the Chris Rock-inspired bullet ban or make-bullets-really-costly "idea", Moore doesn't advance any agenda or solution for stopping gun violence.
The bigger question, and the one that Moore eventually explores through the prism of our neighbors to the north (who have inexplicably become the new Polacks in our national consciousness), is why do Americans live in a culture of fear? Fear of our neighbors, fear of our children, and fear of the foreign. Why is American fear different from the fear of residents of other nations, and why does it manifest itself in violence so often, and so deadly?
Capsule histories of both the story of the United States and US foreign policy abroad in the post ww2 period, while illustrating that violence and fear are evident on the macro as well as local levels, do little to explain the phenomenon of American violence. As Moore points out several times in the film, almost every other nation has a history as bathed in blood as the US. The US, however much it is despised as a "hyperpower" these days, is not exceptional in terms of its violence or the reach of that violence.
One theory that Moore advances is the vacuity of TV, especially TV news. Crime goes down, reporting on crime goes up. If it bleeds, it leads. He tries to compare US evening news unfavorably to the banal reports received nightly by Canadians, but while the difference is striking it's a kind of chicken/egg argument - if Canada had close to the amount of violent crime that the US did, maybe the comparison would be more telling.
Marylin Manson, favorite scapegoat of the religious right, offers a theory that verges of conspiracy - that the powers that be use the media to create fear in the minds of people so that they'll be tempted to buy a product that they think will assuage their fear. To my mind, this is another facile answer, the rote leftist argument against capitalist society, and I naturally ignore it....
....Until Moore examines the case of a 6 year old boy in Flint Michigan who shot a classmate with a handgun he found at home and brought to school- this seems like a typical argument for gun control, and indeed, Moore later uses it as a cudgel to bash Charlton Heston. But to his credit, he digs deeper, and examines an ultimately more harmful systemic corruption in the US - "workfare to welfare" programs.
The mother of the boy in this case was forced onto one of these programs during the Clinton administration (though Moore glosses over this fact, and instead uses this as an example of Bush's America. Which is fine by me, but I'm sure Andrew Sullivan or somebody will/has called him on it). In an appalling scene, we see how she is bussed, township-style, from the Flint slum in which she lives, to a shopping mall in rich Auburn Hills in order to weight tables and make fudge (she needs two jobs to make ends meet) for the wealthy. Every day, busses filled with mostly black people (if Moore is to be believed -seeing as there are more white people than black on welfare, he may be guilty of playing a race card here - but that's a minor infraction) - make this 80 mile journey so that participants can "pay back" the welfare they've received. Companies who employ the workers get certain tax breaks, and in another appalling twist, Lockheed Martin, a leading weapons contractor (who is shown earlier in the film to be one of the largest employers in Littleton, CO, where they make the ICBMs) is the private contractor the government chose to run the workfare-welfare program.
Conservatives speak often of the disintegration of the family (though, you know, there are more broken homes in the UK than here) as the root cause of social evil, yet with programs such as this they fracture single-parent families even more. There's a word for this, one that George Bush knows well: Evil.
How do we stop these Evil-Doers and the culture that perpetuates them? Aside from starting up a corporate version of "Cops", Moore doesn't advance any answers. He seems as perplexed by America at the end of the film as he did at the beginning (when he receives a free rifle for opening a bank account). Despite this flaw (and some fact-fudging), Moore is perhaps the most important voice of progressives in the United States these days. He has unprecented access to people, unprecedented leverage he can muster with his media contacts, and unprecedented empathy for even the most unsympathetic characters he encounters. I only wish I could edit his film into a leaner, tighter fighting machine, and make it mandatory in schools across the country. |
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