Bowling For Columbine

What could be more timely than a reissue of "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore's Oscar-winning 2002 documentary about gun violence in America and the factors that might drive it?

Moore's documentary talks about the George W. Bush era, but its messages are just as potent and relevant today as they were just a few years after the 1999 massacre in which a pair of school shooters committed a slaughter at Columbine High School in Colorado. Nearly two decades later, as school kids continue to die and killers wielding weapons of mass carnage terrorize our public places, the debate rages on between sacrificing our Constitutional right to possess firearms and our foundational guarantees to, among other things, life itself.

Moore takes a hard look at gun violence in the United States as compared with other nations, taking note of how Canada has as many or more guns per capita as we do (though this may have changed since 2002), and yet their gun violence rate is far lower. One by one, Moore picks through the tired list that gun-protecting politicians trot out: Violent movies, first person shooter video games, and heavy metal music by Marilyn Manson, whose music the Columbine shooters reportedly listened to. None of it holds up to scrutiny: Other nations have young people, too, and those young people listen to the same music, watch the same movies, and play the same video games, yet they don't shoot up their schools.

Teenagers are only part of the equation, of course. Adults kill, too, and so do nations; Moore looks at national histories like those of Germany and Britain, blood-soaked annals that somehow have not translated into the kind of free-floating carnage Americans insist they abhor and yet refuse to address. Moore even takes note of the fact that Lockheed-Martin was building missiles and other weapons in Littleton, Colorado, not far from Columbine High School, and muses on whether there's a connection to be teased out. But as he examines various theories from both the political left and right, they all turn out to be inadequate.

If adults and teens kill, so do pets (when their owners foolishly attach loaded weapons to them); so, too, do small children who might mistake a gun for a toy. One of the film's most heart rending passages concerns a six year old boy who took his uncle's gun to school and fatally shot a classmate. By the time we get to this part, though, the incident serves to illustrate a whole new theory Moore has come up with: That gun violence, and a reliance on guns for self defense against enemies that just don't materialize, are the result of fear-mongering narratives doled out by ratings-seeking media and power-hungry politicians. Who are those enemies that loom so large in the public's imagination? Simply put: Black men. A cheeky, South Park-style cartoon sketches out a version of American history in which Southern whites, in a panic after the Civil War, embraced the newly invented Colt revolver (capable of firing multiple rounds before requiring a reload) out of sheer terror of their former slaves. Enter the KKK, which more or less morphs into the NRA, and the link between racism and reliance on guns - and gun violence - for white America to feel secure starts looking like one long, unbroken chain of bias.

At first it seems a little too broad and simple a theory, but as Moore explores the idea it grows more and more plausible. What sort of news sells? What sort of politics wins elections? Think Willie Horton, the boogeyman that helped Bush I win the 1988 election. Think about "Cops," the long-running Fox reality show in which white police officers would chase down fleeing black suspects (for some reason, the suspects were often shirtless). Moore certainly thinks about these things, and he interviews a producer of "Cops," who offers the frank assessment that fear and crime make for ratings, whereas peace, love, and understanding are a snore. When Moore wonders why there's no such thing as a show called "Corporate Cops" - in which law enforcement wrestle polluters or bankers to the ground and arrest them - the producer allows that would only make for good TV if the police treated those kinds of (mostly white) criminals with the same rough handling... and if, by the way, those kinds of criminals were to be found shirtless much of the time.

Which brings us back to the two six year olds. In the wake of that shooting, which took place in Moore's home state of Michigan, Charlton Heston - at the time the president of the NRA - swept in, as he had not long after the Columbine massacre, when he led a massive (and tone deaf) rally in Denver. While gun enthusiasts crowed and clapped, outraged people from across the United States were sending in their opinions and ideas about what sort of punishment should be meted out to the six year old who had pulled the trigger. Their suggestions, we learn, were brutal. Oh, and by the way... the shooter in that case was a black boy. The victim was a white girl. Hmmm.

Perhaps the single most resonant remark in the movie comes from the maligned rocker Marilyn Manson, who readily acknowledges that his presentation of himself as some sort of creepy, raging ghoul makes some people nervous. But he's an artist making a point with his look and his public persona; behind that, it turns out, is someone smarter than our politicians or the NRA's leadership, either then or now. Asked what he would say to survivors of the Columbine shooting, Manson tells Moore, "I wouldn't say a single word to them, I would listen to what they had to say - and that's what no one did."

Far too many victims later, after February's shooting in Florida pushed a group of fearlessly empowered teens to demand that they be taken seriously, that might be starting to change.

The film itself is only part of the story, and there's more to be explored in the special features, where Moore addresses the camera in a standard-def video made for the initial DVD release and talks about the famous speech he made when he won the Oscar for "Bowling for Columbine" just after George W. Bush took us to war in Iraq. A new documentary featured Moore and his collaborators discussing his filmmaking techniques, including the kind of off-the-cuff improv and openness to possibility that led to Moore's revealing interview with Heston himself, at Heston's home. Another short featurette shows Moore revising Colorado and addressing students six months after the film's release. An episode of Moore's TV show "The Awful Truth" explores his satirical/not satirical idea of "Corporate Cops" at greater lengths. These are all powerful additions to Criterion's Blu-ray edition, though the Charlie Rose segment and "Film Festival Scrapbook" seem of lesser import.

There's also a booklet essay by film scholar Eric Hynes, who is clear-eyed about Moore's controversies, the way his style rubs some people the wrong way, and the ways in which his pioneering techniques leave some of the older - more balanced - elements of traditional documentary filmmaking behind. On the whole, Hynes finds Moore's work valuable and this film worthy. So has Criterion, which has taken its usual technical and curatorial care for this release. And so will you - because while some things in this movie may look outdated, the film itself certainly is not.

"Bowling for Columbine"
Blu-ray
$31.96
https://www.criterion.com/films/28785-bowling-for-columbine