Saw Bowling for Columbine last night. It's worth seeing just for its discussion-provocativeness. It's loosely centered around the Columbine shootings, but it's a larger look at gun violence in the U.S., peppered as expected with Moore's shamblingly confrontational interviews done with hand-held cameras. His personal style and presence obviously have a way of getting people to drop their guard. Over and over, he catches them saying jaw-dropping things, and he deftly accentuates the absurdity (when he wants to) using cinematic and environmental context. Worth the price of admission alone is the interview with the Lockheed-Martin PR guy in their missile factory near Columbine, backed by hangar-sized missiles under construction, where Moore pursues the possible relationship between the manufacture of these looming massive objects of mass destruction and violence in the community. There are many more like this, devastatingly hilarious, hilariously devastating. But it's not all done with an off-camera smirk.
This obviously isn't a straight documentary, and his stats and examples are blatantly chosen to add to the confrontainment/edutainment value. For example, he compares the U.S. poverty rate with Canadian unemployment rate (twice), two quite different things. Even the core statistic -- gun deaths -- is given in absolute numbers, rather than per-capita. Here are the still-appalling gun-related deaths per 100,000 people in the world's 36 richest countries in 1994:
United States 14.24; Brazil 12.95; Mexico 12.69; Estonia 12.26; Argentina 8.93; Northern Ireland 6.63; Finland 6.46; Switzerland 5.31; France 5.15; Canada 4.31; Norway 3.82; Austria 3.70; Portugal 3.20; Israel 2.91; Belgium 2.90; Australia 2.65; Slovenia 2.60; Italy 2.44; New Zealand 2.38; Denmark 2.09; Sweden 1.92; Kuwait 1.84; Greece 1.29; Germany 1.24; Hungary 1.11; Republic of Ireland 0.97; Spain 0.78; Netherlands 0.70; Scotland 0.54; England and Wales 0.41; Taiwan 0.37; Singapore 0.21; Mauritius 0.19; Hong Kong 0.14; South Korea 0.12; Japan 0.05.(For comparison, the death rate from auto accidents in the U.S. was 16.5 per 100,000 in 1996.) Nevertheless, one message comes through very well through Moore's anecdotal selections: the U.S. media creates and perpetuates a culture of fear (because it sells news), and this, amid all the other complex factors, may be what causes people in the U.S. to buy guns and shoot each other more.
See it and discuss.
November 13, 2002 09:43 AM