The housemates and I watched Bowling for Columbine on Saturday, and it stirred something in me that I don’t think was quite what director Michael Moore intended the film to stir in people.
The film is put together in a very loose, fragmented, yet emotionally satisfying style. It’s a good documentary, but there is no consistent narrative arc and the few conclusions drawn by the end of the movie are almost completely ambiguous and unrelated to what the first half of the film seemed to be about. It does manage to make one good, if slightly nonsensical, point, however, and that is that blaming violence on any one thing is impossible (although Moore seems to believe that media-cultivated fear is more responsible for violence than anything else). The scary thing is that, when the credits rolled at the end of the film, I thought I agreed with everything Moore had said. Now that I’ve spent some time actually thinking about things, though, I’ve come to the sudden realization that I was completely duped.
Bowling for Columbine is a masterful work of manipulation, and most of it appears to be intentional. Many of the statements and statistics presented as fact in the film, while technically true, should have come with a few paragraphs of clarifying fine print. Some of the “facts” were outright lies. The parts of the film that weren’t half-truths or lies were carefully crafted to lead the viewer to false conclusions without actually stating false information. By the end of the film, Moore has you believing, among other things, that Canada is a pristine, violence-free wonderland; that Charlton Heston is a heartless, gun-crazed racist; that Dick Clark is responsible for the death of a six year-old girl; and that stores that sell bullets are responsible for how those bullets are used.
Moore’s own beliefs seem to vacillate so frequently within the course of the film itself that, on second viewing, it becomes easy to see where he’s obviously manipulating the people he’s interviewing. At the beginning of the film, Moore states quite clearly that he believes the second amendment gives Americans the right to own weapons, but that it doesn’t necessarily guarantee the right to own guns. At the end of the film, while craftily leading Charlton Heston down a slippery path toward embarrassment, Moore says that he agrees with Heston that the second amendment guarantees Americans the right to own guns. It’s obvious at this point that he’s saying this only to lure Heston into a false sense of security in preparation for the embarrassing scene that follows, but it’s what first made me wonder: if Moore will manipulate Charlton Heston by lying to him about his own beliefs, how will he manipulate his viewers?
The answer is pretty much any way possible.
Comments
No subject
ur suppose to quote movies, not italicize em
Re: No subject
Actually, it's generally agreed upon that titles of longer or more continuous works such as books, plays, films, television shows, magazines, newspapers, etc. should be italicized or underlined. Shorter works, such as poems, short stories, individual episodes of a television show, etc. should be quoted.
Re: No subject
Quite true, wonko. Also, underlining is deprecated. In the days of typewriters, it was drastically easier to underline a title than to italicize it. Now that we have mostly left the typewriter behind, italics are once again de rigeur.
I applaud you!
Quite an astute analysis. To see the other side of political commentary I recommend "Treason" by Ann Coulter. Absolutely zero manipulation. Just cold hard facts and bitingly hilarious sarcasm.
Moore Responds
Moore responds to many that website with his own proof here.
Otherwise, I agree that the movie can be misleading and should be taken with a grain of salt. But, I still think it deserves the Oscar.
Re: Moore Responds
For example, he states that the opening scene at the bank where he gets a gun in return for opening an account is shown exactly as it happened, and that his background check took only 10 minutes. Yet, according to the bank teller who actually dealt with him that morning, the process took over an hour and a half and that, in fact, Moore had submitted most of the paperwork for the background check two months prior to even visiting the bank. The bank doesn't even store the guns on the premises, but since Moore had arranged everything in advance, they had a gun waiting for him. In the film, there's a quick shot that makes it appear that the teller is telling Moore they keep "500 guns in the vault", but Moore suspiciously cut the part where she said that the vault in question was over four hours away.
Responding to criticism that the Lockheed Martin facility in Littleton, Colorado doesn't actually make weapons or rockets used in weapons, Moore performs some quick sleight-of-hand where he says that the Littleton facility produced ICBMs in the 1980s and that they now build rockets used for launching satellites, but he fails to mention that satellite launch vehicles are the only rockets the Littleton facility builds these days. Moore claims that building rockets for satellites is just as bad as building weapons, since some of those satellites are used by the military to coordinate attacks. The flaws in that logic are obvious.
Moore goes on to defend the gun death statistics used in the film, naming his sources for the data. What he doesn't mention is that for every nation except the US, his sources provided the number of homicides. However, he pulled his number for US gun deaths by adding the number of gun homicides to the number of gun deaths by police intervention, a number which he did not include in any other country's statistics.
Michael Moore seems to have a habit of twisting or misrepresenting the truth, and by doing so he becomes untrustworthy. I can't believe anything he says now until I've done research of my own to confirm it.
Re: I applaud you!
Overcoming my extreme desire not to get into this, I'll provide this link to a spinsanity article about Coulter's writing. Please note that spinsanity is a major debunker of Michael Moore's ridiculous rhetoric as well.
This country needs more people talking honestly and directly, not spitting venom at each other. There are plenty of people on both sides of the political fence striving for the good of the country who don't feel the need to dehumanize people or beat on strawmen. Michael Moore is an awful person to believe. So is Ann Coulter.
When it comes down to it, people need to think for themselves, not choose one pundit or another to think for them.
Re: No subject
u guys do not need to get all sophisticated and big worded with me hear... im sry, and wonko i like the new layout but maybe u can change the red/orange to a blue? itd look better to me ITE.. peace
Re: No subject
Yeah, the orange is kinda irking me too. I'll see what I can do about it.
Michael Moore predicts the future
Perhaps someone should remind Michael Moore's web designer that it's currently Monday, October 20, 2003, and Sunday the 26th is six days in the future. I'm sure they expect it to be a #1 bestseller by Sunday, but since it's not Sunday yet, where are they getting their figures?
Re: No subject
hurry hurry and btw hows the forum coming
Re: Moore Responds
As much as he bends the truth, his books are much clearer and just as entertaining. I think if you're going to critize Moore consider his other work, otherwise critize the movie.
Re: Moore Responds
Um. I am criticizing the movie. Which Moore made. Criticizing the movie leads directly into criticizing Moore, and in any case, I'm only criticizing Moore in relation to the movie that I've seen. You'll notice I never said I disagreed with his books; that's because I haven't read them and can't criticize them until I have.
Preach On Brother!
I felt the EXACT same way when I saw the movie, I walked away believing everything Moore said. Then a while afterward I though "why do I believe him so blindly, I don't do that for other people" I think it is because at the beginning of the film he says he is so pro-gun, and mentions that he is a member of the NRA. So I thought I could trust him. I used to love his old TV show too. He is now ranked down with every other political liar.
No subject
For what it's worth, I respect Michael Moore and the cause he espouses but it saddens me that he felt it necessary to distort the truth in making his case to the public. This type of argument assumes that a more honest and complex depiction is too difficult for the average person to comprehend and it may actually weaken the overall argument in the long run.
p.s. - It was especially interesting to watch this film with Canadian audiences. You could tell that everyone was surprised and excited when he went to Windsor and Toronto but when he started to resort to the one-dimensional non-violent stereotypes (I don't know anyone who doesn't lock their door!), the audience started to squirm. The overly simplistic explanations for differences, the misrepresented social statistics ("the unemployment rate in Canada is twice what we have here") and the reliance on anecdotal interviews (with teens from Sarnia, Ontario, no less!) made it feel like Moore was winking at us and asking us to play along on this little fib to help him make his overall important point. Not cool.
Re: I applaud you!
Her books are meticulously researched and documented in fact, and if you understand the context in which she speaks, her writing is truly funny. The way she gets her points across, while abrasive, I'm sure, to those sympathetic to her targets, is often metaphorical and deliberately exaggerated (hence her joke about the Clintons hanging crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree.)
With Ted Kennedy flat out calling the President a "liar" multiple times in his speek before congress recently, and a Democrat party spokesman, Al Franken, making official speeches at Democrat party functions laced with profanity and hate speech toward Republicans, I'm not sure the criticism of Ann Coulter's "hardcore jargon" is anything but overrated.
You'd have to be pretty stupid to read one of her books and take her descriptive language absolutely literally, but you'd have to be even more stupid not to realize that the majority of her points about the Left have a great deal of truth to them.
Re: No subject
Well, for what it's worth, the orange works in color theory. I like it, but that could have something to do with me seeing WAY too many blue sites out there. Your colors are different, but they work. Either way, the new look is cool.
Re: I applaud you!
I'm not going to argue with you about whether all vaguely defined "leftists" are guilty of one of the most serious crimes on the books and one of the few federal crimes carrying the death penalty, and whether it's useful to claim they are. And I'm not going to argue with you about whether demonization, distortion, and exaggeration on both sides of the fence are some of the greatest obstacles to political progress in this country. I'm sure nothing I say can make any change in your views, and I'm still hoping to avoid getting an ulcer before the age of 30.
So this is me signing off this thread, with a parting injunction to everyone -- I am the daughter of a Republican and a Democrat. It's a sure way to realize that the people on both sides of politics are just that -- people. Fallible, well-meaning people who want what's best for the country, and for themselves, in some order. I have views that shocked my 'liberal' friends at school, and views that shock my 'conservative' friends at school. Read the news -- from more than one source and more than one country. Ask yourself what people stand to lose, in money, in face, in votes. Use the critical thinking skills I hope your school taught. Look up the dictionary definitions of words politicians use oddly. Make up your own mind, don't trust any pundit, "left" or "right," to make it up for you. And when all else fails, remember that we are all human beings, and try to be dignified, noble, and kind.
Re: I applaud you!
That being said, I otherwise agree wholeheartedly with Eilonwy - nobody makes up my mind for me but me. I happen to find Ms. Coulter's books entertaining, and the facts that she presents enlightening.
I find it interesting and telling that liberals in the present age seem to be unable to advance the modern liberal agenda without pulling the wool over the public's eye first. Failing that, their last resort is the creation of an activist Judiciary - the most dangerous threat to liberty our nation has ever faced.
Re: I applaud you!
p.s. - I suppose for the weak minded, Ms. Coulter's books could be considered manipulative, but compared to Michael Moore's purposefully deceptive body of work (as wonderfully described by Wonko), they are about as manipulative as the license plate on my beat-up green truck.