Hacker Cinema
Bowling for Columbine
2002 · Film · documentary · 120 min
Directed by Michael Moore
This is not a film about gun control. It is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi. From a look at the Columbine High School security camera tapes to the home of Oscar-winning NRA President Charlton Heston, from a young man who makes homemade napalm with The Anarchist's Cookbook to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old. Bowling for Columbine is a journey through the US, through our past, hoping to discover why our pursuit of happiness is so riddled with violence.
3 positive1 negative1 mixed17 neutralfrom 22 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
22 comments on Hacker News
The first line of your comment doesn't seem necessary to make your point.
There is a guideline that says "don't be snarky"[0] and I think it applies here.
Having produced a documentary (and being in the process of creating another one), I can't say that I agree with your view on purpose at all.
The purpose of either documentary or fiction movie is whatever the movie maker aims at. There is no reason for anyone to abide by your standard of "trying to get at the truth" when writing the scenario for Once Upon A Time in America, Jurassic Park, The Simpsons (the movie), or Bowling for Columbine.
I'd say most movies have an intent behind them. Further than that, we're art amateurs trying to interpret the meaning of abstract paintings in a gallery. Maybe the painter wanted to denunce the patriarchy. Or maybe they had food poisoning that day. Who knows.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Here is the list from the thread: --- 1. A Man Named Pearl
2. Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland
3. Microcosmos
4. Crip Camp!
5. Keep The River On Your Right
6. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed
7. Harlan County USA
8. Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story
9. Good Night Oppy
10. We Met in Virtual Reality
11. All That Breathes
12. Still
13. Can’t Be Stopped
14. The Amazing Jonathan Documentary
15. Searching for Sugarman
16. AKA Mr Chow
17. The Pigeon Tunnel
18. Little Richard: I Am Everything
19. I Know That Voice
20. Genghis Blues
21. Kings of Pastry
22. 20 Feet From Stardom
23. Stevie
24. Anvil: the Story of Anvil
25. Searching for Sugar Man
26. King of Kong
27. The Gleaners and I
28. Touching the Void
29. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History
30. 20 Days in Mariupol
31. Minding the Gap
32. How to Survive a Plague
33. Speciesism
34. Free Solo
35. Jim Allison: Breakthrough
36. Seven Up! series
37. Bowling for Columbine
38. The Fog of War
39. Rivers and Tides
40. Capturing the Friedmans
41. Spellbound
42. King of Kong
43. Crip Camp
44. Jesus Camp
45. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
46. Flee
47. Man on Wire
48. Queen of Versailles
49. The Thin Blue Line
50. Time Indefinite
51. The Gleaners and I
52. My Life as a Turkey
53. Happy People
54. Grizzly Man
The entire movie Bowling for Columbine was about my statement. :)
What other ways (better ways?) are there to prevent school shootings?
And then we stick them on antidepressants.
> Although only 8.6% of American males are on antidepressants at any given time, they seem much better represented as a percentage of mass shooters. Here are 39 mass shooters who were either on antidepressants at the time of their rampage, had abruptly quit taking their medication when they went on their spree, or had been prescribed antidepressants at some point in the past.
https://thoughtcatalog.com/jeremy-london/2019/09/37-mass-shooters-who-were-on-antidepressants/
Michael Moore came to the same conclusion when researching for his movie, Bowling for Columbine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04UqzYOdGNs
These drugs can have serious side effects in x/1,000,000 people. What happens when you give them to tens of millions? You'll start to see those edge cases. Why didn't we have many of these mass shootings prior to 1990? When did we start mass dosing our kids? I think we have a lot more research to do, if anyone is actually willing, but you'd be going up against the big guys.
I'm a US citizen that has spent a significant amount of time outside of the US. 35 years in the US, and 16 years now in New Zealand. And it's not plainly obvious to me. Bowling for Columbine movie pointed out that Canadians have just as many guns, but much less shootings.
I'm in New Zealand. New Zealand has guns. You need to take a class and be approved by the police who interview you and inspect your gun safe. Pistols are much harder to get. More than 10% of people have a gun license. There is almost no culture of using guns for self-defense against other humans. Farmers consider them necessary tools on the farm, hunters use them to hunt food, and DoC workers use them to cull pests (so do farmers). I also feed my dog about one-third of her diet by shooting rabbits and possum. Recently certain semi-automatic weapons were prohibited, but even before that we didn't have school shootings. Sometimes a family household would be slaughtered by a member of that household. Last night in Auckland seven houses were shot up in gang related violence.
I'm still having trouble drawing a line in the sand between "healthy skepticism" and "overriding suspicion".
When someone like michael moore does "bowling for columbine", people didn't accuse him of being a conspiracy theory advocate.
Yet, if he were to do a documentary today on the influence of pharmaceutical lobbying on the way the world handled covid (or the influence of china), he would surely be suspected.
I don't think this category is useful in any way to think about a given issue / theory.
Am the furtherest from being an expert, so many caveats:
TIL Wikipedia seems to agree with your assessment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre#Motive
My understanding has long been the FBI profilers determined that spree shooters are begging for help, hoping someone will stop them. I'm pretty sure I got this from interviews in the movie Bowling for Columbine.
So it'd make sense to be alert for warning signs. Like most everything, all the well intentioned anti bullying measures were implemented terribly by noobs and proved counter productive.
But mostly, no one bothered to check to see if any of the remedies were helping.
Well, some measures are known failures. Like zero tolerance policies.
This is a recurring theme. DARE boosted drug use. Promoting abstinence boosted teenage pregnancy. Aggressive pain management led to opioid epidemic. Etc.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Bowling for Columbine, Blackfish, most MJ documentaries.
Oh yeah, Bowling for Columbine was definitely a documentary. I think it depends on the movie.
He won the 2003 Oscar for Best Documentary with Bowling for Columbine, and was nominated for that same category in 2008 for Sicko.
Yeah but people grew up in different perspectives on media. As a teenager I've seen Bowling for Columbine in the movie theater and also read books from Michael Moore which are highly manipulative already. Still, everybody hyped his work at the time and on first sight this was hard to get. At that time (early 2000s) other revealing documentaries became popular, for instance Zeitgeist. At the time it seemed a bit shallow and repetitive in context of similar productions, but I wouldn't ever have called someone watching this Conspiracy Theorist.
Today the landscape changed totally, those kinds of "documentaries" produced today are created at much greater pace and still reasonable professional quality, probably because both tools and creators got more professional. But what didn't change is, when you watch one of these films, I guess, it still seems reasonable to a degree. Of course they build on something tangible, like how currencies are created, what Fiat money is, the really crazy stuff comes then in subsequent episodes.
IMHO this is like a cult because a whole (social) network of websites is associated to this nowadays. But when stuff is hosted on YouTube etc. their rating system should at least provide an appropriate scam flagging on a community level.
Apocalypse now, casablanca, bowling for columbine, etc. were made in a certain context. That context can't be captured and commercialized because history moved on and it isn't there anymore. They can't completely exist in a vacuum. When I look at today's aaa movies whether the context is lacking or the movie suffers from the formula and lack of originality or personal vision (as you point it).
I remember gummo, searching for the wrong-eyed jesus, american honey, chop shop, land of plenty and winter bones. I am pretty sure three of them will pass the test of time.
(I am not american nor living in america so I don't know the movie scene as well as the european one)
This is a reference to a scene from the Michael Moore movie Bowling for Columbine, where he is walking in a Canadian neighborhood and just opens the front door of someone's house. I couldn't find a better clip than this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pjJbtb4Bs0Q
I live in Canada and I read the newspapers almost daily. Canadian school shootings are rare, rare enough to be reported coast to coast when they happen. I know of only one this year, in the north. The US truly has more than 10X the number of shootings, as documented in the movie Bowling for Columbine. (and other places) This difference is due to a different gun culture. (I would guess the rape cultures are equal)
That just kicks the problem up one level: now you've got to figure out the distinction between political speech and non-political speech. I'm not familiar with how things work in Belgium, but in the United States Hollywood has released a large number of explicitly political movies in the past fifteen years, such as Lions for Lambs or Bowling for Columbine or Munich, and that doesn't even get into the political subtexts that are often present even in mass-market blockbusters. Would those be forbidden under this policy?
Assuming that you do come up with a plausible way of drawing a line here, you also need to have general trust that this power will not be abused. Given the heavy politicization of regulatory agencies in the United States, a large portion of the population is worried -- not without substantial justification -- that "is this speech opposed to the party in power" will be one of the factors used to draw that line.
A similar treatment was comedy-documentary Bowling for Columbine in 2002. Moore explores a half dozen reasons why the US seems to have more mass shootings than other countries. He doesnt choose one main answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_for_Columbine
I'd probably add that 13 years and a hundred more shootings later there could additional theories like the ubiquity of violent video games and the heroic portrayal of previous mass shootings.
Even though the contemporary Michael Moore (rightly, IMO) gets a bad rep, Bowling for Columbine is fundamentally all about the US's culture of violence, specifically comparing how it approaches violence compared to Canada. Guns are surely an important symbol of that culture in the movie and society, but the documentary is a genuinely thoughtful take on the broader and more salient issue.
> Because the state has the monopoly of violence.
I'm fascinated by this viewpoint, but I'm afraid I've never fully understood it. How many weapons to the population have to have before the state is no longer considered to pose a threat? Do we stop at clubs or knives? Small arms? Assault weapons? Explosives? Armoured vehicles? Missiles?
> How many deaths in 2012 due to complication related to obesity? How many due to guns? How many due to road accidents?
Those three are almost entirely unrelated. Complications related to obesity almost only ever affect the physical wellbeing of the obese person. Road accidents arise from the operation of a useful tool by many millions of people, every day, and generally aren't malicious (and thus are more difficult to prevent). This doesn't make these two causes of death any less tragic, but the sort of gun violence the current US administration wishes to legislate against is wanton slaughter of humans, pure and simple. To paraphrase Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine"[0], assault weapons and armour piercing rounds are not useful for hunting[1].
[0]: Now there's something you could call "propaganda". That movie had a lot of good information, but it was often obscured by horrible misrepresentation and questionable conclusions.
[1]: Contrary to popular belief, gun control does not preclude those who need weapons in their day-to-day lives from purchasing them. Gun control is not a binary.
Thanks for the correction. I'm clearly showing my ignorance when it comes to some of these issues.
I based my M16 bought at Walmart caricature on the little I've learned from news media and documentaries like Bowling for Columbine.
You can substitute M16 for shotgun, and Walmart for Corner Gun Store and add in a mandatory 24 hour waiting period, which maybe doesn't make for quite as nice a sound bite, but is just as ridiculous.
>such mass murders are simply the price of the freedom to have guns.
This is absolutely not true. There are plenty of places with standing armies (i.e. pretty much all eligible males have guns in their homes) and don't have anything remotely like the gun murder rate of the US.
Micheal Moore made "Bowling for Columbine" to prove that the reason for the violence was guns themselves. By the end of the his movie, he didn't seem to believe it anymore himself.
If you want to do some research into the gun debate, a good place to start is the movie "Bowling for Columbine". Some people will think of it as an extreme left-wing-nutjob propaganda piece, but my recollection of the movie is not that it hammers you with a conclusion, but that it presents a bunch of different scenarios that are all 'odd' in their own way. Accusing BfC of being a propaganda piece is like calling Borat a propaganda piece, stylistically they are quite similar.
Anyway, one of the things that really struck me about that movie was the difference in gun related deaths (per head of population) in Canada and the U.S. Basically both countries have buttloads of guns and the justification in both is that they are for 'hunting'. I don't remember the exact figures, but the deaths per 1000 from guns was enormously much higher in the U.S. than in Canada. Moore doesn't give an answer to that dilemma per se, but he does throw it out there for people to think about and make up their own minds. Frankly, if that is propaganda, I think the U.S. and the internet in general need a lot more of it.
-----
As for the guns debate, you could make an analogy to poison, where you say that poisons are sold at the supermarket, so why not sell guns at the supermarket too? I guess the reply would be that the poisons that are sold invariably have some other practical use, e.g. cleaning products. Whereas guns are pretty much designed with the express and only purpose of killing stuff.
Then the gun-nut will reply "oh, there's lots of other uses for a gun, like sport (target practice), hunting and personal defense as a deterrent". The problem isn't that those things are wrong, the problem is that - unlike pretty much every other country in the world with guns - people in the U.S. don't seem to stop at deterrent, they are much more likely to use the 'personal defense' guns to try to kill someone else.
Why is that?
What is it about the U.S. that as soon as they get a gun in their hand they want to go 'pop a cap in yo ass'?
And why doesn't that happen in Canada?
Some of the scenarios I remember from the movie that were presented:
The bank that gives you a shotgun when you open an account
The mall store(?) that was selling ammo in massive aisles
The five year old that took a handgun to school and shot one of his class-mates dead
The Columbine massacre
The gun lobby holding a big pro-guns rally in Columbine immediately after the massacre
Moore harassing Charlton Heston (figurehead of the gun lobby) (this one was most like a scene from Borat - it was an uncomfortable 'excuse me while I invade your personal' thing and went on for ages)
They're like, "Don't screw this up...or you won't get into honors math in 7th grade...and you'll just die poor and lonely."
http://www.eslnotes.com/movies/word/Bowling-for-Columbine.doc