Movie 666

Bowling for Columbine is opinionated, rambling, rough edged, and carries a tasteless title. It is also quite remarkable. For in his own stream of consciousness and highly personalized way, documentarian Michael Moore has connected the dots of American hegemony in ways that social theorists with copious volumes cannot.

Bolder and bigger with every film: Moviemaker Michael Moore

Hegemony can be defined as the interrelation between power structures that give society its shape and texture. In the United States, for instance, the government does not simply shape our social structure, so much as our social structure is shaped by the relationship between government, police, corporate interests, media, and organized religion. Together, these entities make up the structure of our society. As members of society, we take cues from these institutions and further cement the hegemony through our own attitudes and fears.

Moore explores our local hegemonic structure somewhat inadvertently. Taking the Columbine shootings as his point of departure and aiming to understand why Americans are so prone to shoot one another, he performs a chain of interviews that lead him from Colorado to Michigan to Canada to California and elsewhere. By simply letting the content of his previous interview point the way to his next, he does not answer his central question so much as simply create an impression of the ways in which society with its institutions and attitudes takes shape and perpetuates itself.

One of the most insightful parts of the movie investigates the case of a kindergarten student who killed one of his classmates with his uncle’s gun. Moore explores the details of the harrowing event as well as the media coverage and the public outrage that followed — some of which called for a virtual lynching of the seven year old black child.

Moore notes the story-of-the-day quality with which the initial event was covered by television media and manages to interview a local television reporter in all of his plastic, twofaced glory. He then goes on to interview the teacher at the school who placed the initial 911 call and following her comments, tracks the life of the mother and family of the disturbed youth.

Moore first shows us how the mother from the impoverished town of Flynt, Michigan was left without work following the closing of the local GM plant as jobs were given to cheap labor out of country. We then travel with Moore before sunrise on a two hour bus ride to the wealthy suburban mall where the state’s privatized work-for-welfare program sent her (the program, incidentally, was run by defense industry giant Lockheed Martin, who also builds nuclear missiles in Littleton Colorado, site of Columbine High School). We get quick tours of the Dick Clark fifties-theme restaurant and the fudge factory where she performed her minimum wage jobs before bussing home after sunset. Despite the two jobs, the woman still did not have enough to pay her rent. Consequently, she was evicted from her house and taken in by her brother. Soon after, while she was bussing to work, her young child found her brother’s handgun, carried it to school and killed another student.

In this connect the dots fashion, Moore manages to give us an account of the institutional constraints of our society. Abstract social programs and government agencies are given a human face, as well as the people they impact. Moore next journeys to L.A. to hunt down restauranteur Dick Clark and get his opinion on the matter. Clark, however, displays none of his synthetic televisual charm when he is approached by Moore. Instead, he orders his bodyguard drivers to slam the minivan door shut on Moore while he is sharked away to his next capitalist adventure.

Ultimately, it is debateable whether Moore actually uncovers anything resembling an answer to his initial question, why do Americans shoot one another so much? But he uncovers quite a bit else along the way and manages to put human faces and stories on what otherwise might be theoretical notions of how society works.

As cinema, Bowling for Columbine is remarkable for its earnestness and aggressiveness, and most of all, for using the medium as a means to gain insight into the world. Instead of gangsters loafing at Jack Rabbit Slim’s (Pulp Fiction), we have exploited mothers working at Dick Clark food franchises. Instead of a bronze chested gladiator wheeling his chariot around the Forum (Ben Hur), we see decaying movie idol Charlton Heston using what remains of his cinematic mystique to rally gun nuts to his sketchy cause.

This type of comparison is important, because Bowling for Columbine as a work of cinema shares the same screens as these films. And media — cinema included — helps glue together the hegemonic structure of our society. In this regard, it is safe to say that most movies this year are quite slender in relation to the bulky Moore and his latest movie.

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