Movie Review

That's right, ammunition. The troubled teens who caused such carnage at Columbine had purchased the bullets for their shooting spree at the local Kmart, and in one of the film's most incredible scenes, Moore takes two survivors of the shooting to Kmart's headquarters in Troy, Mich., to "return the merchandise" that's still embedded in their bodies. When that doesn't get the desired response (a promise that Kmart will stop selling ammunition), the dogged threesome head to the nearest Kmart, buy every bullet in the place and return to Kmart's headquarters--this time with a hoard of reporters and news cameras behind them. Needless to say, Kmart vowed to stop selling bullets for handguns within 90 days. This scene really gets at the heart of Moore's paradoxical position in modern culture. It's his bulldog tenacity as a documentarian that makes his films and TV shows so interesting to watch, especially when he's forcing big business to its knees, but at the same time the Kmart scene shows how Moore himself can easily fall prey to exactly the kind of media hoopla he cautions against. The media is a powerful influence; don't trust it. The media is a powerful tool; manipulate it.

Fortunately, Moore knows how tenuous his position is in this regard, and as a director he makes decisions to juxtapose scenes in ways that, rather than pretend the issue doesn't exist, play up the fact that as a personality on screen he's every bit as susceptible to being accused of manipulating the medium as any local news reporter. In one particularly shocking example, a reporter puts on his sad face to tell of the tragic shooting of 6-year-old Kayla Rowland by a classmate in Flint, Mich. (Moore's hometown and also, not coincidentally, Moore would say, the onetime home of General Motors and Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters). As soon as the cameras stop rolling, the reporter is shouting obscenities into his earpiece and whining about how much he needs some hairspray. Moore, on the other hand, takes his cameras inside the school to talk with the principal, and he turns her away from the camera when she becomes visibly upset. But he doesn't turn the camera off. It's tricky. The same could be said of the film's climactic scene, in which Moore visits Heston (the personification of the film's real villain--the NRA) at the actor's home. Knowing now that Heston suffers from Alzheimer's disease, Moore's incessant questions seem too pushy and Heston's abrupt departure seems justified. Of course, who's to say that Heston didn't release the information about his disease to the media this August knowing that Columbine, which first screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May but actually debuted in the U.S. at the Telluride Film Festival--in August--had painted him in a very unfavorable light? Although this connection seems tenuous, it's just this kind of conspiracy-minded reasoning that guides the plot of Bowling for Columbine. It can't be coincidence, Moore argues, that Lockheed Martin, the largest weapons manufacturer in the U.S. and possibly the world, is based in--you got it--Littleton, Co., home of the Columbine Rebels. It may be just a coincidence, but it might just be all too true.