BEFORE: It's Primary Day here in NY, what better time to tackle a hot-button issue like gun control? I'm going out with friends tonight, so I probably won't be voting. Which might be better for everyone, because if I were to vote, it would probably be for Anthony Weiner. I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but here are my thoughts on the matter:
I liked the guy before the scandal hit, and to the best of my knowledge, his positions on the issues have not changed. Unlike some people, I'm able to mentally separate a politician's record from his personal life. Sure, he's a horndog - but who isn't? Let he who has never sent an incriminating racy e-mail cast the first stone. Plus: Thomas Jefferson, JFK, Eisenhower, FDR, Bill Clinton - need I go on? Forget mayoral, Señor Carlos Danger seems downright presidential to me. Show me the Chief Executive who wasn't getting a little bit of strange on the side - and Weiner hasn't even cheated, he only texted about it. Which is the greater sin? Don't you think JFK would be sexting right now if he were alive?
Also, none of the other candidates have managed to stand out from the pack. There's the Bloomberg clone (to the extent that a lesbian woman can be a Bloomberg clone) and the guy who's trotted out his bi-racial family and ex-lesbian wife when appropriate, but I don't know where any of them stand on the issues. I could research their positions, but that's starting to sound like a lot of work.
Plus, I get most of my news from Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Dave Letterman. A vote for NYC's #1 political sex freak would go toward guaranteeing 4 years of solid, solid comedy. So I won't be voting, but the Movie Year hereby endorses Anthony Weiner for Mayor, and I'm wondering why the heck my favorite comedy news shows haven't done the same.
THE PLOT: Filmmaker Michael Moore explores the roots of America's predilection for gun violence.
AFTER: First off, I have to issue a "mea culpa", since it took me about 10 years to get around to watching this film. In my defense, my usual response to human tragedy is to (at first, anyway) to ignore it, circle the wagons, and keep going about my business. That's what we were told to do after 9/11, wasn't it? Go on with our lives, so the terrorists don't win. That a-hole shot up a movie theater in 2012, and it kept me from going to see "The Dark Knight Rises", I just found other films to watch.
Also, an apology to my BFF Andy, who discussed this film at length with me years ago, picking apart its flaws, and I wasn't ready to watch it at the time. I needed a decade (appararently) to gain some distance, but then last year we had the Newtown shootings in CT, so really the issue doesn't seem to be going away. I'm not going to resign myself to thinking that school shootings are part of life, or the price to live in a free society, but I'm also not naive enough to think that with enough effort we can completely prevent the occasional maniac from losing control.
Plus, at the time I was sort of hanging out with Michael Moore, I'd gone to see him introduce his film "The Big One" at a film festival, and then for a while we were going to the same parties in NYC. I kind of liked the way he was pointing out the hypocrisies of Corporate America. He's been kind of quiet in recent years, and it seems like Morgan Spurlock has sort of taken up where he left off. But Moore was a very divisive figure, noted for his "sandbagging" techniques - we all know there's a proper way to set up a meeting or an interview with a famous person for your film, but Moore always preferred to barge into a building lobby unannounced and then act SHOCKED when that executive won't take the time to appear on camera. Well, why would he, if Moore couldn't take the time to call in advance and set up a proper meeting? Making an edgy political film is no reason to throw manners out the window.
This is how I was taught to make a documentary: 1) point out a problem 2) examine and assign blame, and 3) suggest a solution. The main problem with "Bowling for Columbine" is that all it does is assign blame for the school shooting in Colorado, and it's all over the freakin' place. We're not any closer to a solution by the end of the film, and without proposing a fix, then what exactly was it trying to accomplish? Would I prefer that fewer people get shot? Of course. Do I want to live in a world where there are no school shootings? Of course, but how are we going to get there?
This is what I wanted out of this film - an examination of what went down in Columbine. Maybe there were already a ton of TV shows and movies that discussed the details, but somehow none of them were more prominent than this one. Tell me who did it, tell me how they did it, and most importantly, tell me WHY they did it. Almost none of that is in this film. First off, it seems like Moore got distracted by a second school shooting that took place in his hometown, where a 6-year-old boy brought a gun to school and shot and killed a 6-year-old girl. Focus, focus!
This is who gets blamed in this film for the shootings in Littleton, CO and Flint, MI:
1) The NRA and a blind guy. The NRA, sure, easy target (pardon the pun). Who else is fostering the proliferation of guns in America, and isn't that the problem, the U.S. gun culture? Well, no, not exactly. Honestly I'd be more worried about UNregistered guns in America, the ones people can get on the street. I don't really like all of what the NRA stands for, and I think they interpret the Constitution the way they want to, but at least they seem like they might want to make gun owners into responsible gun owners. And if a blind guy wants to take target practice and get a gun license, I'm not going to stop him, or suggest that his desire to defend himself caused a school shooting.
2) Bank managers. Again, this is part of gun culture, a bank that gave out a free rifle for opening an account, instead of the usual toaster. Clearly this was a gimmick, an attempt to appeal to a certain demographic. Was it ill-advised? Certainly. But unless one of those actual guns was used by the Columbine shooters, this officially counts as going off on a tangent.
3) Lockheed Martin. Well, sure, they had a plant in Littleton, and the theory is that this contributed to the "death culture" around Columbine High. And the plant manager chose not to see any connection between building missiles that we launch at our enemies and the bullets that kids shoot at their schoolmates - probably because there wasn't one. There's the big and the little, and they're not always the same. Besides, this is like saying that the Domino Sugar plant in Brooklyn is a direct cause of diabetes in New York City - proximity does not automatically connect the dots. Other factors are probably at work.
4) The CIA and U.S. foreign policy (1953-2001). OK, admittedly the U.S. doesn't have a great track record here, and this spirals out of the Lockheed Martin missile thing. The U.S. is directly or indirectly responsible for countless dictators being installed into or removed from power, from Salvador Allende to the Shah of Iran to Noriega to Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden. And if that's your documentary, then make that documentary about the evils of CIA and the thousands of people who died as a result. But I don't think any of this was on the minds of the Columbine shooters. We're mixing apples and oranges here, and now it's starting to seem like Mr. Moore is getting his own political bugaboos into the mix.
5) Pilgrims and cowboys. Those bastard pilgrims, I knew it. Those uptight pricks - the founders of our country were people who the BRITISH thought were too straight-laced. They came to America and acted like scared little weasels - they had to kill all the Native Americans, then kill all the Mexicans, then they had to enslave Black people, all so they could feel safe. But then they decided to spend generations living in fear of free minorities and created the KKK? I doubt this was anyone's line of reasoning. First off, people don't think over generations, they're selfish bastards who think only about themselves and what decisions will benefit them in the near future. Did those decisions compound, decade after decade, to create the mess that we're in now? I'm not so sure - plus this kind of discounts all of the good things about America, like clean water, improved lifespans and a capitalist system that rewards hard work. It certainly doesn't seem like the Pilgrims had a direct influence on a school shooting.
6) The media and their "climate of fear". Could your drinking water be killing you? Could snakes be inside your home RIGHT NOW? What are the hidden health risks from wearing sunglasses? Look, I hate the methods that local and national news have to resort to in order to get viewers as much as the next guy - but saying this is even an indirect cause of school shootings is completely backwards. It's blaming the messenger. It's like blaming your doctor for telling you you're sick. "Damn doctor, telling me I've got cancer, I wish I'd never gone to see him." So, you'd rather NOT know? How will THAT fix the problem? Yes, the media is a bunch of weasels, and I wish they didn't have to stoop so low to fill up a 24-hour news cycle. But they showed up in Littleton AFTER the tragedy, not before. Next...
7) KMart. OK, we've got a potential winner here. KMart apparently sold the ammunition used in the shooting. The KMart managers and executives were able to sleep at night because they believed they were giving the public what they wanted, easy access to ammunition to shoot small game. But this was legal according to Colorado laws - and if you condemn them, you condemn the whole capitalist system, which we're all part of. After Moore sandbagged them by bringing Columbine victims to their corporate office to "return the bullets" (come on, did you think the execs were supposed to perform surgery and dig the bullets out of the back of a wheelchair-bound teen?) they held a press conference the next day to announce that they'd be phasing out the sale of ammo. Sure, maybe they did it because it was the right PR move, not out of a noble desire to save lives, but a win is a win.
8) The teachers and guidance counselors at Columbine High. Now, this is pretty low and also comes pretty darn close to blaming the victims. Moore interviews "South Park" co-creator Matt Stone, who attended that very high school, and Stone points out that the teachers at Columbine tended to put pressure on kids to succeed by telling them that if they couldn't pass their exams, they'd never amount to anything and they'd end up old and poor. This is a spin on the "it gets better" motivation, only in reverse. BUT, this is not a direct line of reasoning either - even if a teacher said, "You're a loser now, you'll never amount to anything," the next thought in that reasoning is not "so you better grab a gun and shoot your schoolmates". If anything that's an argument for teen suicide, not a mass shooting. Fuzzy logic at best.
9) Workfare. This seems like another one of Moore's personal hates. The mother of the boy who brought a gun to school in Flint was forced to work at a mall far from home in order to earn the welfare benefits that enabled her to live just above the poverty level, so she wasn't there to supervise her son, who had to stay at his uncle's house, which is where he found the gun. So really, the whole system is responsible for the death of the little girl, so I guess scrapping workfare will save lives, right? Again, this is a complex problem with no simple solutions, so taking potshots at it won't really solve anything.
10) Dick Clark. After all, he owned the restaurant chain where the mother was doing workfare, which meant that she couldn't supervise her son, who brought a gun to school. And then Clark couldn't even be bothered to do a 5-minute interview when ambushed by Michael Moore and he had the NERVE to say he had somewhere else to be. What a Dick. Clark later had a stroke and passed away so I guess karma's a bitch - see, Michael Moore, I can draw false connections between things too. But why stop there? Why not blame the dinosaurs who died and fossilized and became the petroleum that got refined into gas and oil that fueled the bus that brought the woman to Dick Clark's Bandstand restaurant and kept her from supervising her son, who brought a gun to school? Screw you, dinosaurs, I'm glad you died so humans could evolve and make a mess of things...
Surprisingly, here's who DOESN'T get blamed in this film for the Columbine shootings:
1) Eric Harris + Dylan Klebold. After all, all they did was plan the school shooting, buy guns, bring them to school, and pull the triggers again and again. Sure, we'll never know exactly WHY they shot their classmates - but they still shot their classmates. Am I missing something here? Why does this movie barely mention them? And why focus on their membership in the bowling club, which has nothing to do with anything? Just to make the point that it wasn't their love of violent video-games any more than it was their bowling prowess? OK, but even if I accept these theories - it wasn't video-games, it wasn't bowling - Moore still kind of forgot to tell me what it WAS, then.
2) Whoever bullied them. Somebody, somewhere, gave these kids a hard time. I haven't looked into their back-stories enough to say who beat or mistreat them, but it was someone. Why not focus on that angle? This is what was missing from "Elephant" as well - somebody needs to get really into the social structure of high-school and start figuring out whose heads aren't screwed on right. Is it the "mean girls", the jocks, the stoners or the dweebs? In the giant fruit cocktail of personalities that make up the average high-school, which element needs to be focused on or removed from the mix?
Also getting a pass - broken homes, racial turmoil, the excessive number of guns in America, rock music (Marilyn Manson specifically) and violent videogames. And I LOVE playing "Grand Theft Auto", but even I think they could dial it back a bit. Again, it's a complex social problem, and I'm not prepared to let any of these culprits off the hook, just because the U.K. has more divorces, Canada has more guns, but the U.S. has the most shootings. It's all of the above, it's none of the above, it's everything and nothing.
But in a film where Michael Moore takes Charlton Heston to task for going to Littleton, CO and Flint, MI after gun tragedies in order to foster his own political agenda, Moore himself appears in Littleton, CO and Flint, MI a couple years later, in order to foster his own political agenda. Yes, I noticed. I'm not going to get into specific instances of documentary manipulation because they've been discussed at length elsewhere (e.g. Moore cajoled the bank managers to give him a gun at the bank, which is not their regular method of operation, and then took them to task for giving him a gun at the bank - what idiots!) but I feel the need to point out irony and hypocrisy and B.S. where I find it.
But now, since this is MY blog, it's MY turn to suggest solutions. And they won't be easy to hear, and they may not make sense at first, and heck, they may not even be feasible at all - but this is how I see things.
First, how to stop bullying in America. Let's say you're a teacher or principal, and you notice the jocks beating up on the nerds, or the "mean girls" trashing the dweeby girl. What you need to do is call the bullies into your office and show them a picture of "Fred" (or whoever) and you tell them Fred was a bully in Littleton, Colorado, and he pushed the wrong kids too far, and now Fred is dead, and so are Fred's friends. Nobody wants that, so let's all ease up on the nerdy kid / gay kid / weird kid before everyone regrets it.
And this goes out to you, nerdy kid / gay kid / weird kid - I'm not going to B.S. you and tell you "it gets better", because maybe it doesn't. You are who you are, and the sooner you accept yourself and live proud, the better things will be for everyone. But if you're being bullied, tell someone. If your teachers and principal are ineffective, then call the cops, call the media, file a lawsuit. If you feel like you're at the end of your rope, buying guns is not going to solve anything. If anything, that ends with you standing over a cafeteria full of bodies, and facing either a lifetime of imprisonment and suffering, or taking yourself out.
And I'm NOT going to advocate teen suicide, though it may seem easy preferable to just skip the middle part where you shoot your classmates and just go straight to the endgame. That's the coward's way out, just ask Ariel Castro (who just saved the taxpayers mucho dinero, but that's neither here nor there). Nope, it's time to buck up, be a man (or woman) and get professional help. It's the tougher road, sure, but it beats the alternatives in the long run.
RATING: 3 out of 10 background checks (and this is mainly for committing the cardinal documentary sin of being extremely unfocused, and not proposing valid, workable solutions)
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