Guns 'n' ammo

With Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore hits a moving target. Four critics examine the trajectory.

On location

THIRTY THOUSAND GUN deaths a year, an international "anti-terror" campaign that has even our allies quivering, and a sniper headed toward a freeway near you. Clearly, the enemy is us. What Michael Moore really wants to find out in Bowling for Columbine is who the hell are we?

I've been wondering the very same thing myself. I write this from Canada, where Moore did a lot of thinking for Bowling for Columbine – a film that attempts to unravel why, exactly, America is so very homicidal. Canadians, who own just as many arms as the U.S.'s scared citizens, don't go around killing one another, Moore discovers. True, the context is different. Below my hotel window 2,000 of the queen's loyal subjects spend their lunch hour walking miles of city to get a quick wave from her majesty. (Page-one news: The queen has got her game face on to drop the ceremonial puck during a hockey game.) In Canada, heads are being scratched raw over the U.S.'s latest campaign of terror "against" terror. While the unclassifiable "we" fear the unknowable "them," the rest of the world is afraid of an irrational "us."

Yet in Moore's world, it's the oddball exceptions that prove the rule. What's so powerful about Moore's new film, a truly intelligent departure from the somber stranglehold of the Sept. 11 era on the topic of What's Wrong with America, is what's so powerful about all of Moore's films: his use of location, the comic mise-en-scène that one couldn't dream up in a studio setting, the "reality" of our reality that is truly too strange for words. He doesn't have to generalize, he specifies. He interviews a concerned citizen in or near Littleton, Co., in front of a Lockheed Martin missile, about the tragic school shooting at Columbine High. The man is a P.R. flack for the arms manufacturer, and he tells Moore the company is doing its part to help: it's offering anger management training for kids in the area. Does the U.S. government need anger management training? Is there a contradiction in this arms company, which ships gigantic missiles through the city's highways, helping children learn this kind emotional deterrence? No, the man offers, earnestly: The United States doesn't use these arms for acts of aggression, only in defense. The room in which the missile is placed offers its own comic counterpoint in a sign that reads: "This room must remain foreign object free."

I mean, after all this time, Who lets this guy in? The camera rolls as Moore makes pit stops that turn into filmmaking coups: James Nichols, brother of Terry Nichols, demonstrating homegrown paranoia, classic corn-fed antistatism, Second Amendment pride, and his potholed perspective on world history ("What about Gandhi?" Moore asks Nichols, who answers that he's never heard of him). He hits the city of Toronto, where urbanites can't even be frightened into locking their doors ("Thanks for not killing me!" Moore tells a man in an "I [heart] N.Y." T-shirt after barging into his home without knocking). He travels from Michigan (malls and militia groups) to Denver (to speak with a thoughtful Marilyn Manson, whose take on school shootings – that the United States perpetrates real violence but wants to legislate only about fantasy violence – Moore adopts as his major through-line) and back again.

By the time the interviews are over, those catch-phrase historic events that had been reduced to very singular meanings – "Columbine," "Oklahoma City," "9/11" – are reinvented as the truly terrible, complex situations they were. America is not just one kooky country, as so many self-satisfied nonfiction films are happy to point out; Moore's travelogue has an analysis that stems from a Chomsky-inflected worldview boiled down to one very simple, devastatingly sad sequence in which Louis Armstrong sings "What a Wonderful World" to a rundown of the past few decades of U.S.-sponsored violence. The U.S.'s killing sprees, inside and outside its borders, are fueled, Moore argues, by fear.

Ours is a population easily herded, a fact Moore enjoys as he revisits some of the old ghosts of media frenzy: those "Africanized killer bees" that never arrived, the razored apples poised to kill children on Halloween (the only deaths by candy were actually a result of relatives, not dangerous strangers, Moore reports). Should a country this hyped up on fear be armed? That question is easy. The bigger one – Why are we so afraid? – is largely unanswerable. What's new for Moore is taking on a question so sticky in a time so angry in a country so thought-controlled. He's taking a risk that, I believe, pays off profoundly. This time, it's Michael Moore, live, from the back of your mind.

Susan Gerhard