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When Bowling for Columbine was released in the United States on October 11, 2002, it was over three years since the event that inspired it: the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. Those shootings left 13 dead, plus the perpetrators, and they scandalized and terrified the nation. The sight of teenage children fleeing their school in fear as their classmates lay dead behind them was seared into our brains forever. Blame was tossed around at everyone from gun manufacturers to the NRA to popular musicians and the creators of violent films and video games to the parents of killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Americans were frightened and terrorized and determined to do something about it.
And yet in the 18 years since that horrible day, there have been DOZENS more mass shootings in the United States, most recently the October 1st massacre in Las Vegas, which currently stands as the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Though who knows how long that record will hold?
In the wake of these mass shootings, we have gotten depressingly used to the usual progression of outrage, followed by calls to action, followed by political roadblocks, followed by quiet defeat. It happens again and again, and with every new shooting — at a movie theater, at an elementary school, at a nightclub — it boils down to: how could we let this happen? And perhaps more fundamentally: why does this keep happening?
Michael Moore, for all his many years of blustering, of grandstanding, of making himself the center of attention instead of the issues he champions, has gotten at least one thing exactly right, and that was Bowling for Columbine in 2002. It’s an imperfect film that nevertheless absolutely nails the gun-control debate to the wall.
Michael Moore’s central question in Bowling for Columbine was even more specific: what is it about the United States of America that makes us so much more susceptible to these acts of gun violence? Why do we have thousands upon thousands more gun deaths than any other Western nation? He shoots down (pardon the pun) a whole host of the usual explanations: violent music/films/video games are hardly exclusive to America; neither is a history of imperialistic violence nor economic strife. Moore boils it all down to two things: America’s raging gun culture and its white population’s pervasive fear of violence from black people. As Moore lays it out, they’re not exactly un-connected.
You don’t have to buy into every one of Michael Moore’s rationales in Bowling for Columbine to think that the film is still dead-on when it comes to the gun debate. His shaming of the United States for their intervention in propping up violent regimes in other countries feels much more like post-9/11 rage than anything pertinent to domestic gun massacres. But the fact is that with every successive mass shooting, the proposed scapegoats are too small. Banning bump stocks (as we might do after Las Vegas) would not have prevented Sandy Hook; universal background checks wouldn’t have prevented Las Vegas. None of these proposed band-aid fixes get to the root of America’s gun violence program. In 2002, Michael Moore refused to get bogged down in debates over whether popular culture like Marilyn Manson and South Park were to blame for gun violence (isn’t it quaint to remember when America’s parents were afraid of Marilyn Manson??).
Those were the band-aid fixes of that day. Moore went further, going right at the gun culture that lies at the root of it all.
When Bowling for Columbine was released in 2002, America was already mired in its response to the latest horrific act of violence. Post-9/11, the Bush administration was taking the country into war. Moore would eventually make another, even more provocative movie about that, Fahrenheit 9/11. Already, in early 2003, Moore was agitating against George W. Bush and his reasons for pushing the country into war. When Bowling for Columbine won the Oscar for Best Documentary that year, Moore’s Oscar speech was contentious and divisive, drawing as many boos as it did cheers.
This is the essential Michael Moore conundrum, of course. Working through the bluster and the intentional provocations to get to the real stuff underneath. The furor over his words obscures the truth at the root. And what’s true is that Bowling for Columbine remains as sadly relevant today as ever. On a red carpet in 2012, shortly after Sandy Hook, Moore lamented, “I never thought I would have to, a decade later, stand here and say that that film of mine did no good. That to me is personally heartbreaking.”
In April of this year, Moore spoke again about Bowling for Columbine and its influence. “We could release this movie again this Friday and it would be every bit as relevant,” he said. Yet he was still searching for that big answer: why? “The one thing I left out in the film and didn’t really think of it until I was at the premiere is girls don’t do this,” Moore mused. “It’s all boys. I think there have been one or two exceptions in 30 years. Generally, men commit most of the gun murders – adult men and teenage boys. Why don’t women shoot other human beings?”
Tragically, these questions still have to be asked as America piles one mass shooting’s death toll on top of another. We can hope that after another 15 years, we don’t still have to look back on Bowling for Columbine as an unheeded call. But if we do, it will still be as right as it’s ever been.
