Michael Moore Essay

Evaluation "Bowling For Columbine"

Michael Moore, the director of “Bowling For Columbine”, acts throughout the film in a very proactive mode as he gets involved in front of the camera as well as behind, doing things like opening a bank and receiving a gun and campaigning with Columbine victims to ban the sell of ammunition at Wall-Mart stores; he does this as it firmly puts his views across to the viewer, and in certain aspects it may also shock them (anybody can get a gun easily in America)

Moore is deliberate in his use of visual conventions as he shows a childish cartoon about Americans being scared and a comedy sketch of Chris Rock joking about guns this adds an uncomfortable feel to the documentary and makes the topic less serious as he is using comedy to emphasis a very serious event. Moore also uses editing by using two points that juxtapose each other i.e. cutting from someone saying “America only makes weapons to defend” and then showing how America has used weapons to kill many innocent people. He also uses jump cuts in “Fahrenheit 9/11” to show and put emphasis on how many times George Bush says something like “Osama Bin Laden”, “Saddam Hussein” and “weapons of mass destruction” this not only make Bush look stupid but shows how many times he has tried to distract from the oil reasons for invading.

I think that sometimes the narrative of the documentary can simplify complex issues i.e. if Bush did this, it could have avoided that and if the school had this program then the shootings wouldn’t have happened, this shows that Moore is trying to say that these situations could have easily been avoided when in fact the situation is much more complicated than that. On the other hand he looks deeply through the situations usually not focusing too much on the situation itself but focusing on how this could have happened and how it can be prevented in the future.

Moore positions the viewer behind himself so they are watching him conduct the investigation and highly stresses his viewpoints on the situation; this could be seen as a vanity project of sorts as many of Moore’s films have a portion focusing on his home town of Flint, Michigan.

The argument in Columbine is obvious as it is clear what Moore is backing and what he is trying to achieve whereas in Fahrenheit the argument is more unclear and it seems as though Moore is just searching for the truth. “Bowling For Columbine” creates a false sense of closure in the conclusion of the documentary, it does this by showing the Columbine survivors winning their petition against Wall-Mart and the selling of ammunition for handguns, but it hasn’t resolved the fact that it is still very easy to get a handgun in America.

Michael Moore Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_moore