BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE
Assigned Film for 22 May 2009
A DOCUMENTARY IS as good a film genre as any in which to study the significance of editing to tell a story and preach a theme. In his Oscar-winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine (2002), director Michael Moore explores gun ownership and violence in the US, using teenage killings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, as the film's main focus.We can study the power of editing in a documentary because while everything we see is "true" and "factual" (the footage shows real people and events), editing creates connections that are less true and factual.
For example, the editor can link images with other images or soundtrack to create a fictional reality. This is true in commercials, where a shot of a baseball player hitting a home run is followed by another shot of him holding a soft drink to link the two images. But no one seriously believes that drinking a certain kind of soda helps one become a great athlete (the reverse is more likely the case).
Moore's film is an exercise in simple-minded film montages that show connections where there are none. Does Moore really believe, for example, that the US bombing of other countries has anything to do with gun violence?
Since Moore lacks answers to the questions he poses about guns he tries to touch, through editing, as many bases as possible, hoping, if not to find an answer in all his footage, at least to find a film there. He found his film, but at the cost of a shallow coherence and intellectual dishonesty.
Moore's film is dishonest on several levels. Unable to build a coherent argument for gun violence, he finds as many links in his footage as possible to pad his film. One link is racism. Another is US imperialism. Another is poverty. Yet another is national history (Canadians have few murders). Still another is capitalism.
Apparently dissatisfied with these links, Moore then singles out individuals to personify the issue such as those in the Bush cabinet. Ruthlessly he then singles out the spokesman for the NRA (National Rifle Association) and Hollywood superstar, Charlton Heston (famous for playing Moses and other historical figures) for attack.
These appear as risible people in Moore's simplistic montages. Moore, however, appears as a sympathetic figure, seen patting a tearful woman on the back before Moore's editor cuts to a sequence where Charlton Heston talks about "cold hands" holding a rifle. In this way, Moore appears as the warm opposite of Heston's cold character.
The last image we see is of Moore holding up a photo of a child killed by a gun and accusing Heston of complicity in her death. Defiantly, he erects the dead girl's photo as a memorial for Heston (and us) to see before he leaves Heston's estate.
A sequence like that suggests the poverty of Moore's ideas. Apparently frustrated by his inability to impose coherence on his footage, he uses Heston as a scapegoat for the complex problem of gun violence in America.
Some parts of the film are even silly, as when Moore questions whether a dog can be charged with a gun crime or challenges a cop why there is pollution in the city. This is not satire—it's idiocy and suggests a mind of little, if any, intellectual substance. Bowling for Columbine is entertainment masked, through clever editing, as investigative journalism.
The pity is that Moore could have explored more complex issues related to gun ownership and violence, such as constitutional interpretations of the Second Amendment protecting the right to bear arms, congressional points of view, the pros and cons of gun ownership, personal testimony on both sides of the debate, etc.
Instead Moore challenges a producer of the popular TV show, Cops by asking why the show doesn't focus on corporate criminals. The producer admits it would be a difficult show to sell.
But Moore's documentary is just as commercial. An in-depth study of the gun issue, with a less simplistic thesis, would have consigned Moore's film to television instead of a profitable theatrical release. (Its popularity was eclipsed only by Moore's later attack on the Bush administration in Fahrenheit 9/11.)
Nonetheless, Bowling for Columbine is a good place in which to study editing techniques, such as audio-visual montage (linking of ideas by sound or image), omission (what is not shown is as important as what is shown), rhythm (the pacing of shot sequences can express moods, such as satire), optical devices (slow motion can increase the impact of an action, such as a boxer being knocked down), etc.
To give examples from Moore's film, a montage of war clips is accompanied (with stereotypical irony) by the well-known pop song, "What a Wonderful World." He uses John Lennon's Beatle song, "Happiness is a Warm Gun," to the same effect.
Moore frequently links brief shots to illustrate his points, as if the images (including filmed documents) prove a point when they merely illustrate a point. Thus Moore seems to prove his thesis about African Americans stereotyped as criminals by the news media by showing a rapid montage of news reports to this effect.
Editing can change the meaning of a shot by allowing it to play out. For example, when Moore challenges TV host Dick Clark, editing allows the sequence to continue long after other editors would have cut, showing Moore watching the car drive away.
This technique is especially noticeable when Moore challenges Charlton Heston about a little girl's death, for which Moore holds Heston responsible. By holding on to the shot the editor makes sure the viewer sees Moore yelling questions at Heston long after Heston has started to walk away, as if Heston was evading a tough challenge. But to an educated viewer this sequence comes off as the weakest in the film, a desperate attempt to stage a moment of truth in a film that fails to grasp any truth.
For there is more method than substance to Moore's film. Still, the viewer can learn a lot about the power of images and sound to construct reality.
