Moore Targets America

"Anger does well. Hate does well. Violence does well." In a short interview segment of Michael Moore's newest in-your-face documentary, Bowling for Columbine, the former producer of the hit television series Cops uses these words to describe the baseline of his marketing strategy. In doing so, he also inadvertently illuminates what Moore believes to be the core of American violence: media-driven fear.

Much like Moore's other controversially anti-establishment documentaries, Bowling for Columbine not only asks difficult questions, but also demands answers from the people most unwilling to give them.

Centered on the disproportionately high level of shooting deaths in the United States, Bowling for Columbine takes its audience through a multi-tiered American odyssey in search of explanation. By way of characteristically-probing interviews--the subjects of which range from members of the Michigan militia to the LAPD to Marilyn Manson--Moore unflinchingly attempts to elucidate why American citizens murder each other with a frequency that is not only foreign, but inconceivable to citizens of other "gun-loving" countries, such as Canada.

Moore does what anyone who has seen Roger and Me or The Big One knows he does best: He makes people squirm. The traditional buzzwords and empty political rhetoric surrounding gun ownership provide insufficient justifications, as evidenced by Moore's capstone interrogation of NRA president, Charlton Heston.

Bowling for Columbine is in turns brilliantly hilarious and tearfully macabre, but its execution remains refined and razor-sharp. Save for one maudlin montage of American brutality overseas (musically accompanied by Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World"), Moore's delivery is not manipulative, but specular. His America is one that fears its citizens when it should fear itself. Michael Moore--especially on the subject of firearms--is a much-needed firebrand.