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FILM COMMENT
November/December 2002
MICHAEL MOORE
By Stuart Klawans
The United States every year puts up spectacular numbers for gun murders. Why are our statistics so far out of whack with those of other nations? As Bowling for Columbine begins, it seems as if Moore intends to give the standard liberal answer to this question: America's simply got too many guns and bullets knocking around. Despite all the raucous laughter that he elicits in Bowling for Columbine, Moore is working on difficult and personal emotional terrain. He's concerned with fear and shame: the fear that white Americans have, generally, historically felt for black men, and the shame that too many kids feel (sometimes with disastrous consequences) when they're branded as losers-for-life. As a sociologist, Moore proposes that these endemic emotions, especially fear, are the causal factor behind the murder statistics, when combined with easy access to firearms and ammo. As a polemicist, Moore argues that we ought to do something, now, about the miseries behind our society's dangerous feelings. As an autobiographer, Moore speaks with deep conviction about those wounds that Richard Sennett called "the hidden injuries of class" - but only when he tacitly uses someone else as a stand-in. He can be heartbreaking about the six-year-old boy who killed Kayla Rolland. About himself, he's best when he's King of the Carnival.
© 2002 by Stuart Klawans
You can read the complete version of this article in the November/December print edition of Film Comment.
