David Hardy analyzes Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine as a "documentary" per the Academy's own rules and finds it wanting:
- The Michael Moore production "Bowling for Columbine" just won the Oscar for best documentary. Unfortunately, it is not a documentary, by the Academy's own definition.
The injustice here is not so much to the viewer, as to the independent producers of real documentaries. These struggle in a field which (despite its real value) receives but a tiny fraction of the recognition and financing of the "entertainment industry." The award of the documentary Oscar to a $4 million entertainment piece is unjust to the legitimate competitors, disheartening to makers of real documentaries, and sets a precedent which may encourage inspire others to take similar liberties with their future projects.
Bowling makes its points by deceiving and by misleading the viewer. Statements are made which are false. Moore invites the reader to draw inferences which he must have known were wrong. Indeed, even speeches shown on screen are heavily edited, so that sentences are assembled in the speaker's voice, but which he never uttered.
These occur with such frequency and seriousness as to rule out unintentional error. Any polite description would be inadequate, so let me be blunt. Bowling uses deliberate deception as its primary tool of persuasion and effect.
A film which does this may be a commercial success. It may be amusing, or it may be moving. But it is not a documentary. One need only consult Rule 12 of the rules for the Academy Award: a documentary must be non-fictional, and even re-enactments (much less doctoring of a speech) must stress fact and not fiction.
....The point is not that Bowling is unfair, or lacking in objectivity. One might hope that a documentary would be fair, but nothing rules out a rousing polemic.
Article comments
1 - PotKettleBlackHeavyIndustries
Interesting, but:
Soundbiting is an accepted practice in our media (believe what you will about Bias, Rush Limpbag bites people as much as NPR does), and most of the things not exerpted from Heston's speech didn't really effect the meaning. The NRA WAS asked not to come, and they came and said they could go where ever they want.
Heston DID make the "Cold Dead Hands" speech, and if you believe it was merely thanking the person who gave him an antique, you either believe him to be warped or you are the one who's warped. That statement is clearly aimed at the anti-gun forces in the world. Who else would pry anything from his cold dead hands? Why would you say thanks in any other way than some variant of "Gee, this is the greatest gift I've ever gotten." If you had to get all cold & dead with it, why not say something like, "I'll cherish it always, and be buried with it."
Mr. Hardy also asserts that Moore is misleading in his discussion of the KKK & the NRA. Moore never says that they were founded in the same year. He states, correctly, that the NRA was founded the same year that the KKK was made an illegal, terrorist organization. Granted, the Klan was always a terrorist organization that did things that were illegal, but it was not officially an illegal organization until the Ku Klux Klan and Enforcement Acts were passed in 1871. Sure, he leads you to believe that the Klansmen up and started the NRA, which is a little misleading, but nowadays, it seems way too plausible, looking at the NRA now.
About the Buell shooting: Hardy shows that Moore puts this into the film:
"No one knew why the little boy wanted to shoot the little girl."
Then he counters with two facts: that the boy was a bully, and that the gun had been bought by his drug dealing uncle from a drug addicted customer who stole it.
There is no explanation, even in these sad facts, of why he wanted to shoot the girl. Bowling really depicts the young man as pitiable, not sympathetic, and if you cannot pity a child born in Flint, whose father is serving time, whose mother is forced to work two jobs at a mall that it takes over 45 minutes to get to and from in order to get welfare, and consequently, whose primary caretender is a drug dealing uncle, then you are truly on the border between humanity and inhumanity. I have seen the film twice, and not once felt like the kid isn't pretty screwed up, but twice have felt that he deserves our pity.
Regarding the Taliban:
Moore points out that we gave $245 million in aid to the famine ravished Afghanistan, and thusly, supported the terroist friendly Taliban, who, even ignoring their terroist ties, were in no danger of winning any humanitarian awards. He then contrasts that with another famine struck country of similar size (Bangladesh if I recall correctly), and notes that we sent quite a bit less aid to them, even though their government doesn't support terrorists or blow up monuments to other religions. He never says anything about the type of aid, in both cases humanitarian.
The Numbers:
Even if you cannot verify his numbers, the ones Mr Hardy came up with, verify Moore's conclusion.
Even if you allow all homicides in Germany, 1476, that's still lower than one would expect, comparatively, compared to the 1995 US homicide number. Since we're only talking about Gun Homicide, lets take the 147 for Germany in 1995 vs the 8480 for the US in 1999. That's a pretty vast discrepancy, considering that we share alot, culturally, with Germany. Even factoring that the US is four times bigger than Germany, that's 8480 to 588... In easier terms 1442%. How bout Australia: 123 (with roughly 20 Mil, we will multiply by 15) in their peak year cited. That turns into 1845, also known as 460%
The numbers speak for themselves, even if Moore has different data, that Mr Hardy was unable to find.
The Plaque on the B-52:
If Mr. Hardy knows his Viet Nam history, he will know that Linebacker & Linebacker 2 were bombing missions. Specifically, carpet bombing missions. While it is possible that THAT B-52 may have bombed a Vietnamese airstrip and blew up a MiG, it is likely that it carpetbombed the area, which likely resulted in the death of Indochinese on Christmas Eve. Even if you take the story at face value, that it shot down a fighter interceptor on Christmas, I wonder just who does Mr. Hardy think was flying said MiG. And does he think they lived? I would venture that the pilot was Vietnamese, and he likely died. Granted, it was kill or be killed, but I find it highly unlikely that a Viet Nam era B-52 shot down anything that wasn't on the ground. Especially having studied the Linebacker and Linebacker 2 offensives.
I think Mr. Hardy missed the point of the movie. I took it as an exploration of the gun culture and other issues facing American Society. Mr. Glassner, in his "excellent book" (I agree on this, but Mr. Hardy said it), repeatedly points to guns as the main problem.
The film is polemic, but it can still be a documentary, as it documents many things.
2 - Eric Olsen
Thanks for all of that Max - Hardy believes that the "liberties" Moore takes transform his film from documentary into something else. You do not - however it's pretty important for those who may be swayed by the film to know it is not all "fact" and that there is pretty heavy-handed manipulation.
3 - san
Eric, we can agree on that: if one is getting all one's information from one source, one is probably not getting much information at all. (High-toned, lofty use of "one" as a pronoun so you know I'm not talking about you in particular.)
4 - Eric Olsen
One agrees
5 - Brian Flemming
"Dishonest" techniques don't render a documentary a non-documentary. The legendary doc Nanook of the North staged many of its scenes without telling the viewer. If the Academy gets into squabbles about technique, one of the greatest docs ever made, The Thin Blue Line, would be disqualified. Oh, wait, it was.
But that's the kind of thing that will happen if the Academy committee gets into these kinds of allegations. A sloppily made doc is still a doc.
Still, if the nominating committee and the voters had had all the information, I wonder if Bowling would have won an Oscar.
6 - Steve Rhodes
As I've said before, Bowling is a genre of documentary called the essay film with a heavy dash of satire.
Unfortunately, most people have a very narrow view of documentaries. I remember the Heston sequence, and I didn't think that the "cold dead hands" soundbite was from Denver. It is an iconic image of Heston and ofcourse Moore was going to use it to introduce him.
He does need a better fact checker, but so do most media organizations and book publishers (which often have few if any as their corporate owners have been squeezing them for higher profit margins). I haven't had a chance to look at all of Hardy's criticisms, but I wonder if he and other conservatives get as upset about Rush Limbaugh's reign of error.
We should teach people visual and media literacy like they do in Europe and Candada to look at all media more critically.
7 - PotKettleBlackHeavyIndustries
True about the dangers of one source of information.
Here's what gets me today.
A conservative will complain all day about the Liberal Media Bias and then turn around and lobby the FCC to reduce the barriers to media conglomeration. If there is this prevalence of liberal media, is the dream of our hypothetical conservative that the one "fair and unbiased" news organization (Fox News) will ultimately wind up owning all the other "Liberal" outlets?
8 - George
"distortions and fabrications ...Fiction masquerading as fact can cause more damage than either."
seems this post has been shown to contain the very same thing it purports to be up in arms about (no pun intended), which, to me, serves as a reminder that we all tend to "see what we want to see" unless we are willing to work very hard to overcome dogma, no matter what camp it falls in.
9 - Aaron
Man, you guys are really stretching. I am willing to concede that Bowling for Columbine is a "documentary," but can't we agree that Moore is playing fast and loose with the truth? Does anyone care to comment on Moore's discussion of the Lockheed-Martin plant or his staging of the scene in the bank? Did Moore object to providing famine relief to Afganistan? If not, why did he mention it? His assertions are so confused in the light of these factual discussions that it is hard for me to go back and figure out what he was trying to say.
10 - Jimmy
That's just the begining...
11 - Eric Olsen
Jimmy, I sense that not a fart will escape Michael Moore without your keen awareness of it.
12 - Linda lawson
I recently saw the film in question and was deeply moved by the story of the little boy who virtually lost his mother to the 'welfare to work' law. I find it strange that this country does not consider the care of a child an honorable day of work. How honorable is it to send mothers away from the care of their children to work for wages that do not come close to paying the bills so that the wealthy can eat fudge at a cheap price. The government is totally apathetic to the children who wake up in poverty and now they expect them to wake up without their mothers! welfare is 1% of our tax dollars and I would be glad to know that my part goes to help these children. Politicians have created an unfair image of the single mother who struggles to make ends meet every day.they do not create the difficulties that they face in society, they are the victims of it!