Bowling Truths: The Film Is Unmasked

Very long, but definitive, analysis of Bowling for Columbine
by Dave Kopel. FYI (copy below):
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel040403.asp
AOL users
click here

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April 4, 2003, 2:30 p.m.

Bowling Truths

Michael Moore???s mocking.

In the field of mockumentary filmmaking, there are two

giants. Rob Reiner created the genre with his film This is
Spinal Tap. Michael Moore has taken the genre to an
entirely different level, with Bowling for Columbine.

In 1984, This is Spinal Tap premiered as the world’s first
self-described “mockumentary.” The film purported to be a
documentary of a heavy-metal band called “Spinal Tap.” In
fact, there was no such band. No group had ever hit the
charts in the 1960s with a song called “Listen to the Flower
People.” No rock drummer named John “Stumpy” Pepys had ever
died in an inexplicable gardening accident. No arena rock
performance had ever featured a pair of midgets dancing
around an 18-inch replica of Stonehenge.

Over the course of the movie, most viewers figured out that
“Spinal Tap” was not a real band. The realization often
came somewhere between the band’s rocker “Big Bottom” (“I
met her on Monday; it was my lucky bun day”) and the
sensitive ballad “Lick My Love Pump.”

Still, a substantial portion of the audience sat through the
entire film without ever realizing that the whole thing was
a joke. They left the theatre believing that there really
was a band called Spinal Tap. In response, the creators
ended up producing a Spinal Tap MTV video, and even a 1992
Spinal Tap “Reunion” tour. The stupidity of a fraction of
the audience had brought its own “reality” to life.

This is Spinal Tap is an excellent movie which was,
unfortunately, neglected by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences. No such fate befell Bowling for
Columbine. While only an unusually dim minority believe
that Tap is truth, Bowling for Columbine has seduced almost
all of its audiences with its brazen mockumentary.

You can’t really understand the artistic accomplishment of
This is Spinal Tap if you naively expect to find the album
Smell the Glove in your local music store. Likewise, you
cannot understand the brilliance of Bowling for Columbine if
you actually believe the purported facts in this
mockumentary. For the benefit of the overly credulous, let
me summarize some of the “facts” in Bowling for Columbine.
Then, I will explain how Michael Moore demolishes the
pretensions of the audience and of elite cinematic opinion
in a way that has never before been accomplished.

FICTITIOUS “FACTS”

The introduction of Bowling is a purported clip from an NRA
documentary, announcing that the viewer is about to see a
National Rifle Association film. Obviously, Bowling is not
an NRA film, and so Moore makes it clear right at the
beginning that Bowling is not a documentary (based on true
facts), but rather a mockumentary (based on fictitious
“facts”). It’s a humorous movie, but the biggest joke is on
the audience, which credulously accepts the “facts” in the
movie as if they were true.

The first mockumentary “fact” is the title itself. The
Columbine murderers were enrolled in a high-school bowling
class. After the NRA introduction, the film begins on the
morning of April 20, 1999, the day of the Columbine murders.
Narrator Moore announces that on that day, “Two boys went
bowling at six in the morning.” This serves as a setup for
a later segment looking at the causes of Columbine, and
arguing that blaming violent video games (which the killers
played obsessively) or Marilyn Manson music (which the
killers enjoyed) makes no more sense than blaming bowling.

In fact, the two killers ditched bowling class on the day of
the murders. The police investigation found that none of
the students in the bowling class that morning had seen the
killers that day. The police report was completed long
before the release of Bowling for Columbine, so the title
itself is a deliberate falsehood. (I don’t use the word

“lie” because the mockumentary genre allows for the use of

invented facts.)

After the April 20 lead-in, Bowling begins an examination of

middle-American gun culture, and indulges the bicoastal

elite’s snobbery toward American gun owners.

We are taken to the North County Bank in Michigan, which ???

like several other banks in the United States ??? allows

people who buy a Certificate of Deposit to receive their

interest in the form of a rifle or shotgun. (The depositor
thereby receives the full value of the interest immediately,
rather than over a term of years.)

Moore goes through the process of buying the CD and
answering questions for the federal Form 4473 registration
sheet. Although a bank employee makes a brief reference to
a “background check,” the audience never sees the process
whereby the bank requires Moore to produce photo
identification, then contacts the FBI for a criminal records
check on Moore, before he is allowed to take possession of
the rifle.

Moore asks: “Do you think it’s a little bit dangerous
handing out guns at a bank?” The banker’s answer isn’t
shown.

So the audience is left with a smug sense of the pro-gun
bank’s folly. Yet just a moment’s reflection shows that
there is not the slightest danger. To take possession of
the gun, the depositor must give the bank thousands of
dollars (an unlikely way to start a robbery). He must then
produce photo identification (thus making it all but certain
that the robber would be identified and caught), spend at
least a half hour at the bank (thereby allowing many people
to see and identify him), and undergo an FBI background
check (which would reveal criminal convictions disqualifying
most of the people inclined to bank robbery). A would-be
robber could far more easily buy a handgun for a few hundred
dollars on the black market, with no identification
required.

The genius of Bowling for Columbine is that the movie does
not explicitly make these obvious points about the safety of
the North County Bank’s program. Rather, the audience is
simply encouraged to laugh along with Moore’s apparent
mockery of the bank, without realizing that the joke is on
them for seeing danger where none exists. This theme is

developed throughout the film.

From the Michigan bank, Moore moves on to an examination of

the rest of Michigan’s culture ??? or, more precisely, to

eccentric and unrepresentative segments of that culture,

thereby playing to the audience’s feelings of superiority

over American gun owners.

For example, hunting is a challenging sport, requiring

outdoor skills, wildlife knowledge, patience, and good

marksmanship. Most members of the urban audiences cheering
Bowling for Columbine are no more capable of participating
in a successful hunt than they are of conducting a
three-day, backcountry cross-country ski trek, or playing
rookie-league baseball. The vast majority of hunters are
also very safety-conscious. In 2000, for example, there
were 91 fatal hunting accidents in all of North America,
within a population of over 16 million hunters.

Yet Moore ignores all of this. Instead, he comically
reports an incident in which some reckless hunters tied a
gun to their dog to take a funny picture, and one of the
hunters was shot. According to the police reports, the
foolish hunters had only a still camera, but Bowling
presents a fabricated video clip which purports to have been
filmed by the hunter’s friend. Because the clip appears to
be a home movie, Bowling makes hunters seem viciously
callous: The “hunter” holding the camera continues
recording after his fellow hunter has been wounded, rather
than immediately stopping to help the friend.

Similarly, the ideology of gun ownership and civil liberty
is not presented by reference to Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison, or to legal scholars such as liberal Democrats
Sanford Levinson or Larry Tribe. Instead, Moore goes to the
Michigan Militia.

While Moore allows the militia members to present their
case, he makes the group (which has no record of illegal
violence or any other illegal activity) appear extremely
dangerous by informing viewers that Timothy McVeigh and
Terry Nichols attended militia meetings. Moore conveniently
neglects to mention that the two were eventually kicked out,
for talking about violence.

James Nichols, the brother of a convicted mass murderer, is
offered as a spokesman for the right of free people to
resist tyrannical government.

ON TO LITTLETON, LOCKHEED, AND 9/11

Bowling then departs Michigan and heads for Littleton,
Colo., to develop the thesis that American militarism
created the mass-murder atmosphere that resulted in
Columbine.

Aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin has a factory in
Littleton, so Moore asks a company spokesman if “our kids
say to themselves, ‘Well, gee, Dad goes off to the factory
every day, and he builds missiles, he builds weapons of mass
destruction. What’s the difference between that mass
destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High
School?’” The camera then takes a shot of a workplace

safety slogan ??? “It has to be foreign-object free” ??? to

imply that Lockheed Martin employees revel in the killing of

dehumanized foreigners.

Of course the connection is nonsense. While one killer’s
father once served in the Air Force, neither family worked
in the defense industry. The other killer’s parents were

gun-control advocates ??? so much so that they forbade him to

play with toy guns ??? unlike the many children who are shown

with toy guns elsewhere in the film. One of the killers’
gun suppliers was the son of a Colorado anti-gun activist.
Thus, Moore might just as well have asked a spokesman for a
gun-prohibition group if “our kids say to themselves, ‘Well,
gee, mom and day say that guns are just for killing innocent
people. So if I have a gun, I guess I should use it for

killing innocent people.’”

Moore returns to the bowling theme a few scenes later, to

present the argument ??? which the audience of course supports

??? that neither bowling nor Marilyn Manson was responsible

for the Columbine crimes. The audience is encouraged to
feel intellectually superior to the politicians, who are
pictured blaming Marilyn Manson.

Yet the connection the movie draws between Lockheed and the
Columbine mass murder is even more tenuous than the
connection with Manson. The Columbine killers had no
connection to Lockheed, but they did listen to Marilyn
Manson. And Brian Warner’s choice of the stage name of

“Manson” shows that mass killers can enjoy enduring

pop-culture fame ??? precisely what the Columbine killers

hoped to achieve. (I avoid mentioning their names so as not
to assist their vicious quest.)

After blaming Lockheed for 13 deaths at Columbine, the film
moves on to blaming the United States government for 3,000
deaths on September 11. It does this by arguing that we got
what we deserved, because our nation revels in the killing
of civilians by air.

A montage of U.S. foreign-policy atrocities (to the tune of
“What a Wonderful World”) concludes with the statement that
the U.S. gave $245 million to the Taliban in 2000-01. The
next shot is of the World Trade Center in flames.

In fact, that money was not given to the Taliban government,
but rather to U.S. and international agencies that
distributed humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan.
In other words, the fact that the United States gave money
to Food For Peace and for girls’ schools for Afghan refugees
is supposed to prove that the America deserved to be
attacked by al Qaeda.

Right after the footage of the airplanes hitting the Twin
Towers, Bowling shows a B-52 memorial at the Air Force
Academy in Colorado Springs. Moore intones: “The plaque
underneath it proudly proclaims that this plane killed
Vietnamese people on Christmas Eve 1972.” The point is
obvious: that the United States government and al Qaeda
both perpetrate murder by airplane.

In fact, the plaque on the B-52 at the AFA is not as Moore
describes it. The plaque says “B-52D Stratofortress.
‘Diamond Lil.’ Dedicated to the men and women of the
Strategic Air Command who flew and maintained the B-52D
throughout its 26-year history in the command. Aircraft

55-083, with over 15,000 flying hours, is one of two B-52Ds

credited with a confirmed MIG kill during the Vietnam

Conflict Flying out of U-Tapao Royal Thai Naval Airfield in

southern Thailand, the crew of ‘Diamond Lil’ shot down a MIG

northeast of Hanoi during ‘Linebacker II’ action on

Christmas Eve, 1972.”

Moore thus confirms the absurdity of the blame-America-first

position popular among the Hollywood Left, by showing that

such views require the ignoring of obvious facts ??? such as

the difference between financial aid to a dictatorship and

humanitarian aid to refugees, or between fighting enemy

pilots and perpetrating war crimes against civilians.

BLAME IT ON THE NRA

A long mockumentary segment reports on the NRA convention in

Denver in May 1999. The segment begins with NRA president
Charlton Heston holding an antique rifle above his head and
delivering the signature line: “From my cold dead hands.”
Actually, Heston never displayed a rifle or uttered that
line at the Denver convention.

Moore bashes the NRA for being insensitive by holding its
convention in Denver two weeks after the Columbine murders.
That insensitivity is heightened by the implication that
Heston did the “cold dead hands” rifle display there.
Viewers are not informed that the NRA convention had been
scheduled many years in advance, that Mayor Webb (who at the
last minute told the NRA to cancel the convention) had
eagerly solicited the NRA convention for Denver, or that the
NRA drastically reduced its four-day convention, holding
only its annual members’ meeting, in an afternoon session
legally required by its non-profit charter from the state of
New York.

The litany of scapegoating (Lockheed Martin, the United
States, the NRA) then abruptly shifts into the
anti-scapegoating segments concerning bowling and Marilyn
Manson.

In keeping with the mockumentary format, Moore tells the
audience that bowling was “apparently the last thing they
did before the massacre.” Even if the killers hadn’t
skipped class, this statement would be untrue. Bowling
class was at 6 A.M.; the killings began around 11 A.M.

The “scapegoat Lockheed and the NRA” segments serve as a
perfect counterpoint to the “don’t scapegoat bowling or
Manson” segment. By leading the audience into fatuous

scapegoating of Lockheed and the NRA, the film demonstrates

the pervasiveness of scapegoating ??? even by people who

denounce it.

A cartoon history of the United States comes next, on the

theme that American gun owners are racist. The Second
Amendment is said to have been written “so every white man
could keep his gun.” Actually, at the time of the Second
Amendment, every state allowed free people of color to own
guns. Moreover, anti-slavery activist Lysander Spooner
would later use the Second Amendment as part of his argument
to show that slavery was unconstitutional. Gun prohibition,
he argued, is a condition of slavery; the Second Amendment
guarantees the right of all people to own guns; hence
slavery, and its attendant gun prohibition, are
unconstitutional.

The audience is now informed that the National Rifle
Association was founded in 1871, “the same year the Klan
became an illegal terrorist organization.” The voice-over
says that this was just a coincidence, but the cartoon shows
gun owners helping Klansmen to murder blacks.

The phrasing of the Klan line leaves some viewers with the
impression that the Klan was created in 1871, even though
the group was founded in 1866 in Tennessee. What happened
in 1871 was congressional passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act,
which allowed the president to suppress the Klan by denying
Klansmen the writ of habeas corpus. (The Klan was, of
course, composed of men who fought on the losing,
pro-slavery side of the Civil War.)

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act of
1871 into law, and worked for the rapid extermination of
that terrorist organization. Grant dispatched federal
troops into South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida to
destroy the Klan and to protect black voting rights. In an

April 1872 report to Congress, Grant pointed out the

continuing problem in some southern counties of the Ku Klux

Klan attempting “to deprive colored citizens of their right

to bear arms and the right of a free ballot.”

President Grant also signed the Enforcement Act of 1870,

which made it a federal crime for the Ku Klux Klan or

similar conspiracies to interfere with the civil rights of

freedmen ??? including their Second Amendment right to arms.

Frederick Douglass justly called Grant “the benefactor of an

enslaved and despised race, a race who will ever cherish a

grateful remembrance of his name, fame and great services.”

The 1871 founders of the National Rifle Association were

thus diametrically opposed to the Confederates who founded

the KKK. The NRA founders were Union officers who had
fought on the winning, anti-slavery side of the Civil War.
Dismayed by the poor quality of Union marksmanship during
the war, the NRA’s founders aimed to improve the shooting
skills of the American public at large. The first NRA
president was Ambrose E. Burnside, who had served as
commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Ulysses Grant left the presidency in 1877, but continued his
long career of public service in retirement. In 1883, he
was elected president of the National Rifle Association.
From 1871 until the end of the century, nine of the NRA’s
ten presidents had fought against slavery during the Civil
War. These included Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, a hero of
Gettysburg, and Gen. Phillip Sheridan, the famous Union
cavalry commander. During Reconstruction, Gen. Sheridan
served as military governor of Louisiana and Texas, and
removed hundreds of local officials (including the governors
of both states, and the chief justice of the Texas supreme
court) from office for failing to respect the rights of
freedmen and for failing to enforce laws for their
protection.

In Bowling, Michael Moore brags that he is an NRA “Lifetime
member.” So it might be expected that Moore would inform
viewers about the NRA’s noble anti-slavery history. But
Moore’s connection to the NRA is bizarre; he told Tim
Russert that he joined the group so that he could be elected
its president and make it support gun control. This is
aggrandized self-delusion, rather like Barbra Streisand
announcing that she was becoming Catholic so that she could
be elected Pope and make the Church support polygamy.

The supposedly racist nature of white gun owners is
reinforced by Bowling’s statement that an 1871 law made it
illegal for blacks to own guns. No such law existed,

although it is true that many gun laws from the late 19th

century ??? such as licensing and registration laws, or bans

on inexpensive guns ??? were selectively enforced in the South

so as to deprive blacks of firearms. These are the same
kinds of laws that Moore promotes today. Indeed, he turned
the Bowling for Columbine premier into a fundraiser for the
Brady Campaign, which works hard to outlaw inexpensive guns
used by poor people for protection.

MEDIA FEAR-MONGERING

Having established the racism and paranoia of American gun
owners, Moore now begins an extended sequence depicting the
media as racist fear-mongers. He first argues that the
media create irrational fears about black criminals.
(According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, table 43,
4,238 blacks were arrested for murder and non-negligent
manslaughter, compared to 4,231 whites.)

University of Southern California Professor Barry Glassner,
author of The Culture of Fear, gets lots of camera time to
explain how the media sensationalize crime and hype fears to
unrealistic levels. And this is where Bowling’s genius
truly shines.

On the one hand, Bowling works the audience into
self-righteous anger at “the media” for using cheap
sensationalism to promote fear. At the very same time, the

film uses ??? you guessed it ??? cheap sensationalism to promote

fear. The very techniques which he decries in the media,
Moore uses himself, with obvious approval from the audience.
Moore thus enacts a real demonstration of how the audience
is itself complicit in the cycle of fear.

Moore criticizes weakly researched media stories that scare
people over nothing (such as phony stories about razors in
Halloween apples), but at the same time, his own factual
claims are either invented or taken grossly out of context.

For instance, Moore lets Glassner criticize the media for
sharply increasing coverage of homicides during a period
when the actual homicide rate was falling. Yet his own
frantic film about the terrible dangers of American gun
violence comes even as gun crime rates have fallen sharply
from their early 1990s levels.

Glassner’s book points out that an American schoolchild is
much more likely to be killed by lightning than in a school
shooting. Yet Moore’s film rests on the premise that the

Columbine shooting represents an American epidemic of

violence.

Even while denouncing Americans for being so afraid of

violent crime, Bowling for Columbine works hard to make them

still more afraid.

The audience accepts Moore’s cinematic fear-mongering ???

while congratulating itself for being too sophisticated to

fall for media fear-mongering. So even as Bowling offers
its audience the superficial social satisfaction of being
less media-malleable than the rubes who are presented as
typical Americans, the audience nevertheless falls for
sensationalistic media exploitation. The L.A. Weekly noted

the “tabloid” nature of Moore’s film, and the film’s tawdry

use of cheap emotion and cheap shots could indeed serve as a

model for an aspiring tabloid television producer.

Accordingly, the smug audience of Bowling is degraded not

merely to the level of ordinary gullible Americans who buy

into the fear-mongering on the evening news, but still

further ??? to the trash-news level of people who are easily

manipulated by tabloid media.

Thus, Bowling turns the audience’s very pleasure in watching

the movie into a deconstruction of the audience’s blue-state

social pretensions. The Bowling audience is every bit as
ignorant and fearful as the audience for Inside Edition.

Moore’s technique is that of turning an audience’s
acceptance of a work’s superficial message into a much
deeper message which critiques the audience itself. Thus,
Bowling for Columbine makes the audience complicit in its
own delegitimization and degradation. Most of the audience,
of course, never “gets” the real point.

Moore’s clever techniques of inversion reach an apogee with
the Willie Horton ad. Political historians will remember
that in the 1988 Democratic primaries, candidate Al Gore
criticized Gov. Michael Dukakis for a Massachusetts

furlough program under which Willie Horton ??? who was serving

a murder sentence of life without parole ??? was given a

weekend furlough, and raped a woman. During the fall
campaign, the pro-Bush National Security Political Action
Committee ran a Willie Horton commercial.

The official Bush campaign ran its own advertisement,
“Revolving Doors,” which attacked the furlough program but
did not mention Willie Horton.

But Moore pastes text from the National Security PAC ad over
film from the Bush commercial, thus creating the impression
that Bush invoked Willie Horton. Moore falsifies the
advertisement by pasting onscreen the text: “Willie Horton
released. Then kills again.” This libels Willie Horton,
who perpetrated a rape but not a murder during his furlough.
The audience already knows that it is supposed to be angry
about the Willie Horton ad, because it was unfair and
because it politically seduced gullible Americans. So

Bowling does a “Willie Horton” of its own on the audience,

making the film’s version of the ad into a falsehood and so

turning the audience into dupes of a Willie Horton ad ??? just

like the 1988 dupes of the original ad. For good measure,

the ad makes the audience believe that a black man is guilty

of a crime he never committed; Bowling thereby perpetrates

the same manipulation of racial fears which it accuses the

media of perpetrating.

OH, CANADA!

After over an hour spent on the horrors of the United

States, Moore switches to the peaceful society of Canada.

He begins by arguing that Canada and the United States are

very similar ??? except that Canada has a generous welfare

state, and no culture of fear.

It’s true that Canada does have a lot of guns compared to

England or Japan, but Canada’s per-capita gun ownership rate

is about a third of the American level.

Moore films the over-the-counter purchase, no questions

asked, of some ammunition in a Canadian store. The Canadian
government has pointed out that such a transaction would be
illegal, since the buyer is required to present
identification. Moore did not respond to a request from the
government’s Canadian Firearms Centre to explain whether he
staged a fake purchase, edited out the ID request, or broke
the law.

Moore then tells the audience that 13 percent of the
Canadian population is minority ethnic, the same as in the
U.S. Actually, it’s about 31 percent in the U.S. More
significantly, blacks and Hispanics, who are involved in
well over 50 percent of American homicides (both as victims
and as perpetrators) make up about 2.5 percent of the
Canadian population. In the United States, each group makes
up about one-eighth of the U.S. population.

Comparing U.S. gun-death totals with Canada’s, Moore offers
a U.S. total that includes death by legal intervention
(e.g., a violent felon being shot by a police officer) while
omitting this same category from the Canadian total.

We return to Flint, Mich., for a long segment on Kayla
Rowland, a six-year-old girl who was fatally shot in school
by a male classmate the same age. Moore blames Michigan’s
requirement that welfare recipients work at a job. Because
the killer’s mother, Tamarla Owens, commuted to work in a
shopping mall 70 hours a week, and because she still could
not pay her rent, she was about to be evicted. She thus
moved in with her brother, and then her unsupervised son
found a handgun, brought it to school, and killed Kayla
Rowland.

Actually, Owens earned $7.85 an hour from one job ($1,250 a
month, almost entirely tax-free), plus at least the minimum
wage from her second job, and received food stamps and
medical care. Her rent was $300 a month. Michigan had
rent-subsidy and child-care programs too, but Owens
apparently did not know about them. So, contrary to the
impression created by Moore, Michigan’s welfare-to-work
program is generous: Even without the rent subsidy, Owens
earned more than enough to pay the rent. Perhaps Owens’s
caseworker should have told her about the available
subsidies, but the caseworker’s mistake hardly means that
the Michigan system is the Dickensian horror portrayed by
Moore.

Moore tells the audience that Ms. Owens and her son were
living with Owens’s brother. He doesn’t tell the audience
that their home was a crack house, or that the stolen gun
was received by the brother from one of his customers, in
exchange for drugs.

“No one knew why the little boy wanted to shoot the little
girl,” says Moore. Actually, the killer was the class
bully; said that he hated everyone at school; had been
suspended for stabbing a child with a pencil; and,
subsequent to the shooting, stabbed another child with a
knife.

We now get a quick cut to Charlton Heston speaking at a
gun-rights rally in Flint, holding a rifle above his head.
Moore explains that Heston came to Flint after Rowland was
killed. Later, when interviewing Heston, Moore tells him,
“You go to these places after they have these horrible
tragedies.” There’s a considerable distortion here. Kayla
Rowland was killed on February 29, 2000. Heston appeared at
a Bush campaign rally in Flint over half a year later, in
mid October.

Moore told Phil Donahue that “The American media wants to
pump you full of fear.” And that’s just what Moore himself
does, terrifying and angering his audience about American
gun owners, George Bush, American media, American foreign
policy, American welfare policy, the National Rifle
Association, and the American character. The theme of the

movie could well be encapsulated by D. H. Lawrence’s claim

that “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic,

and a killer.”

Bowling for Columbine revels in the tabloid-style, raw

exploitation of emotion ??? in promotion of unjustified fear,

in falsehoods and quarter-truths, in oversimplification of

the problems of race, and in mean-spirited pandering to the

audience’s bigotry about people of different social

backgrounds.

In this way, Bowling subverts its own audience. To
participate in Bowling’s emotional journey is to surrender
to the very same mendacious hate- and fear-mongering that
the movie purports to criticize. Liking Bowling for

Columbine is no different from liking the sleaziest “news”

show on television, except that the audience for the latter

doesn’t claim to be more aesthetically ??? or morally ???

sophisticated than the mainstream American public.

Bowling also subverts elite Hollywood opinion. Imagine if

the Academy gave the award for “Best Music ??? Original Song”

to a film that used an unoriginal song, such as “Jingle

Bells.” Such an award would show that the Oscars are based
on Hollywood politics rather than on artistic merit. The
presentation of Best Documentary to Michael Moore for a film
based on so much untruth has proved the same thing.

Some readers may doubt that Moore intentionally created an
entire film whose subtext so thoroughly contradicts its
literal text and that so effectively mocks its audience and
its creator. My response is that we are long past the era
of being chained to an artist’s precise intentions. Georgia
O’Keefe is said to have denied that her flower drawings were
evocative of female genitalia. Does that mean we should
pretend that O’Keefe paintings are not overflowing with
female genitalia?

The fact is that a mockumentary larded with untruths and
brazen self-contradiction is gobbling up documentary prizes:
a special award at the Cannes Film Festival, the National
Board of Review’s “Best Documentary,” the International
Documentary Association’s choice for best documentary ever,
and the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Countless actors and producers may have railed at the
Academy for poor taste, but no artist has ever demonstrated
the film elite’s hypCountless actors and producers may have railed at the
Academy for poor taste, but no artist has ever demonstrated
the film elite’s hyper-partisan preference for political
correctness over truth as thoroughly and well as has Michael
Moore.