Overdose
06-30-2004, 02:24 AM
A defense of Michael Moore and "Bowling for Columbine" (Op-Ed)
By Eloquence
Wed Aug 13th, 2003 at 09:00:09 AM EST
Inaccuracies
Your webpage list a number of alleged inaccuracies in Moore's movies. It is true that Moore's film is sometimes unintentionally deceptive, but to call it fraudulent is hyperbole to the extreme. It is no more so than any other successful documentary of the last decades. Let's look at some specific criticisms:
1) The bank scene, listed on your website on a separate page. Critics have stated that this scene was "staged", but in the bank interview, the official tells Moore that the bank has its own vault storing about 500 weapons at any given time. It is also a licensed firearms dealer which can perform its own background checks. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, linked from your site, an employee claims that the gun would have been "normally" picked up at another dealer. It is not explained what "normally" is supposed to mean, but that claim flatly contradicts the statement of the bank official in the film. This sounds more like a later correction for public relations purposes, but of course nobody questions the bank claims when they can be used against Moore.
The only thing that Moore compressed is the timeframe. According to the same WSJ interview, "Typically, you're looking at a week to 10 days waiting period." This is plausible -- but entirely irrelevant for the movie, which already makes it quite clear that a background check is being performed. Moore's detractors have sometimes extended those 7-10 days to several weeks, contradicting the bank's own estimate.
There is nothing inaccurate whatsoever about the bank scene. The bank does exactly what it advertises: It hands out guns from its vault to those who open an account. The silly criticisms of the scene obscure the real obscenity of the situation: a bank handing out guns to its customers, higlighting the utter laxness of how Americans deal with deadly weapons and a love of firearms that borders on the religious.
2) The Lockheed-Martin interview. This is perhaps the criticism repeated the most often, and it also the most inaccurate. First, the actual quotes from the film are often reproduced incorrectly. The dialogue goes as follows:
Moore: "So you don't think our kids say to themselves, gee, dad goes off to the factory every day - he builds missiles. These are weapons of mass destruction. What's the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?"
McCollum (PR person): "I guess I don't see that specific connection because the missiles that you're talking about were built and designed to defend us from somebody else who would be aggressors against us."
First, note the word "our" in Moore's question. Moore is not from Colorado -- his question is generic, not meant to refer specifically to the Lockheed Martin plant in question. McCollum understands it this way -- otherwise he would protest against the plant being mischaracterized. However, critics of Moore have cleverly ignored McCollum's response and presented Moore as spreading lies about the Lockheed plant.
Even Lockheed did not believe the public to be that gullible. In response to one Moore detractor, McCollum wrote: "Although other units of Lockheed Martin Corporation elsewhere in the country produce weapons to support the defense of the U.S., we make no weapons at the Littleton-area facility Moore visited." Of course, critics have conveniently ignored the fact that Lockheed Martin does supply weapons of mass destruction to the US military, and that the company is the nation's largest military contractor. As Moore correctly points out, it is bizarre for a society to openly embrace the production of destructive weapons, but on the other hand see no connection of this to everyday violence -- children learn by imitating adults.
Yes, Moore makes this point through slight exaggeration by moving with the camera through the LM plant -- but he makes no incorrect statement. It is typical for his critics to jump on what is at most a slightly misleading implication, but in doing so, they themselves have, unlike Moore, made many incorrect claims.
3) Denver NRA meeting. Critics like yourself claim that Moore has massively distorted evidence to support his point that Charlton Heston has effectively insulted the victims of the Columbine tragedy by holding a rally in Denver shortly afterwards.
First, the "from my cold, dead hands" part: This is used by Moore as a visual citation to introduce Heston. It is perhaps one of his most famous quotes, shown on national TV even here in Germany. It tells viewers: Aha, this is the person we are talking about. Nowhere does Moore say or imply that these words were uttered at the rally in Denver, and in fact, their reptition later in the movie at another occasion (oddly claimed by critics to be again "misattributed") is simply a reminder of this. It is Moore's way to say: Viewers, meet Charlton Heston, gun nut extraordinaire.
The "visual of a billboard and a narration" is viewed by you as evidence that Moore is trying to somehow tie the two events together, when in reality, it is quite obvious that he does it to separate the introduction of Heston from his speech in Denver. Moore is a professional filmmaker -- he concentrates on maximum impact of each of the statements he cites, and to accomplish that effect, uses subtle interludes instead of long-winded introductions. This is a common technique, but because conservative readers are not familiar with the basics of filmmaking, they believe critics who claim that he is "distorting" the interview. What he does is standard filmmaking practice.
The same goes for the interview which follows. Moore's critics would expect us to have him quote Heston in his entirety, have him present fully the PR that the NRA has used to justify its rally in Denver for reasons of "balance". The NRA was fully aware of the scandal it would cause through its rally and decided to push on because they believed to have enough media support to successfully do so. They were right. You claim that there was "no way to change location, since you have to give advance notice of that to the members, and there were upwards of 4,000,000 members." 10 days are more than enough to give advance warning of a change in location or date, had the NRA really wanted to. It is probably correct that their primary reason for not doing so was to save money, not to piss off the victims of Colubmine. That does not change the fact that they did just that. Moore presents the most important part of the speech to back up this point and ignores the fluff. This is what good documentary filmmaking is about. And here the critics again ignore important evidence:
When Heston mentions the mayor of Denver, the crowd boos loudly. Heston maganimously holds up a hand to read the mayor's letter (only to explain in detail why he chose to ignore the request -- not mentioning at all the reasons you have given!). This booing by the crowd, not mentioned with a single word in your transcript or your article, shows that the crowd was fully aware of the controversy they would cause by coming to Littleton after children were being killed there -- and they effectively said "Fuck you". To say that they could not have done otherwise is a bold lie by Moore's critics.
4) The Kayla Rolland case. Again, critics like yourself charge Moore with deception. The rally took place on October 17, the shooting on February 29. Again, standard filmmaking techniques are interpreted as smooth distortion: "Moore works by depriving you of context and guiding your mind to fill the vacuum -- with completely false ideas. It is brilliantly, if unethically, done." As noted above, the "from my cold dead hands" part is simply Moore's way to introduce Heston. Did anyone but Moore's critics view it as anything else? He certainly does not "attribute it to a speech where it was not uttered" and, as noted above, doing so twice would make no sense whatsoever if Moore was the mastermind deceiver that his critics claim he is.
Concerning the Georgetown Hoya interview where Heston was asked about Rolland, you write: "There is no indication that [Heston] recognized Kayla Rolland's case." This is naive to the extreme -- Heston would not be president of the NRA if he was not kept up to date on the most prominent cases of gun violence. Even if he did not respond to that part of the interview, he certainly knew about the case at that point.
Regarding the NRA website excerpt about the case and the highlighting of the phrase "48 hours after Kayla Rolland is pronounced dead": This is one valid criticism, but far from the deliberate distortion you make it out to be; rather, it is an example for how the facts can sometimes be easy to miss with Moore's fast pace editing. The reason the sentence is highlighted is not to deceive the viewer into believing that Heston hurried to Flint to immediately hold a rally there (as will become quite obvious), but simply to highlight the first mention of the name "Kayla Rolland" in the text, which is in this paragraph.
Unfortunately, because the zooming is rather fast, it is easy to miss the rest of the sentence, so as you correctly note, some viewers got an incorrect impression. It would have been fair for Moore to point out this possible misinterpretation on his website. However, the claim of deliberate distortion is ludicrous for several reasons:
a) Moore clearly states that "before he came to Flint", Heston gave an interview. In the excerpt from said interview, we can see that it is from March. If Moore wanted to deceive his viewers, why would he say this, and show the month the interview was published?
b) Why should Moore leave the words "Clinton is on the Today Show" visible in the text, which is necessary to correctly interpret the highlighted part? I reviewed the sequence several times and it is perfectly possible to see this text without pausing.
c) Both the "soccer mom" interview and the sequences showing the NRA rally make no effort to distort the fact that this rally happened months after the fact. The camera lingers on Bush/Cheney posters, and the protestor is quoted as saying that "we wanted to let the NRA know that we haven't forgotten about Kayla Rolland". You make the hysterical claim that the interview "may be faked" (on the basis that no name is shown for the interviewee), but if Moore had faked it, why the hell should he put this sentence in the protestor's mouth, which directly contradicts the conclusion that the rally happened hours after Kayla's death? Why did Moore, the masterful deveiver, not edit this sequence out? This makes no sense.
Opinions may vary on how tasteless it was for Heston to hold a pro gun rally on the location of the nation's youngest school shooting months after the fact, but this sequence of "Bowling" is without doubt the most unfair to Heston. The claims of deliberate distortion don't hold up when viewing the whole scene, though -- as "Hanlon's Razor" states, one should never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. The somewhat inept editing of the NRA press release has led some viewers to wrong conclusions, which is unfortunate, but Moore's critics have no interest in viewing the matter fairly. Had they done so, Moore himself would probably have apologized for the gaffe. In any case, at no point does Moore make a false statement, in contradiction to claims by critics that his documentary is "full of lies".
5) You write: "Having created the desired impression, Moore follows with his Heston interview." No, he doesn't. You accuse Moore so often of changing the chronology, yet you have no problems changing it yourself. The Heston interview is at the very end of the movie. After the Flint rally comes a brief TV interview with Heston, where he is asked about Kayla Rolland (again, clear evidence that the local media in Flint raised questions about the NRA's presence), then an inteview with country prosecutor Arthur Busch, entirely ignored by critics of the film, who also mentions Heston's presence as notable, and refers to the immediate reactions of "people from all over America", gun owners/groups who, according to him, reacted aggressively to warnings of having guns accessible to children, much like spanking advocates react aggressively when anti-spankers point to a case of a child being killed or severely injured by a beating. These people do not feel the need to express sympathy, or to think about ways to avoid such incidents, but they feel the need to assert their "rights" and to look for quick, simple answers -- as Busch states, gun owners wanted to "hang [the child] from the highest tree". This is all not mentioned by critics of Moore's movie, who claim to be objective.
Perhaps the best example of the paranoia surrounding Moore's film is your sub-essay "Is the end of the Heston interview itself faked?"
Moore answers a simple question -- how could the scene have been filmed -- with a simple answer: two cameras. From this, you construct an obscure conspiracy of "re-enactment": "For all we can tell, Moore could have shouted 'Hey!' to make Heston turn around and then remained silent as Heston left." Even if your "re-enactment" theory is true (and I see no evidence that you have actually tried to ask the people involved in the filmmaking for their opinion), this itself is not unethical, and you have no evidence whatsoever that Moore has done anything unethical here, just like you have no evidence that Moore has unethically removed parts of the interview. You use standard filmmaking technique as a basis to construct bizarre conspiracies which sound plausible to the gullible reader, without ever providing any evidence for the implicit or explicit claims of fraud and distortion.
By Eloquence
Wed Aug 13th, 2003 at 09:00:09 AM EST
Inaccuracies
Your webpage list a number of alleged inaccuracies in Moore's movies. It is true that Moore's film is sometimes unintentionally deceptive, but to call it fraudulent is hyperbole to the extreme. It is no more so than any other successful documentary of the last decades. Let's look at some specific criticisms:
1) The bank scene, listed on your website on a separate page. Critics have stated that this scene was "staged", but in the bank interview, the official tells Moore that the bank has its own vault storing about 500 weapons at any given time. It is also a licensed firearms dealer which can perform its own background checks. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, linked from your site, an employee claims that the gun would have been "normally" picked up at another dealer. It is not explained what "normally" is supposed to mean, but that claim flatly contradicts the statement of the bank official in the film. This sounds more like a later correction for public relations purposes, but of course nobody questions the bank claims when they can be used against Moore.
The only thing that Moore compressed is the timeframe. According to the same WSJ interview, "Typically, you're looking at a week to 10 days waiting period." This is plausible -- but entirely irrelevant for the movie, which already makes it quite clear that a background check is being performed. Moore's detractors have sometimes extended those 7-10 days to several weeks, contradicting the bank's own estimate.
There is nothing inaccurate whatsoever about the bank scene. The bank does exactly what it advertises: It hands out guns from its vault to those who open an account. The silly criticisms of the scene obscure the real obscenity of the situation: a bank handing out guns to its customers, higlighting the utter laxness of how Americans deal with deadly weapons and a love of firearms that borders on the religious.
2) The Lockheed-Martin interview. This is perhaps the criticism repeated the most often, and it also the most inaccurate. First, the actual quotes from the film are often reproduced incorrectly. The dialogue goes as follows:
Moore: "So you don't think our kids say to themselves, gee, dad goes off to the factory every day - he builds missiles. These are weapons of mass destruction. What's the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?"
McCollum (PR person): "I guess I don't see that specific connection because the missiles that you're talking about were built and designed to defend us from somebody else who would be aggressors against us."
First, note the word "our" in Moore's question. Moore is not from Colorado -- his question is generic, not meant to refer specifically to the Lockheed Martin plant in question. McCollum understands it this way -- otherwise he would protest against the plant being mischaracterized. However, critics of Moore have cleverly ignored McCollum's response and presented Moore as spreading lies about the Lockheed plant.
Even Lockheed did not believe the public to be that gullible. In response to one Moore detractor, McCollum wrote: "Although other units of Lockheed Martin Corporation elsewhere in the country produce weapons to support the defense of the U.S., we make no weapons at the Littleton-area facility Moore visited." Of course, critics have conveniently ignored the fact that Lockheed Martin does supply weapons of mass destruction to the US military, and that the company is the nation's largest military contractor. As Moore correctly points out, it is bizarre for a society to openly embrace the production of destructive weapons, but on the other hand see no connection of this to everyday violence -- children learn by imitating adults.
Yes, Moore makes this point through slight exaggeration by moving with the camera through the LM plant -- but he makes no incorrect statement. It is typical for his critics to jump on what is at most a slightly misleading implication, but in doing so, they themselves have, unlike Moore, made many incorrect claims.
3) Denver NRA meeting. Critics like yourself claim that Moore has massively distorted evidence to support his point that Charlton Heston has effectively insulted the victims of the Columbine tragedy by holding a rally in Denver shortly afterwards.
First, the "from my cold, dead hands" part: This is used by Moore as a visual citation to introduce Heston. It is perhaps one of his most famous quotes, shown on national TV even here in Germany. It tells viewers: Aha, this is the person we are talking about. Nowhere does Moore say or imply that these words were uttered at the rally in Denver, and in fact, their reptition later in the movie at another occasion (oddly claimed by critics to be again "misattributed") is simply a reminder of this. It is Moore's way to say: Viewers, meet Charlton Heston, gun nut extraordinaire.
The "visual of a billboard and a narration" is viewed by you as evidence that Moore is trying to somehow tie the two events together, when in reality, it is quite obvious that he does it to separate the introduction of Heston from his speech in Denver. Moore is a professional filmmaker -- he concentrates on maximum impact of each of the statements he cites, and to accomplish that effect, uses subtle interludes instead of long-winded introductions. This is a common technique, but because conservative readers are not familiar with the basics of filmmaking, they believe critics who claim that he is "distorting" the interview. What he does is standard filmmaking practice.
The same goes for the interview which follows. Moore's critics would expect us to have him quote Heston in his entirety, have him present fully the PR that the NRA has used to justify its rally in Denver for reasons of "balance". The NRA was fully aware of the scandal it would cause through its rally and decided to push on because they believed to have enough media support to successfully do so. They were right. You claim that there was "no way to change location, since you have to give advance notice of that to the members, and there were upwards of 4,000,000 members." 10 days are more than enough to give advance warning of a change in location or date, had the NRA really wanted to. It is probably correct that their primary reason for not doing so was to save money, not to piss off the victims of Colubmine. That does not change the fact that they did just that. Moore presents the most important part of the speech to back up this point and ignores the fluff. This is what good documentary filmmaking is about. And here the critics again ignore important evidence:
When Heston mentions the mayor of Denver, the crowd boos loudly. Heston maganimously holds up a hand to read the mayor's letter (only to explain in detail why he chose to ignore the request -- not mentioning at all the reasons you have given!). This booing by the crowd, not mentioned with a single word in your transcript or your article, shows that the crowd was fully aware of the controversy they would cause by coming to Littleton after children were being killed there -- and they effectively said "Fuck you". To say that they could not have done otherwise is a bold lie by Moore's critics.
4) The Kayla Rolland case. Again, critics like yourself charge Moore with deception. The rally took place on October 17, the shooting on February 29. Again, standard filmmaking techniques are interpreted as smooth distortion: "Moore works by depriving you of context and guiding your mind to fill the vacuum -- with completely false ideas. It is brilliantly, if unethically, done." As noted above, the "from my cold dead hands" part is simply Moore's way to introduce Heston. Did anyone but Moore's critics view it as anything else? He certainly does not "attribute it to a speech where it was not uttered" and, as noted above, doing so twice would make no sense whatsoever if Moore was the mastermind deceiver that his critics claim he is.
Concerning the Georgetown Hoya interview where Heston was asked about Rolland, you write: "There is no indication that [Heston] recognized Kayla Rolland's case." This is naive to the extreme -- Heston would not be president of the NRA if he was not kept up to date on the most prominent cases of gun violence. Even if he did not respond to that part of the interview, he certainly knew about the case at that point.
Regarding the NRA website excerpt about the case and the highlighting of the phrase "48 hours after Kayla Rolland is pronounced dead": This is one valid criticism, but far from the deliberate distortion you make it out to be; rather, it is an example for how the facts can sometimes be easy to miss with Moore's fast pace editing. The reason the sentence is highlighted is not to deceive the viewer into believing that Heston hurried to Flint to immediately hold a rally there (as will become quite obvious), but simply to highlight the first mention of the name "Kayla Rolland" in the text, which is in this paragraph.
Unfortunately, because the zooming is rather fast, it is easy to miss the rest of the sentence, so as you correctly note, some viewers got an incorrect impression. It would have been fair for Moore to point out this possible misinterpretation on his website. However, the claim of deliberate distortion is ludicrous for several reasons:
a) Moore clearly states that "before he came to Flint", Heston gave an interview. In the excerpt from said interview, we can see that it is from March. If Moore wanted to deceive his viewers, why would he say this, and show the month the interview was published?
b) Why should Moore leave the words "Clinton is on the Today Show" visible in the text, which is necessary to correctly interpret the highlighted part? I reviewed the sequence several times and it is perfectly possible to see this text without pausing.
c) Both the "soccer mom" interview and the sequences showing the NRA rally make no effort to distort the fact that this rally happened months after the fact. The camera lingers on Bush/Cheney posters, and the protestor is quoted as saying that "we wanted to let the NRA know that we haven't forgotten about Kayla Rolland". You make the hysterical claim that the interview "may be faked" (on the basis that no name is shown for the interviewee), but if Moore had faked it, why the hell should he put this sentence in the protestor's mouth, which directly contradicts the conclusion that the rally happened hours after Kayla's death? Why did Moore, the masterful deveiver, not edit this sequence out? This makes no sense.
Opinions may vary on how tasteless it was for Heston to hold a pro gun rally on the location of the nation's youngest school shooting months after the fact, but this sequence of "Bowling" is without doubt the most unfair to Heston. The claims of deliberate distortion don't hold up when viewing the whole scene, though -- as "Hanlon's Razor" states, one should never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. The somewhat inept editing of the NRA press release has led some viewers to wrong conclusions, which is unfortunate, but Moore's critics have no interest in viewing the matter fairly. Had they done so, Moore himself would probably have apologized for the gaffe. In any case, at no point does Moore make a false statement, in contradiction to claims by critics that his documentary is "full of lies".
5) You write: "Having created the desired impression, Moore follows with his Heston interview." No, he doesn't. You accuse Moore so often of changing the chronology, yet you have no problems changing it yourself. The Heston interview is at the very end of the movie. After the Flint rally comes a brief TV interview with Heston, where he is asked about Kayla Rolland (again, clear evidence that the local media in Flint raised questions about the NRA's presence), then an inteview with country prosecutor Arthur Busch, entirely ignored by critics of the film, who also mentions Heston's presence as notable, and refers to the immediate reactions of "people from all over America", gun owners/groups who, according to him, reacted aggressively to warnings of having guns accessible to children, much like spanking advocates react aggressively when anti-spankers point to a case of a child being killed or severely injured by a beating. These people do not feel the need to express sympathy, or to think about ways to avoid such incidents, but they feel the need to assert their "rights" and to look for quick, simple answers -- as Busch states, gun owners wanted to "hang [the child] from the highest tree". This is all not mentioned by critics of Moore's movie, who claim to be objective.
Perhaps the best example of the paranoia surrounding Moore's film is your sub-essay "Is the end of the Heston interview itself faked?"
Moore answers a simple question -- how could the scene have been filmed -- with a simple answer: two cameras. From this, you construct an obscure conspiracy of "re-enactment": "For all we can tell, Moore could have shouted 'Hey!' to make Heston turn around and then remained silent as Heston left." Even if your "re-enactment" theory is true (and I see no evidence that you have actually tried to ask the people involved in the filmmaking for their opinion), this itself is not unethical, and you have no evidence whatsoever that Moore has done anything unethical here, just like you have no evidence that Moore has unethically removed parts of the interview. You use standard filmmaking technique as a basis to construct bizarre conspiracies which sound plausible to the gullible reader, without ever providing any evidence for the implicit or explicit claims of fraud and distortion.