unbelievable
I am watching Bowling for Columbine with my adolescent literature class and marveling once more. I’ve seen it before and took away the guns and violence message, but this time I’m watching it for the messages it communicates about men and boys and what it means to be an adolescent in America today. Somehow, boys growing to be men have taken a turn where access to and use of guns and other weapons is a rite of passage. Just another story of one-upsmanship where escalating violence involves innocence — the boys trying to prove themselves through hurting others, bravado spread thick. (Not including Eric Harris, who took psychopath to a whole new level). Moore has a point — living in the shadow of Lockheed Martin and the Air Force Academy can’t help but teach all of us to interact through escalating violence.
Moore’s smart too, by talking to men who were once boys — but boys who didn’t walk into schools knowing how to “make a five-gallon drum of napalm” or shoot an M-16. What’s happened in the interim? Has the recent history of Vietnam and the Gulf War, gang violence and terrorism inured us to such a degree that we start playing out the scripts the television provided us, without realizing what they would mean, until it was too late? How could this possibly be?
July 4th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
Does “first hand” knowledge of Columbine, the area, the whatever make you view the movie differently??
July 5th, 2006 at 1:42 am
have you seen elephant? worth checking out, both for complementing moore’s take on things as well as for the use of multiple cameras and narrative threads to explore a columbine-type situation.