WITH HIS gift for generating controversy, Michael Moore was always likely to create a stir at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony. The terminally dishevelled film-maker delivered exactly on cue as he collected his Oscar for Best Documentary for
Bowling for Columbine, unleashing a tirade against America’s “fictitious” President George W. Bush.
A bestselling author on both sides of the Atlantic, Moore can lay claim to being the most influential performer-cum-activist of our times. Harold Pinter merely publishes in-your-face haiku in the literary columns; Moore commands the attention of millions. His left-wing polemic, Stupid White Men, was declared Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. A hero to many on the Left in Europe and the US, Moore is hailed as the principled voice of the anti-Bush, anti-capitalist movement. With the Democratic Party still in disarray, and with conservative “shock-jocks” storming America’s airwaves, he functions almost as a one-man opposition party. When he came to London last year to deliver a curious mixture of satire and speechifying at the Roundhouse, in the heart of liberal North London, the atmosphere was as reverential and ecstatic as a Billy Graham rally.
Bowling for Columbine got a standing ovation when it was screened at Cannes last year, and was awarded a special prize by the jury. A vitriolic assault on the gun lobby, corporate greed, the military-industrial complex and media hysteria, the film shows the famous muckraker roaming the land in search of the causes of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. His quest reaches a climax when he confronts the actor Charlton Heston, a champion of the pro-gun National Rifle Association (NRA), at his home. Heston seems ill at ease with the line of questioning (it has been disclosed that he is suffering from a form of Alzheimer’s) and eventually walks off camera, leaving Moore to savour a moral victory.
But having made his name with a brash form of guerrilla journalism, Moore is becoming the target of the same brand of tactics. Step into the sometimes murky hall of mirrors that is the internet, and you find his work coming under increasingly hostile scrutiny. If the mainstream press has been slower to dissect his modus operandi, the so-called online community has plunged ahead. Moore’s enemies seldom miss an opportunity to mount personal attacks, too. The fact that this self-styled blue-collar man of the people lives in some style on New York’s affluent Upper West Side has been a source of wry amusement to his foes.
At first sight, much of the coverage seems merely the kind of abusive satire that Moore enjoys inflicting on his own victims. A cheerfully disrespectful website called moorewatch.com has sprung up alongside moorelies.com. And in the weeks since he carried off his Academy Award, a new site, revoketheoscar.com, has begun urging malcontents to support a campaign to have the accolade withdrawn on the grounds that Bowling for Columbine contains errors and distortions.
Is this yet more evidence of a deranged right-wing conspiracy? Moore’s many admirers will certainly think so. The internet is, after all, the perfect place to dress up rumour and gossip as hard facts. But there is a serious undercurrent to all this dissent.
The studiously non-partisan political fact-checkers at Spinsanity.org have lambasted the reliability of the big man in the baseball cap. (Spinsanity also points out that Moore ran into similar trouble over his first hit documentary, Roger and Me.) Doubts have surfaced here and there in the print media as well. At the highly respected New Republic magazine — certainly no friend of Dubya’s — the staff rarely miss an opportunity to question Moore’s veracity. Another liberal journal, The American Prospect (one of the “must-read” journals recommended on Moore’s own website, michaelmoore.com), pointed out that his analysis of US gun crime is highly misleading because it underplays the appallingly high level of black-on-black violence: “There is a point at which an effort not to perpetuate offensive stereotypes turns into an impoverishing erasure of the facts.”
When the conservative Wall Street Journal’s political columnist, John Fund, joined in with a caustic attack on the film’s techniques, it was a sign that Hollywood’s hero might have a fight on his hands. After summarising some of the most serious allegations, Fund said: “Moore would deserve an Academy Award if there were an Oscar for Best Cinematic Con Job. If Bowling for Columbine is a comedy, most of its fans don’t know it. They believe they’re watching something that is in rough accord with reality.”
Does Moore have a case to answer? Some of the claims I have seen — such as the complaint that he faked footage of the dangerous hunting dog shown early on in the movie — are merely a sign that some of his antagonists lack a sense of humour. Another assertion, that he staged the scene where a Michigan bank hands him a shotgun as his reward for opening an account, has been denied by Moore on the film’s website, bowlingforcolumbine.com.
Not a good start for the conspiracy theorists, then. But other points are disconcerting, to say the least. One of the most important concerns the depiction of the Lockheed Martin factory, the largest employer in the Denver suburb where the Columbine shootings took place. After a caption introduces Lockheed as the “world’s largest weapons maker”, a spokesman, Evan McCollum, is interviewed in front of a huge section of a rocket. Moore suggests that there is a connection between the presence in the town of a weapons manufacturer and the demented violence unleashed at nearby Columbine: “So, you don’t think our kids say to themselves, ‘Gee, you know, Dad goes off to the factory every day and, you know, 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 initially appears bemused by this question. The bland reply that he eventually offers appears to be the typical evasion of Corporate Man. (Throughout his career, Moore has been very good at making “ordinary” people, from receptionists to shopkeepers, look foolish on camera.) Later, we see a rocket being transported through the streets in the dead of night, en route to an air force base, passing close to the homes where, as Moore ominously intones, “the children of Columbine are asleep”.
The forces of evil are on the prowl, it seems. But that hardly tallies with Moore’s own subsequent admission, on the Bowling website, that the plant does not actually make weapons: the rockets are used to carry satellites, including TV satellites, into space. Given that the film is so intent on drawing an analogy between rampant militarism and school violence, this surely undermines Moore’s entire thesis.
When you read Moore’s explanation for the error (“Lockheed rockets now take satellites into outer space”) it is possible to infer — if you wish to give him the benefit of the doubt — that there could simply have been a misunderstanding. But when I spoke to McCollum this week he insisted that Moore was given the correct information at the time of the visit.
