The Dispatch improves
Today’s paper arrived flat, not inscrutably rolled up. The power of the pen!
Before
A chronicle of an American lifeArchive for December, 2002
The Dispatch takes a dive
I just opened my Monday paper and found this weird card tucked inside. Like the entire rest of the paper (thank you very much, carrier), the card was all curled up beyond smoothing. It was blank, but it included a strange, grainy note, printed in a mysterious font. The note reads, “I would like … to welcome you to my world.”
Shaken, and checking for white powder, I continued reading. Looks like my building is blessed with its third carrier in three months. Oh, God, I thought. I’ve become used to finding my paper right outside my door in the hallway… or on a table… or under a bench… or right on High Street. Once it was in High Street. Now, you would think, having been a subscriber to the Dispatch for seven years, and having longstanding family ties besides, that they would take note and put a good carrier on my route. But I guess they’re too busy shrinking the pages. I’m distressed to learn I’ll have to train a new one all over again.
“Please look for your Sunday aids to now come Saturday night.” Yeah, that’s when I was expecting to get aids.
This was discouraging: “Please keep in mind that there will be mornings that I’m running late. To inquire about your paper on those days, please call me 1st. Calls to the Dispatch will count against me, as well ass my manager.” When I read this, I was sneakily pleased to see that maybe all those calls to the Dispatch got the last carrier fired, which is why we have this new one. Then I was peeved: already, my carrier is planning to be late? And then it went on to say, “By doing so, you should even receive your paper more promptly.” Is that a threat? Don’t tell on me or you’ll never get your paper? For this I pay $41.60 a quarter?!
What are things coming to? Time was, the local paper boy or girl was an enterprising youngster with an undiagnosed sleeping disorder. This person lives nine miles away, as the pre-addressed tip envelope indicates. How will we ever build the bond that ensures I get the paper and that might persuade me to grudgingly part with a decent tip? I’ll keep my readers informed. But keep in mind there will be mornings when this column is late.
Mike Moore’s crummy movie
This weekend I took in the new Michael Moore movie, Bowling for Columbine. Offended by the title, I resisted seeing it for the longest time. However, when even my younger brother turned out to see it, I realized I’d have to go, so I’d have something to discuss. I’m annoyed that I did.
I first became acquainted with Michael Moore in his classic liberal muckraker story, Roger and Me (1989). That’s the movie Moore made about trying to track down Roger Smith, the GM CEO who was going to close some more plants in Moore’s and GM’s hometown of Flint, Michigan. In that movie, Moore makes a lot of unannounced trips to the GM offices, in what is clearly going to be a futile attempt to stop Smith from shutting down the factories. Despite Moore leaving out key details, such as GM’s losing $24 billion that year, the film appears to be an honest account of a town that’s failing, that’s lost tens of thousands of jobs, and that Moore really cares about. In probably one of the saddest, rawest parts of the movie, he makes two different visits to a woman who is eventually evicted by the sheriff. In other parts, the movie is really funny (I keep telling the story of the rabbit woman who asks, “You want ‘em fer pets er meat?”). Whether or not you agree that GM is responsible for the well-being of this town, you can tell he’s really invested in the story of Flint, and I think that Roger and Me put Moore on the map as a troublemaker for corporate America. Can’t argue with that, particularly if it sells.
So I went into Bowling for Columbine looking for a good sequel. Bowling for Columbine has the same crummy editing and monotone voice-over as Roger and Me. But unlike that movie, it feels slicker and better edited. It also comes with a clearly higher budget, as Moore apparently had the funds to travel about the country with a good-sized crew, and even paid for a trip for two Columbine student survivors to the K-Mart headquarters in Michigan. Since Roger and Me, Moore’s had at least one other film and a TV series that I know of, but it’s obvious that this success has rotted his instinct for telling a compelling story. (You might want to skip the rest of this article unless you have already seen the movie.)
This movie is all about the problem of gun violence in America. As Moore points out in huge numerals that fill the screen, other countries have much lower murder numbers than the US. While Japan, Britain, Germany, and Canada all had annual murders under a thousand, our number was some eleven thousand per year. Could it be our violent entertainment? No, Europeans love the same movies. Is it our bloody history of the Wild West and killing the red man? No, Germans and Britons have a much worse history. Do we just have a lot more guns? No, because Canada has 7 million guns in a population of 30 million. So obviously, there just must be something unusual about the US. But what is it?
This has got to be the most dissatisfying part of the film, because in two goddamn hours, Moore never bothers to getting around to telling you what it is. The closest he comes is blaming welfare reform. In a disjointed segment, he introduces us to the mother, who is black, of the 6-year-old boy who shot the 6-year-old girl in the youngest school shooting ever. He didn’t manage to get an actual interview with her, but he did ride her welfare-to-work bus down to the suburban Detroit mall where she worked at a Dick Clark restaurant. Then, suddenly, we’re out in California, trying to break into Dick Clark’s minivan to ask him — what? Why Dick Clark shot a little girl? The theory is supposed to be that the mother shouldn’t've left her son in a house where the boy found his uncle’s gun. But he doesn’t spend a second decrying the uncle for leaving a gun around the house! Is the gun owner, who apparently didn’t even lock the gun up, completely blameless? Dick Clark may make whiter target, but that doesn’t make him juicier.
In other scenes, we’re told that Lockheed Martin is to blame. Lockheed is identified as “world’s largest weapons maker” in a huge subtitle, and there is an interview with a plant manager at a missile plant that just happens to be located in Columbine High School’s neighborhood. Did the Columbine killers think, “Hey, our parents make missiles and kill people, so we can kill people too?” The plant manager doesn’t think so. Then later, it’s revealed that Lockheed is now running welfare-to-work programs. You make the connection (and please let me know if you do).
This movie has a lot of weak links, including a truly bizarre connection between our fear of killer (”Africanized”) bees and America’s hatred of black (African-American) men. It also has a terrifically jarring and unfunny cartoon sequence narrated by a talking bullet. But maybe the most unhumorous parts of the movie come when Moore tries to play to his traditional strong suit of being just a loser from Michigan, and then unexpectedly gets results.
In one scene, Moore is shown speaking into Charleton Heston’s remote-access gatebox. His trademark style (setting himself up as the anonymous fat guy in order to trick bigwigs into either condescending to him or giving him the brush-off) utterly fails, when he says, “I’m Michael Moore,” and Heston immediately replies, “Oh yes, the filmmaker, of course.” Since Moore is so well-known, he manages to get an appointment at 8.30 the next day. So why did Moore go through the bother of buying that jokey “Map to the Stars’ Homes” and making his appointment through a speakerphone? He could have just had his office call Heston’s office. The scene embarrassingly highlighted Moore’s enhanced image and power, undercutting his credibility as the consummate outsider.
Moore suffers a similar bizarre inversion when his unannounced trip to K-Mart HQ is not a failure. He is visited by two or three different K-Mart people on day 1, and when the merchandiser leaves, he tries a plaintive “Is anybody else coming down?”, clearly hoping to elicit a reaction of corporate indifference. But the K-Mart guy says, “I’ll check,” and the next day K-Mart’s VP of communications comes out and reads a statement announcing they’ll stop selling the ammunition that was used to shoot the two Columbine High School boys within 90 days. Shocked by his own success, Moore doesn’t know what to say except “wow.” Yeah.
This is a gun movie, so he keeps coming back to the question of why America has so many gun deaths. But as I say, he never comes to any kind of good answer. I’ve got one for you: how about gun regulations? He points out that Britain has had, maybe, a twentieth of the shootings we’ve had. But did you know that in Britain, to get a gun permit, you have to appear before a panel and explain why you want the gun? That the only way to get one is to have enough land to do your own shooting, or else to be a member of a hunting club that does own that land? That handguns are entirely illegal in the country — outlawed completely? And that the police, while carrying more firearms these days, still pack nowhere near the amount of heat that American cops do? No. You wouldn’t hear any of this from the movie. The irony of this is that, even in the Canadian gun club, as he’s asking the random guy how easy it is to get guns, a big red poster on the wall behind him says that gun permits require 30 day notice, two references, and spousal notification. Come on, Mr. Moore, don’t insult our intelligence by leaving out any reference to gun regulations. America’s gun laws are the weakest in the world, and I think there’s at least some connection here. If I’m wrong, you would have put it into your movie.
I was not expecting to enjoy this film. But I was looking for a good fight — at least, a compelling argument and maybe some good laughs at a cast of unfortunates and idiots like the ones he found to star in Roger and Me. I was unsatisfied; although the movie is full of documentary canards that kept gibing back toward that film, he never killed the rabbit. In a confusing segment, Moore shows the high school boys how to use their undercover cameras during the K-Mart visit. But when a security lackey tells Moore to shut off his main camera, he does so, and no undercover footage is actually used. This was just one more reason Moore appeared fatter and happier. The truly grating, righteous Moore of Roger and Me would’ve used ‘em.
In all, this is a movie with too many weak links. It’s a banal showcase for Moore’s maybe-deserved star power, but that alone doesn’t add up to a compelling argument about why we have too many gun deaths. This is an empty movie, built around connections that an “outsider” like Moore shouldn’t have.