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Synopsis of Bowling for Columbine & Class discussion 

by Jonathan, Steven, and Laszlo

The documentary Bowling for Columbine is a film about the impact that guns have had on America. It is directed by the famous filmmaker and author Michael Moore. The movie focuses primarily on showing the negative effects that guns have had on the United States and how their poor gun control laws are the cause of the shooting that occurred at Columbine high school, as well as many other violent acts. There are many aspects about this film that make it special in comparison to other documentaries. Typically, documentaries are serious films in which entertainment is not one of the main concerns and the information provided is heavily backed by historical facts. In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore not only focuses on playing with the audience’s emotions but provides biased information at the same time. He arranged his film in a way where the viewer is constantly experiencing shifts in their emotions, going from laughing to feeling sad, and back and forth. He did this by making comedic scenes, followed by tragic scenes. 

The main concepts that were covered in class this week were rhetoric and propaganda. Rhetoric is basically the art of expressing oneself in a way where the main objective is to convince or persuade people. This can be accomplished through speaking, writing, and film making. The three methods that are used to convince the audience in classical rhetoric are logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos refers to the use of logic and facts such as statistics or numbers to prove a point. Ethos refers to believing in someone based on their credentials or status in society. Pathos refers to having an impact on the viewer’s emotions with the purpose of altering their judgment. Michael more manages to successfully use all three of these rhetoric devices to convince the audience into believing everything he is saying. For example, he heavily relies on pathos as he manipulates the audience’s emotions from laughter to sadness throughout the entire movie. He also uses logos in the scene where he is showing all the statistics among which none of them have any listed sources. He uses ethos during the interviews as he chose the particular people he wanted to interview in order to prove his point, even though none of them are professionals about the subject of guns or violence.

Another concept that we learned and discussed in class is propaganda. This is a concept that refers to the manipulation of information by only presenting one side of a story to an audience, with the objective of convincing them that it is the only possible truth. There are many different techniques that can be used to persuading people into believing one side of the story. These include name calling, glittering generalities, transfers, false analogies, testimonials, plain folks, card stacking, bandwagon, either/or fallacies, and faulty cause and effect situations. Michael Moore uses propaganda and does so by using many of the previously mentioned techniques in his film. He uses the “plain folks” technique very often, mostly during his interviews. This method refers to portraying plain folks as the holders of the truth. That is why he interviews a lot of ordinary, everyday people, and he even dresses up as an everyday person himself despite the fact that he is a multi-millionaire. This technique works because most of the people that will watch his documentary are everyday people, therefore they will have more of a tendency to believe what he is saying if Michael Moore himself and the people portrayed in his film have a similar appearance as them. Moore also uses “card stacking” when he is presenting statistics about the number of deaths by guns from various countries. He does this by not specifying whether those deaths are from accidents, hunting, murders or any other possible causes therefore it leads the audience to believe it is all from murders. He arranges and presents facts in a way where it only benefits what he is saying, because if he presented the whole truth it might not be so advantageous for him. These are only a few of the ways in which he is using propaganda in his film to persuade the audience.

In conclusion, the message that Michael Moore is trying to get across to his audience is not bad, it is simply the means by which he is doing them that are questionable. The use of rhetoric and propaganda are not morally correct in his film because he is using it to only highlight the negative side of gun ownership and gun laws.

Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009)

In this documentary created and narrated by producer Michael Moore, he interviews many American citizens to understand the true effects that capitalism has on the population. In this film, Michael Moore uses specific interviews and proof of past events to help prove his biased opinion that capitalism makes it so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

This film starts out with examining the Roman Empire and then moves to the introduction of the second bill of rights created by Franklin D. Roosevelt. We then learn that Roosevelt passes away, and society turns to hell, leaving the poor unemployed and hopeless while giving billions of dollars to the banks and corporations of Wall Street, leaving them free to do whatever they want with the money. Michael Moore starts off with interviewing the poor in America who are losing everything or who have lost everything and then slowly moves up the chain to interviewing the politicians of Washington DC, to truly get to the root of this serious problem we call capitalism.

With the banks getting away through placing themselves as the beneficiary of the deaths of the poor, something had to have been done to change this serious matter. The solution for many: Barack Obama. Considered in Michael Moore’s documentary as a socialist, Barack was the only possibility towards fixing this intensifying matter. Shortly after Barack would be elected as the new president of the United States and for some this was the beginning of a new era, yet for others it was the end of us all.

In both Capitalism: A Love Story and Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore uses a specific technique to convince society that his views towards capitalism are the correct ones. This technique is being rhetorical. There are three main forms of rhetoric: logos, pathos and ethos. Logos is using numbers/statistics and having logical reasoning for the argument, pathos is the ability of changing the way the reader/viewer addresses the piece of literature through appealing to their emotions, and finally ethos is being able to trust someone’s opinion because of their high social status, “their opinion is always the right opinion”. Michael Moore successfully uses all three of these techniques in each of these documentaries. For instance, in Capitalism: A Love Story Michael Moore uses the ethos method by interviewing Elizabeth Warren, the head of the US Congressional Oversight Committee. To help demonstrate that his point of view is the right one, Michael Moore uses each and every one of the techniques of propaganda that were presented above. An example of this would be in Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore uses the technique of plain folks: “Portraying simple people as the holders of the truth”. He interviews a man who had just lost everything he owns about his beliefs of why this has happened and uses this interview in his movie simply because this man’s opinion is the same as Michael Moore’s.

A Personal Reflection on Both Films

Both films can teach the viewers about the bureaucracy that lies within society today, whether it be about the ignorance of authority in terms of gun control or the issues that hide behind a capitalistic society. The documentaries themselves teach the viewers about how perceptive a person can be to a professionally produced film; in both documentaries the things Michael Moore does within his documentaries appeal to mostly one opinion, and persuades the viewers to derive some sort of understanding of that opinion. While watching the documentaries we followed instructions to pay attention to whether the film is trying to form our thoughts in a certain way, they succeeded, in finishing both movies our thoughts were directed in thinking against guns and against the capitalistic society. Each and every viewer can learn from this to always take into account that there is most probably another perspective with a decent argument that is worth considering. 

These films definitely depict more of a horrific part of the world today. In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore Deals with the intense topic of gun control, throughout life we had known of the school shootings and all of the crimes committed with guns, however we never knew how real it is and how much it is destroying society as we know it. Capitalism: A Love Story deals with the issues that lie within a capitalistic society, although capitalism was largely praised in the past, this documentary opens up many thoughts about it being the destroyer of the economy and society. While eliminating jobs for a company’s success financially, they leave many unemployed, which allows for many people to go deeper and deeper into debt creating a larger gap between the poor and the wealthy. Another thing discussed in the documentary that was found to be extremely shocking is that with a capitalistic society and mentality, it is encouraged to borrow money due to the wages declining, therefore also making it very difficult to get out of debt, most people get evicted from their homes with no where to go and almost no money for ones life essentials. The films contain very moving messages and while Canada does not have hardly any issues with gun control, the problems that occur across the border still affect us as Canadians because of the close nit bond we share with the states and many Canadians have family that live in the United States.

Both documentaries are very moving and provide a greater understanding of the underlying issues that deal with gun control and a capitalist society. While they are seen as biased, they do provide a lot of key elements of those topics that demonstrate the viewers a persuasive and powerful knowledge on topics that society deals with today.