Bowling For Columbine Film Analysis

In 2002 a film titled Bowling for Columbine was released by Michael Moore, a well-known satirist and filmmaker. The film received the Academy Award for Best Documentary feature in 2003 as well as international awards. The film depicts America’s fascination with guns through a montage played to the Beatles’ “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and then presents the destructions caused from gun violence throughout the film. Thousands of people die each year due to gun violence. Many people blame the lack of gun control, musicians, video games and anger. In the film, Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore provides his audience with appeals of ethos, pathos and logos throughout his documentary for the reasoning behind the massacre that took place at Columbine High School in 1999 and for American gun violence.

Moore uses the appeal of ethos when he begins to give his own background history and when he interviews men who are knowledgeable about guns. We are given a home video scene of a young Michael with his first gun and his voice over stating “I couldn’t wait to get out and shoot up the neighborhood” and then going to some more home videos until we get to a photograph of Moore as a teenager, holding a

Moore was able to use all three proofs throughout his documentary, through his appeal to ethos by sharing his own personal background and through interviews of other gun owners he was able to establish the audiences trust and gain himself credibility, and he used the appeal to logos when he showed us how easy it was to obtain a gun from the bank and by dropping the number of gun deaths with statistical numbers. With the appeal of pathos being Moore’s most effective, he was able to get his message across to an audience of various viewers. Bowling for Columbine sends a very powerful and meaningful message that opens the audiences’ eyes up to the rising gun violence that has been taking place and the lack of gun control that America