Blood Bath and Beyond

Michigan's North Country Bank was offering a free gun with a new checking account--more bang for the buck, read the ad--so naturally Michael Moore had to apply. And he had to ask the friendly officer who helped him with the application: "You think it's a little dangerous handing out guns at a bank?"

Lock your doors and open your minds, America. Michael Moore is armed again.

In Bowling for Columbine, his rambunctious, disturbing, often hilarious new documentary, the leftie perp of Roger & Me and the best-seller Stupid White Men examines America's gun culture. Why do we love to shoot and kill things? And why do we shoot and kill people at rates obscenely higher than those of other countries?

Columbine is a Molotov cocktail of interviews, cartoons, news footage and righteous rabble-rousing. It is also a road movie in search of the troubled soul of America. As Moore told TIME: "It's a film about why we're so violent toward each other, and why we tend to export a lot of this violence around the world. Because otherwise we're actually pretty good people."

Moore, 48, made his name tracking down and confronting corporate executives--a tactic that, in his hands, looked less like investigative journalism than self-promotion and stalking. This time he quizzes Charlton Heston on the propriety of proclaiming, at an n.r.a. convention in Littleton, Colo., just 10 days after the Columbine shootings, that his gun will have to be pried "from my cold, dead hands." (At first the star is courteous, but Moore's questions provoke him to terminate the interview, leaving Moore alone --in Heston's house.) In most respects, though, the film is crisper than Moore's earlier work--it's a handsomely assembled essay in words and pictures--and less given to finger pointing than head scratching.

Moore also looks within. In high school in Flint, Mich., he won a marksmanship award. He is an N.R.A. member who says he wanted to run against Heston for the presidency. He likes guns. He may hear echoes of his youth in the words of a Michigan militia member: "It's an American responsibility to be armed. If you're not armed, you're not responsible." The director is a little spooked by James Nichols, tofu farmer and brother of Oklahoma City bomber Terry, who shows Moore the loaded Magnum .44 under his pillow and points it at his own temple. Nichols stops short of saying people have the right to weapons-grade plutonium. After all, he sagely notes, "there's wackos out there."

Moore is an ace propagandist. He employs excoriating anger (a zippy montage critical of U.S. interventionism, from installing the Shah of Iran in 1953 to giving $245 million in foreign aid to Taliban-run Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001), then switches to breezy humor (a larkish, South Park--ish animation on whites' fear of blacks). To a former producer of Cops, he suggests a spin-off: Corporate Cops, in which guys like Ken Lay would be strip-searched.