Columbine at the Movies

IN GUS VAN SANT'S recent film "Elephant"--at the point where a student enters the school library, dressed in camouflage gear, machine gun at the ready--another student lifts his camera and focuses. It's a chilling moment, with both poised to shoot. Of course, what's chilling about it is that a murder is imminent and the photographer doesn't seem to care as long as he gets his shot. We might construct a metaphor out of this for all the filmmakers who have decided that the topic of school shootings offers a great opportunity to exercise their cameras. In the past few months, Michael Moore's fatuous documentary "Bowling for Columbine" was released on video and DVD. Paul Ryan's "Home Room," Ben Coccio's "Zero Day," and "Elephant" made it to the big screen. Other films are in the works: Michael Engel's "Entering Out," about a student with psychic abilities who predicts a massacre at this school, and Mark Brown's "State's Evidence," about a group of high-school kids who form a suicide pact--with one student so emboldened by the freedom the impending suicide gives him that he goes on a shooting rampage at the school.

Many of these films have won prestigious awards. Last year, "Bowling For Columbine" (in which Moore tries to draw a parallel between local violence in America and American foreign policy) won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for best documentary. "Elephant" won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, as well as the best director prize for Van Sant. "Zero Day" had a less exalted release, but still managed to take home awards at the Atlanta, Florida, and Slamdunk festivals, and the Audience Award at the Rhode Island Film Festival.

These films are, by and large, solely about the killers, inviting us into their world, letting us be privy to their thoughts, and welcoming empathy for their actions. Most of the filmmakers seem to assess the killings as part of a hazing ritual that America needs: a cruel rite of passage necessary for initiation into the understanding of the underdog. America has to lose its innocence--its sense that schools in middle-class neighborhoods are safe and wholesome places where students go to learn--so that the nation can purge the menace that fosters the killers.

Of course, that makes the killers endlessly fascinating individuals who were corrupted not from within, but without. After the actual shootings at Columbine, journalists studied the killers' websites, diaries, and home videos with a Talmudic intensity to find some cause for it all. The killers must have watched too many violent movies, or played too many gory video games, or listened to too many pernicious rap songs, or had access to too many guns, or taken too much Prozac. They lived in homes where the parents and God were absent, and they went to schools where bullies ruled the hallways. The killers, in other words, could be understood, their actions made sense of.

BUT NOW, in the recent flurry of school shoot-'em-up films, the thought has been taken a step further. What these films argue is what we might call the no-reason reason: All the background factors merely facilitate the killings, and the killers kill for no real purpose--with the result that society itself is finally somehow to blame.

There are some comic uses of violent students all the way back in Washington Irving's tale of the headless horseman and Edward Eggleston's "Hoosier Schoolmaster," while the movie "If . . .", Lindsay Anderson's 1968 attack on British boys' schools, ends with the fantasy of Malcolm McDowell shooting all the teachers, unpleasant students, and visiting parents. But mass murder at celluloid high schools really begins with the 1976 "Carrie," in which Sissy Spacek used her telekinetic powers to unleash horror at the school prom to take revenge on those who mocked her.

In the 1989 "Heathers," Winona Ryder and Christian Slater decide they have had enough of the outrageously snobby girls at their high school--a group of popular queen bees all named "Heather"--and they start killing them. Ingeniously, they make the murders look like suicide, and suddenly suicide becomes a popular activity at the school. In 1995, "The Basketball Diaries" ends with Leonardo DiCaprio as Jim Carroll, dressed in "Matrix" black, having a drug-induced dream of entering his school with a machine gun in his hand.

FILMS OF HIGH-SCHOOL KILLING lost their comedy when real students started killing people. (After the shootings in Colorado and Kentucky, families of victims sued the makers of "The Basketball Diaries," charging their product influenced the killers. Both cases were dismissed, but that didn't stop MGM from recalling copies of the film and removing that scene from them.) Directors started making documentaries and neo-realist movies about the shootings, to impel the notion that what was happening on screen was not outlandish, but authentic.

So, for instance, Gus Van Sant filmed "Elephant" as a series of interconnected stories that depict a day in the life of a middle-America high school. Van Sant cast his film with "real people," many of whom have the same first name as their character, and he encouraged them to integrate their experiences into the film. John is late for school because his father is drunk, but he doesn't tell the principal the reason for his tardiness. Elias walks through the grounds with his camera and asks a couple to pose for him. Michelle's gym teacher asks her why she can't wear shorts like the other girls, and then Michelle goes to her job at the library. Jordan, Nicole, and Brittany go to the school cafeteria and discuss the number of fat grams in salad dressing, and then to the bathroom where they each enter into separate stalls and throw up. Nathan walks across the field to meet his girlfriend Carrie. Humdrum and void of drama and tension hardly begins to describe all this.

The camera focuses on the murderers, Eric and Alex, just enough to construct the skeletons of their identity. Alex, a classical pianist, is a sensitive boy; he walks through school weary and withdrawn, fatigued by the classroom battlefield where his classmates pelt him with spitballs and tired of his teachers' indifference. Eric is Alex's bovine disciple, and because they are both pariahs at school, they form a viscid bond. Their relationship is charged (they kiss while taking a shower together before the massacres) and exclusive. Nobody else needs to exist in their universe, which is why they don't mind killing those who do. Even Alex's mother, who begrudgingly feeds them breakfast before the murders, is shown only from the neck down; her face is irrelevant.

At home, the boys watch Hitler documentaries, order guns over the Internet (somehow the guns arrive on the same day), and practice virtual shooting on a computer game and actual shooting on a pile of wood. They also plot the murders together, studying layouts of the school and devising battle strategies. The aim of the massacre, as Alex tells Eric, is to "have fun," but the killings themselves, planned with military precision and deployed with a sniper's obdurate concentration, are sullen exercises, which bullishly ram through the fear that floats in the hallways like a fog, as students scurry to try and find safe passage.

All this is mildly frightening and disturbing, but in the end, "Elephant" is disturbing mostly in its inability to make judgments about the whole, and in the way that it distances itself from censure. For a film where narrative and story are not paramount, there is too much focus on the killers and their nonchalant evil, and not enough on the people they killed.

RELEASED IN SEPTEMBER, Ben Coccio's "Zero Day" is another film that takes its cues from Columbine, aping the massacres so closely that the end result is a film distressing to watch. Also an exercise in neo-realism, "Zero Day" is about a self-proclaimed "Army of Two," Andre Kriegman and Cal Gabriel, who videotape themselves as they plan to shoot up their school.

Like the Columbine killers' videos, these are both confessional and observational. They show the boys having genuine fun with their families, acting as "normal" teenagers do. The boys also speak to the camera, using it to record their experiments with weaponry, their strategies and purposes for killing, and the evidence of their aggrandized egos. Both boys are bloated with a loathsome arrogance and a nauseating self-righteousness.

The boys present their impending crime as motiveless. They even burn their Mortal Kombat CDs and copies of "Lord of the Flies" to make the point that they acted free of influence. "There are no reasons, and you are all going to be looking for them, but you aren't going to find them," says Andre. But the statement is contradicted by the next one. "This isn't our fault. I mean, you made us, made me, what I am. . . . Make no mistake, we have been insulted. Now it is time for the duel."

THE DUEL PLAYS OUT like a battle between cripples and supermen. During "Zero Day"'s massacre scenes, the school becomes the claustrophobic deadly prison that Columbine was when those trapped inside were waiting for the police to act. These scenes are made to look as if they were filmed on security cameras, but there is palpable terror in the grainy images. Students run through the school like rats in a maze as they try to escape the killers, who stalk them and shoot them at point blank range. All the while, a metallic-voiced phone operator narrates and says inanities as "Andre, we can work this out, can you just pick up the line."

"Zero Day" is a terrifying film, but the violence is not what shocks so much as the boys' attitude toward it. Theirs is an oh-lets-shoot-up-a-few-people-when-we-are-done-with-our-homework approach. The boys find amusement in practical weaponry ("Welcome to today's episode of home-gun-show review," says Andre, before giving instructions in the assembly of pipe bombs and shrapnel), and can talk about killing people and out of tune guitars in the same breath. They are nonchalant about their foolproof plan to get publicity and cocksure that the media will lavish attention on them and "scrutinize everything we did under the biggest microscope in the world."

Perhaps one of the reasons that "Zero Day" is so vile--watching it makes you feel contaminated--is because it seems to be paying homage to the legacy of the Columbine killers. It gives them the Hollywood treatment they yearned for. (Although the Columbine boys actually wanted such higher-profile directors as Spielberg and Tarantino to tell their story.) It affords screen time for their nihilism and arrogance, and it broadcasts their blasé attitude toward murder, all the while generating some audience empathy for their personalities.

In much of the literature written about school violence and shootings, the killers were portrayed as lost boys corrupted by an unfair system, who performed the callous murders only because they would not be heard any other way. Since a number of these teenage murderers committed suicide before they could be put on trial, the media deflected its censorious scrutiny elsewhere. Thus, among other things, the media reproached Columbine High School, with its scores of grieving survivors, because it supposedly fostered a culture where students bullied others; the National Rifle Association for lax handgun laws; and drug companies for the psychotropic drugs the killers took.

What is troubling is not the criticism--who could be against curtailing bullying, guns, and drugs in high schools?--but that in our listening to the killers and their tales of woe, we made them retrospective victims. Society ends up masturbating with their memories and paying obeisance to their cause. And in the end, though dead, the killers get what they want; fame, understanding, and now Hollywood glory.

That is why we should welcome a film like "Home Room," and some of the novels that have come out about the killings, especially Douglas Coupland's "Hey Nostradamus!" and Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin." "Home Room" is a ponderous movie, but most of the action takes place after the murders, when two survivors--Deanna, the pretty class brain, and Alicia, the goth freak--form a shaky friendship. In "Home Room," the killer is not given a name or a face, and his screen time is minimal. He and his motives are not important, but the survivors are.

"Hey Nostradamus!" is also about the aftermath of a school shooting, tracking the misery and anguish that leeches onto the survivors and doesn't ever leave them. "We Need to Talk About Kevin," a magnificently written thriller, is told from the perspective of Kevin's mother, in the form of letters to her estranged husband. Kevin, who committed mass murder at his high school, was not corrupted as much as evil from the get-go, a horrendous child who did what he could to sabotage his mother's maternity. In these works, fingers are pointed and blame is ascribed to those who deserve it.

THERE IS SOMETHING PATHOLOGICAL about an empathy that ends up incapable of condemning murder. Audiences might remember the killers, and how they wore trench coats, but unless they are reminded, they will forget the victims--who are far more deserving of attention than the psychotics who killed them. Maybe at some point filmmakers will stop trying to "wake people up" with neo-realist dramas like "Zero Day" and start thinking about how films can honor those victims.

Gaby Wenig is a writer in Los Angeles.