Week of November 26, 2009, Issue #736
FILM
SideVue: Gunning for the Truth
The numbers seem scatter-shot. April 20, 1999; 14 killed. January 16, 2002; 3 killed. July 8, 2003; 7 killed. March 21, 2005; 10 killed. April 16, 2007; 33 killed. December 9, 2007; 5 killed. February 14, 2008; 6 killed. June 25, 2008; 6 killed. November 5, 2009; 13 killed.
These are the dates and body-counts of some of the past decade’s most horrifying shooting sprees, almost all in schools: Columbine High School (Colorado), Appalachian School of Law (Grundy, Virginia), Lockheed Martin plant (Meridian, Mississippi), Red Lake Senior High School (Minnesota), Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, Virginia), Northern Illinois University (DeKalb, Illinois), Atlantis Plastics plant (Henderson, Kentucky); Fort Hood Army Base (Texas).
And in six days, as Denis Villeneuve’s film Polytechnique, screening this weekend at Metro, reminds us, the 20th anniversary of Canada’s own infamous school shooting spree arrives: Dec. 6, 1989; 15 killed at the École Polytechnique de Montreal.
Movies have been blamed for the sprees—as have TV, music, video games, Marilyn Manson, abortion, pornography, premarital sex, divorce, drug abuse and homosexuality. (Those last six were fired off all in one round by Mike Huckabee in his book Kids Who Kill, about the Westside School Massacre in Jonesboro, Arkansas, a year before Columbine; the 13-year-old and 11-year-old shooters, who’d killed four students and a teacher, were released in 2005 and 2007).
And movies have been reluctant to even approach shooting sprees, a relatively recent phenomenon, only 60 years old (WWII veteran Howard Barton Unruh, who died on October 19, is considered the first spree shooter after he killed 13 people in Camden, New Jersey on Sept. 6, 1949). It’s as if, given shooting sprees’ eerily viral nature, spreading patchily through a shadowy population of disaffected students, service-men, and factory workers within a decade or so—“going postal” refers to the rash of 20 workplace shootings (with 40 killed), often in postal outlets, between 1986 and 1997—filmmakers wanted to keep their distance fom the real thing. “Going postal” was popularized by the movies, in 1995’s Clueless, and brief jokes about postal workers popped up in 1995’s Jumanji and 1996’s Jingle All The Way. Otherwise, American cinema didn’t want to get too close. Let’s keep our violence escapist, mindless, action-packed and a little fantastic, it seemed to keep saying, not bring it down to earth and right around the corner, into people’s workplaces or classes.
With Columbine, independent American films began representing school shootings, if not helping understand them. Home Room arrived in 2002. Then, its title perhaps reflecting the sense of an elephant in the middle of America’s living-room, or schoolroom, too large too ignore or forget, Gus Van Sant released Elephant in 2003. Fellow Rhode Island School of Design graduate Ben Coccio’s Zero Day, finished in 2001, was finally released later that year.
Elephant keeps the murdering teens’ motives unclear, mostly because the camera movement is eerily, ominously calm, almost inscrutable. This approach can be criticized as horribly respectful of the killers—as horribly respectful as me including, in the body counts above, shooters’ suicides—but I think it’s only respectful of them in the leering face of our culture’s monstrous overreaction and pitiful underreaction to shooting-sprees.
Years after the wild finger-pointings and near-pornographic coverage of Columbine, for instance, it’s emerged that much of what we were first told, and left to believe, was dead wrong. Colorado journalist Dave Cullen, in his book Columbine, published earlier this year, found that the shooters had many friends, did well in school, had no particular grudges, weren’t bullied, didn’t belong to a Trenchcoat Mafia, and didn’t listen to Marilyn Manson. And, in fact, their ambition was much bigger—to blow up the entire school. The Columbine school shooting, it turns out, was the thwarted ending of a kind of dark star-crossed romance, where a sadist-fantasizer teamed up with a failure-obsessed depressive and the pair developed blockbuster revenge-film ambitions.
While any of Columbine’s possible lessons were muddied by the media, the Virginia Tech shootings immediately revealed some obvious flaws in the mental health system to be redressed and that teachers, who noticed some disturbing facets of the shooter’s personality in class, should be taken more seriously. Yet there’s no sign that these lessons have been learned and applied. (In 1993, after two postal workplace shootings, the US Postal Service created new positions aimed at preventing workplace violence. There were two postal shooting-sprees in 2006, but those positions created in 1993 were eliminated this year as part of cutbacks.)
There is, in fact, a clear pattern to the cases above: nearly all occur in heartland or rural areas of the United States (a land of lax gun-control) and many involve white males lashing out after feeling particularly bullied (especially by homophobic slurs), a feeling that explodes into a vague sense that a larger “they” out there need to be punished. In the latest horror, at Fort Hood, this us versus them mentality seems to have driven an American Muslim to violently, horribly reject being sent overseas to an unnecessary war, taking out his helplessness and frustration on fellow soldiers in the midst of a “war on terror” whose protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with tales of torture and abuse, are only creating more terror.
This is displacement and projection of seething, North American male anger, projection of a hollow-point hyper-heterosexuality we usually see on screen.
This time, though, on-screen representations often get it right by refusing to offer easy solutions. Polytechnique is black-and-white but offers no easy judgements, beginning with a scene of awful chaos and, fairly enough, dwelling on the victims rather than worry about the perpetrator.
Marc Lepine’s now marked as the quintessence of abuse against women, but that’s to take him at his twisted word when we otherwise ignore what killers say. He declared feminism his target, as Villeneuve shows, though obviously his own abuse at the hands of his father had as much or more to do with his murderousness as this easy scapegoat, likely learned from his father’s treatment of his mother and a displaced resentment of his sister. So why does our culture so eagerly seize on a murderer’s simplistic explanation? To absolve itself, to clear us, to refuse self-examination and change. The date of the shooting is now Women’s Remembrance Day even though Lepine’s acts are not typical of violence against women (which usually takes the form of regular domestic abuse, often against lower-class women; a more appropriate, Speak Out Against Violence Against Women Day or the like could be set up around the time of the Super Bowl, when the greatest number of domestic violence incidents are reported). After all, the killer in the 1989 Cleveland School Massacre targeted Asian immigrants and the killer at the Lockheed Martin plant targeted blacks, but there are no Asian Remembrance Day or Black Remembrance Day for those victims.
Of course, much violence may have no solution, a whydoit? that can be figured out. But with shooting sprees, it’s obviously become easier to take up arms against “monsters” rather than use their acts against their false causes, honouring their victims by steadily examining and slowly improving the family dynamics, systemic causes and institutional flaws (from sexism and racism to traumatizing military engagements, bureaucratic mental-health systems and often rigid, conformist education systems) which create, exacerbate and fail to help such killers, and ultimately put victims in their sights. To take aim at easy stereotypes or accept killers’ surface claims is to do the same as most of these killers—target a few individuals and then take the easy way out. The smarter movies to grapple with shooting-sprees seem to understand that one of the real mysteries of this sad, modern strain of violence is how poorly and desperately we try to inoculate ourselves against it.
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