Change the World with a Bullet: The Cold War Origins of the School Shooting Film

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Notes

1. I use the term post-Columbine throughout the essay not to suggest that Columbine is the first school shooting, but instead because it functions discursively as a moment that warps social understanding of the school shooting as a phenomenon. This essay means, among other points, to follow the primordial development of a cultural narrative that does not quite come into being until the 21st century.

2. King took Rage out of print after the 1997 Heath High School shooting; Michael Carneal, the shooter, had a copy of the book in his locker. Rage has also been linked to other earlier shootings. It exists in its most accessible form as part of a collection of early King novels, for which he used the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The first edition of The Bachman Books was released in 1985. The collection fell out of print in the United States along with Rage; the collection continued to include Rage in the United Kingdom until 2007.

3. This list of school shooting texts is, of course, not exhaustive. Texts from media formats beyond film and novels have also addressed school shootings, such as the video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG, Pearl Jam's music video for “Jeremy,” and, arguably, Foster the People's popular song “Pumped Up Kicks.” There are also texts that, though not resulting in a shooting, are part of a larger category of school killing narratives, because they find their resolution in the killing of fellow students by the main character. These include Carrie (Brian de Palma's classic in 1976, with the remake released in 2013)—which, of course, was based on Stephen King's 1974 novel that, ironically, is not out of print, unlike Rage—and Let the Right One In, a 2007 Swedish vampire novel by John Ajvide Lindvist, then turned film by Tomas Alfredson (2008). Appropriately for this essay, Carrie was made during the Cold War while the novel Let the Right One In, although published in 2004, takes place in 1981. This essay focuses both on film and school shootings specifically, however, as a way to represent the origins of this type of narrative. For social, political, and psychological understandings of school shootings, see Katherine S. Newman, Rampage; Peter Langman, Why Kids Kill; Jessie Klein, The Bully Society; Rob Merritt and Brooks Brown, No Easy Answers; and Marcel Lebrun, Books, Blackboards, and Bullets.

4. For a 21st-century critic that maintains a pre–Columbine lens, see Danny Powell's 2009 Studying British Cinema. Powell suggests that in If…

the public school becomes representative of the nation. Here, where wealth and privilege thrive and where the next generation of society's leaders are educated, the school becomes a metaphor for the establishment and also shows a very definite power structure which had becomes for many unacceptable” (202).

This tendency to allegorize the school ignores the more local, situated concerns of the school shooting that we now see in post-Columbine discourse. Indeed, Powell is mirroring all earlier readings of If…, including Sarah Street's in British National Cinema, in 1997 which was published not long before Columbine: “The boys' rebellion in If… is represented as a utopian triumph for youth over a nonsensical world which is crumbling under its own absurdity and obsolescence” (89).

5. Much of the criticism on The Battle of Algiers has focused on terrorism, an issue integral to both revolution films and public discourses that surround school shootings. For more on The Battle of Algiers and terrorism, see John David Slocum, Terrorism, Media, Liberation (especially pages 94–110) and Jeffrey Louis Decker, “Terrorism (Un)Veiled” (pp. 177–196). The latter presents the intersections between gender and terrorism, an issue that is important in If…, as I will show, in the form of “The Girl.” For more on gender in The Battle of Algiers, see Natalya Vince, “Colonial and Post-Colonial Identities” (2009, pp. 153–168); Katherine A. Roberts, “Constrained Militants: Algerian Women”, and Bourlem Guerdjou's “Living in Paradise.”

6. See Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (1992), and Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, British Cinema and Society (1983). Murphy notes that the “most basic [film] conventions…came under siege” (160) in the 1960s and Richards and Aldgate, who specifically talk about this in relation to If…, make a similar argument (pp. 153, 157). These styles, which become part of the school shooting text, are interesting in relation to the actual surrealism that Katherine Newman (p. 4) notes in real school shootings. Talking about the Heath, Kentucky shooting of 1997, Newman says that “Linda Feeney [a student at Heath High School] kept thinking that everything was so normal and so surreal at the same time” (p. 4).

7. Understanding school shootings through critiques of discourse on racial violence is central to the cultural production prompted by If…. Two significant examples are the scene in Gus Van Sant's Elephant when the African-American character, Benny, walks calmly through the school as the shooters are active and the moment in the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin when Kevin's mother, Eva, rationalizes her inability to foresee her son's violence by stating that “for ages black kids and Hispanic kids have been shooting each other in shithole junior high schools in Detroit,” suggesting that the media makes too much of white school shooters (Shriver, 2011, p. 249).

8. A film that is similar to Punishment Park in terms of content (although very different ideologically) and that is also useful to put in conversation with the types of school shootings taken up by revolution films is Red Dawn (John Milius, 1984); beginning with a Soviet attack on a school, Red Dawn exists in an interesting space between the revolution film and school shooting text, since it is explicitly political and allegorical but also forecasts some of the anxieties about the types of school shootings we imagine post-Columbine.

9. Karen Tonso calls this structural fantasy “patriarchy”:

I hope to show that commonalities among shootings may not relate to demographic issues—such as whether the shooter was male or female, or whether White or Asian, but relate to the larger societal force of patriarchy—a promise of ascendancy for men, how some men take up this promise, and how their image of themselves as persons having “special” rights is reinforced and thus made special in everyday life. (1268)

While Tonso argues that the shooter is driven by and supports patriarchy in the act of the shooting, I suggest that the shooting itself functions to deconstruct such fantasies within the school shooting text. In other words, shootings have made the 21st-century more aware of these fantasies even if, for Lindsay Anderson and a number of critics, If… is about reconstructing a masculine ideal.

10. Edelman offers Dickens's Scrooge as the quintessential sinthomosexual. I believe connecting school shooters to sinthomosexuals is both justified, in that Edelman notes that sinthomosexuals are universally “reviled” (45) and enter into a negated space, and productive, since I think, inspired by Jasbir Puar's “Ecologies of Sex, Sensation, and Slow Death” (2010), there is a valuable connection between the school shooter, queer sexuality, and antipolitics. In this, the gun control debate functions much like Edelman's discussion of abortion (31), a debate that the school shooter prompts but also challenges and deconstructs. While If…'s Crusaders can come to represent sinthomosexuality, I also believe, however, that the school shooting text as a whole does try to imagine alternative futures, especially in a novel such as Let the Right One In. This is possibly borrowed from revolution films, which, as I showed, rely on political fantasies; school shooting texts often focus on personal fantasies and virtual realities. For more on issues of bullying and futurity in Let the Right One In, see Benny LeMaster, “Queer Imag(in)ing: Liminality as Resistance in Lindqvist's Let the Right One In” (2011) and Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk, “What Kept You So Long?” (2013).

11. See Lauren Berlant (2007), whose idea of “slow death” also resembles Claudia Card's “gray zone,” another theory valuable to think of in relation to bullying (which is employed by Crofts and van Rijswijk in their article about Let the Right One In referenced previoiusly) and the sinthomosexual:

The evils of everyday misogyny, racism, homophobia, and anti-semitism are not always imminent or looming in the form of well-defined events. They take shape gradually, over a lifetime or even centuries. They are less readily noticed or identified, and yet they shape our options and perceptions. They may inflict social rather than biological death, or permanent deformation, disability, or unremitting pain. They can produce self-hatred. (Card 2005, 233)

12. From a video essay included in the 2005 redistribution of Punishment Park.

13. The kissing scene is often mentioned in critical analyses of Elephant, but there also seems to be some anxiety about how to define it. See, for example, David Edelstein's Slate article, “The Kids in the Hall” (2003). I think the way the film discursively connects queerness and school shootings through this scene is central to the school shooting text and its (anti)politics. For a good analysis of Elephant's form and why its politics are often critiqued that also mentions the film's queer elements, see James Whitfield, “Radical Form” (2005). While focusing on the surreal elements of Elephant and many of the scenes as I also do, Whitfield arrives at a different kind of politics.

14. Women are also not given a space in Edelman's theories in No Future. He does note the need to theorize the female sinthomosexual, a role that perhaps “The Girl” can fulfill. For another version of how women are implicated in the school shooting text, watch Home Room (Paul F. Ryan, 2003). Though, unlike “The Girl,” Home Room's Alicia isn't an actual shooter, she is connected to the shooting and maintains a level of distance and apathy that suggest her relationship to sinthomosexuality. This is also related to Alicia's maternality in complicated ways that attempt to give women a new space within school shootings, questioning the myths that women are victims or catalysts. Alicia, ultimately, is neither, though this negation ultimately relies on sentimental ways of producing Alicia as a proper subject.

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Daniel Ante-Contreras

Daniel Ante-Contreras is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside. His dissertation, which documents how autism challenges accepted definitions of citizenship, includes a chapter on school shooting texts.