Columbine Never Sleeps

There are others, too, as they existed in another lifetime, those sixty months, 1,800 days, 2.6 million minutes ago. On that April 20 of 1999. Which just so happens to be now again. And there are two boys, in particular, who, when they reappear, throw the strangest shadows, for they seem most at peace when everyone is panicked, most alive among the dead, and then, reeling back in time past their self-created moment of destruction, most distraught when the others in the high school are most happy.

Come here, by the side of this road that runs out of town. It’s the night before, and you must understand: It has become urgent to tell this story one last time. Right now, as it happens again—and again. The foothills of the Rockies—the Hogbacks, as they’re known here in Littleton, Colorado—rise spookily beneath a waxing moon. The stars shift and rearrange themselves. Jupiter and Venus clash. Tomorrow, the charts say, children will rule the world.

Excellent article I haven’t seen here before! Long read, but a wonderful one – please take the time out of your day to sit with this a while.

Columbine Never Sleeps

Marvel’s ‘Punisher’ Problem: When Real-World Violence Intrudes on Promotional Plans (Column)

The futility of escaping real-life massacres begs a broader question. For an industry that excels at selling spectacular depictions of violence — especially with guns — does moving off a release date really mean anything? The violence isn’t going anywhere; it’s just moving farther into the future. What makes time-shifted violence somehow more acceptable? It feels like putting a band-aid over a bullet wound, again and again and again.

I ask this as someone who enjoyed “The Punisher” much more than I expected to. The show (which will be reviewed in full at a later date) is a remarkable expression of frustration with America’s doublespeak around the military — a doublespeak that upholds patriotism at all costs, while demeaning the people who serve in the name of national defense. And though I have found “The Punisher” engages with its subject matter in a smart and compassionate way, there is no denying the fact that the lead character Frank Castle, played by Bernthal, is the quintessential (and heavily armed) lone wolf, a gun-toting vigilante who has no qualms about taking lives. It is a brutal show, and guns feature heavily in not just the scenes of violence but in the iconography of the Punisher himself.

[..]

There’s something very scary about this character in a contemporary context. The Punisher may not be a mass shooter. But he is living out a fantasy of unrestrained violence, and he’s doing so in a way that looks very familiar. Or maybe it’s the other way around: It’s not that the Punisher looks like mass shooters, it’s that mass shooters style themselves to be men like the Punisher. Just as pop culture adapts to new norms, pop culture can create new norms. And though the jury’s still out on whether violence in the media influences the actions of mass shooters, there is increasing evidence of a correlation, especially for those exposed at a young age.

Marvel’s ‘Punisher’ Problem: When Real-World Violence Intrudes on Promotional Plans (Column)

“How Should Hollywood Respond to Mass Shootings?”

acinnamon-girl:

The Atlantic has published a fantastic article today on how popular culture currently treats mass shootings, using the Showtime series, Active Shooter: America Under Fire to provide context and suggestions. I highly recommend anyone interested in this topic check it out.

“There are plenty of reasons why the entertainment industry avoids the topic of mass shootings, the most salient being concerns about a copycat effect. After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, a handful of indie film directors considered the subject, in movies like Zero Day, Elephant, and Bang Bang You’re Dead. But the fact that so many lawsuits subsequently blamed pop culture itself for Columbine seems to have turned mass shootings into something most artists don’t dare touch.

There’s something awkward, though, if not outright hypocritical, in churning out cultural products that glamorize gun violence while refusing to engage with the reality of it. For one thing, stories are integral to how humans process real-life events, particularly tragedies. They encourage empathy for victims, and they attempt to convey some extent of the horror. One of Holzman’s main motivations in making Active Shooter, the producer told me, was to humanize statistics that can be hard to comprehend from news reports. The current protocol for stories that tackle mass shootings is to remove them from the public whenever real-life violence occurs—a tacit endorsement of the gun lobby’s argument that the aftermath of a tragedy is the worst time to politicize it. But what if stories can help?…

This isn’t to rail against TV shows and movies that feature gun violence, which is a different argument for a different day. It’s to underline that Hollywood unfailingly responds to mass shootings by looking away. Episodes are delayed; releases are put on hold; promotional events are canceled. Then, after a minimally disruptive period of time has passed, everything returns to normal. But while gun violence quickly becomes acceptable again to depict on film or television, the topic of mass shootings is studiously avoided. The reason that’s most frequently proffered is sensitivity to victims, but coming from an industry that’s hardly squeamish about portraying, for example, sexual violence, it’s hard to fully accept.

The fear of inspiring copycat shootings has also deterred artists since Columbine, which saw a spate of complaints against filmmakers, video-game companies, and musicians for supposedly inspiring its perpetrators. But, as with any difficult subject, there are ways to approach it without glorifying violent crimes or contributing to the mystique around perpetrators. Active Shooter, like the recent documentary Newtown, spends as little time talking about perpetrators as possible. It notes only basic biographical information that adds context to the ongoing question of why these outbreaks of horrific violence keep happening.”

Read the entire article here.

The Columbine Shooting Case Study

Go forth and read this! This study talks about the media coverage of the shooting and the impact it had on reporters. It provides a window into the choices they made during the live coverage of the event, but also talks about the things they encountered on-scene and the misinformation they had to deal with. Great stuff, of which some fragments were new for me as well!

The Columbine Shooting Case Study

The shooting at Columbine High School was something more than a sensational, long-running news story. It was the centerpiece of a national conversation about the state of late-twentieth century America and the causes of and cures for a newly emerging problem (or a newly emerging understanding) of youth violence. More specifically, it was an illustrative example of how dramatic news events are defined in the news in ways that contribute to the social construction of public problems. (Lawrence, 2001, pp. 91-92)

“I literally walked in my apartment, slammed the door and started crying and couldn’t
stop,” says Delgado. “It was the images that were haunting me and the people I talked to. The somberness. You couldn’t help but feel the pain and sorrow even though I didn’t even know anyone involved.”

KMGH’s Mulligan slept in her office the first night. An aide drove to her house for clean clothes. “I have never had a story that impacted me like this,” says Mulligan. “We were all crying at some point in the newsroom. It was so unbelievable. The magnanimity of it just went on and on. It lasted for 10 days.”

An adrenaline rush kept journalists going the first few days, but not the entire ten. By Day Three and Four, some were asking to be taken off the story. Twelve
kids gunned down for no reason. A popular teacher murdered as he tried to shield students. It was just too painfully intense covering grieving families, funerals, distraught students and witnessing an endless river of tears. Psychologists were brought to newsrooms for people to be able
to vent their emotions. “We didn’t have tears the first few days,” recalls KCNC’s Kucharski. “They came after three days, a week. Don’t
underestimate how horribly shaken people are to see bloody bodies and
crying parents.” Months later, KCNC anchor Bill Stuart would publicly
admit he was being treated for depression after covering the Columbine massacre.

[more on the detailed process of news coverage of Columbine here]

bundy-theodore:

The complete front page of The New York Times on Thursday, April 22, 1999 from the “The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851-2009”.

All coverage, including television network news, used terms such as massacre, horror, war zone, bloodbath, siege, and murderous rampage in their description of the events. These descriptors served to cast the events as so deviant as to be beyond understanding or comprehension. The use of terms like bloodbath or war zone is normally associated with war reporting, or accounts of terrorism. In this case, the perpetrators were high school students, rather than foreign governments or terrorists.

Additionally, although school shootings have received extensive news media attention in the US, this crime was more massive in scale — producing more casualties than the previous shootings — and was also portrayed as even more deviant. Previous shootings included those perpetrated by Michael Carneal who opened fire on a prayer group in Kentucky, and Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden who pulled a fire alarm so students would be ambushed when exiting the school building in Arkansas. Yet Klebold and Harris were “worse” because, it was reported, they took great pleasure in killing their classmates.

In casting Klebold and Harris as “deviant,” or as “monsters,” journalists set them apart from “normal” boys in society. This is a common discursive shift journalists make when portraying men who kill or batter victims whom journalists deem to be blameless. For example, Marian Meyers (1997) writes that news coverage of men who commit violence against women often portrays such men as sick or deviant, therefore not reflective of society at large. Klebold and Harris were definitively framed as deviant. This positioning has often been used to differentiate between “good” men who otherwise did not pose a threat to others, and men more likely to be considered “bad” or sociopaths, men outside the mainstream of society (Meyers 1997). Therefore, violence can be an accepted trait of certain masculinities, but only if exercised in certain ways.

Violence employed in heroic acts of saving the world or a “woman in distress” is acceptable and lauded, in both fiction and reality. However, the use of violence for “unjustified” killing leads to inclusion in a deviant/subordinate masculine position, for real and fictional boys. Klebold and Harris were on the wrong side of the divide — even wearing black trench coats to make their associations obvious. By referring to Klebold and Harris as “monsters,” another slippage occurs — monsters are not seen as gendered creatures, male or otherwise — essentially, they are not human.

[Taken from The Monsters Next Door: Media Constructions of Boys and Masculinity, by Mia Consalvo.]