4-20-99
It was long overdue but we finally watched Bowling for Columbine this evening. I cried when I saw the closed-circuit footage of what happened at Columbine. Prior to tonight, I'd only seen the one grainy, silently eerie still of the cafeteria, with Eric Harris' and Dylan Klebold's backs to the camera. It's almost easy to ignore that still; after all, with their backs turned, there is no directed emotion emanating from the image. Had Eric and Dylan turned a hundred and eighty degrees, such that their faces were visible, I'd venture that you might've seen their faces wrought with perhaps defiance, perhaps anger, perhaps satisfaction. I'm hypothesizing. But that single screenshot says nothing about the fear gripping everyone who was there that day. Watching the events unfold in a stiff, punctuated motion, watching the kids dive under the tables and scramble out the door in an attempt to escape an offscreen terror is a whole other story. Even watching Elephant a few years ago was difficult and chilling. Fictional as it was, it was impossible for my heart to not pound, nor my tears to not run as the film closed. There's just something extremely terrifying and heart-wrenching about watching violent history unfurl. Watching violence has a physiological effect on most humans -- rushes of hormones and electrical storms where you'd prefer them to not be. It kills me to think that so often, violence is manufactured for the simple pleasure of entertainment and why people do this to themselves, creating such real or imagined non-neccessity, just because they can.