Alright. Buckle up, kids. This is gonna be a long one. A real overshare, on an issue close to my heart. One article. Four (count ‘em four!) movies. And tying it all together? Two little words: “Serious” and “Respectful” – the murmured invocation before a televised mass funeral; the muffled rallying cry of sand-buried talking heads; the double-barreled shotgun blast of the status quo.
That’s right y’all. It’s the school shooting cinema article you didn’t even know you needed. Over the next (checks notes) 6,500 words (!), I’ll be discussing the four most visible, non-documentary films to have tackled this issue since that fateful 4/20 back in 1999 – Elephant, Zero Day, Polytechnique, and Run Hide Fight – as well as the attendant controversy that sprung up around each. It will be a true survey of the field, straight from the horse’s mouth. And what’s more, as your self-appointed horse, I will also be deftly interweaving a very personal story with my thoughts on these four capital-I Important films. It will get heated at times. It will feel unwieldy at others. But it will also be impressive. It will be heartfelt. It will move you. You shall be moved. And the first thing I want to say about any of it – the first thing I say whenever I tell this story – is that we were lucky.
We were so fucking lucky.
The older I get, the less I remember about the actual day. Mostly just flashes. Moments.
I know it was the end of the school year. Exam time. Everyone was tired. Stressed. Antsy. Trying to keep it together. Make it to the finish line.
I know it was early. Before first period. The buses were still dropping kids off. The common area was packed like it always was that time of the morning. Friends checking in. Checking makeup. Comparing outfits. Comparing notes. Studying. Talking. Shouting. Laughing.
I know it was exactly one month to the day after Columbine, and that on some level, every high school in America was probably a little on edge. But at the same time, what had happened there still felt like an aberration. A singular nightmare, too awful to ever be repeated. No one thought it would happen again. Not to them. Not really.
I know I was in Mrs. Ingle’s class for FCY (Fellowship of Christian Youth). I know we were singing a praise song when a huge crush of students – a mob really – sprinted past our open door in a panic. "Probably just a senior prank," someone said (and in fairness, a grocery bag’s-worth of bait crickets had incited a similar hallway stampede just a few days earlier). As far as I remember, we never even heard a shot, but Mrs. Ingle shut the door anyway, just to be safe.
The announcement came moments later: "Stay in your classrooms. Lock the doors."
This is a big job I’m taking on, comparing four films in one essay, and I thought a lot about how I wanted to approach them. Should it be the order in which they were released? The order in which I saw them? Maybe according to the degree of outrage they incited? Or by the eras in which they were set? I considered every possibility, but in the end, none of those straight-line organizing principles proved particularly conducive to what I’m trying to do here. So we’re starting with Denis Villeneuve’s 2009 docudrama Polytechnique, largely because it’s ridiculous and it pissed me off the most.
Whoa. Sorry. Comin’ in a little hot there. Like I said before. Volatile issue. Close to my heart. Please, allow me to walk that back a bit.
I did not care for Polytechnique.
I don’t know what old Denny-V (as I will disrespectfully refer to him for the remainder of this piece) thought he was doing here with this beyond hubristic restaging of Montreal’s 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, but he did it wrong. All of it. Nearly every decision. His frame-perfect black-and-white cinematography – a conscious choice to “avoid the presence of blood on the screen” – leaves the film feeling figuratively, if not literally, bloodless (rest assured, there are many laborious tracking shots along aesthetically pleasing trails of dark-grey splatter). His devotion of fully one-third of the narrative (which is, lest we forget, about a targeted slaughter of young women) to the misogynist shooter, and then another third to a roguishly handsome young man who fails to stop the attack and subsequently commits suicide out of guilt, reads as little more than paternalistic, self-pitying allyship (and makes the remaining third of the story devoted to female characters feel an awful lot like feminist credentialing 101). Finally, the way he uses all these stories (which are gleaned from interviews and nominally true, for what it’s worth) to graft Fruitvale Station-esque moments of idealized serendipity and cosmic misfortune onto an otherwise senseless real-life crime border on full-blown tragedy porn. Polytechnique is so “respectful” as to feel sterilized, so “serious” as to feel cruel; and so far up its own ass as to feel completely out of touch with the events it’s attempting to eulogize. As beautiful as it is to look at, it’s little more than “thoughts and prayers”: the movie; a moment of silence spent mugging for a Canadian Oscar.
Of which it won nine.
They’re called Genies.
Which is a stupid name.
I don’t have a lot more to say about this film right now, in large part because it has almost nothing to say itself beyond “this happened” and “look how pretty we made it!” It is both an infuriatingly self-aggrandizing, and utterly pedestrian work of commodity “art.” Boy hates women. Boy buys gun. Boy kills women. Boy kills self. One woman survives to achieve her dreams AND has a baby. #Feminism. Roll credits (credits which, by the way, begin with an In Memoriam-style rollcall of the 15 real-life victims’ names – a gesture which I’m sure someone thought was a good idea, but which I seriously doubt made any remaining survivors feel better about much of anything). I will readily concede that this is perhaps an overly critical take, but even knowing that the specific threads that make up the plot of Polytechnique are well-researched and basically historically accurate, they still feel like the wrong stories to be telling. Old Denny-V is a notoriously frosty director under the best of circumstances, a fact that actually serves him just fine when he’s making movies about drug cartels and robot bounty hunters, but he was uniquely ill-equipped to handle this material, and then richly rewarded for doing it anyway. Blame Canada.
Hmm.
Perhaps this is fitting, from a meta-perspective.
Maybe it ties in nicely with some points I’ll make later about American leaders and our country’s endless, Hegelian hissy fit over how to discuss this problem in an appropriate and constructive manner. How, short of abortion, it’s probably the most bitterly divisive and emotionally charged issue of our times, and how that keeps us swinging full-tilt between reactionary extremes, and wholly unable to meet in the middle and solve it; our inaction perfectly preserved on the wrong side of history like some maudlin, monochrome, full-page yearbook spread about bravery, and loss, and how we’ll never forget.
Maybe…
Anyway, back to my thing.
Mrs. Ingle was a beloved institution at Heritage High School – unfailingly, and at times almost offputtingly kind. The rare teacher that placed absolutely every student’s needs ahead of her own, regardless of whether she taught them, or even knew them. She sponsored multiple extracurriculars, and as such her room came equipped with a spacious supply closet which she quickly herded us all inside. I don’t know how long we were in there. 20 minutes? An hour? Longer? It was strangely calm, considering – Mrs. Ingle had that effect on kids – and with the recent massacre in Colorado surely at the forefront of everyone’s mind, we all implicitly understood that we needed to stay quiet. No one talked for a long time, and when we did eventually start whispering, it was to pray together.
Eventually, the announcements came on again. “Everyone to the back exits. Quickly. Single file. Meet on the football field. Your parents will take you home.”
The crowd outside was a tightly packed churn of fear of relief. We had the whole field, and yet it felt like we’d all made the collective subconscious decision to squeeze in-between the 35-yard-lines. Wanting to stay close. Unwilling to let each other go. Looking for everyone we might’ve lost. Hugging everyone we found. Hoping against hope as we checked off our names.
“Is Christina ok?”
“Have you seen Wesley?”
“What about Erin?”
“Where’s Zach?”
And then, once all were accounted for, and it became apparent that, against all odds, our school was somehow still whole, the larger questions came.
“Who got hurt?”
“How bad is it?”
“Who was shooting?”
“Why would he do that?!”
“What happened to him?”
“What do we do now?”
The story that shook out on the news that night was one of a sophomore boy whose name I’d never heard before (I was a freshman) and won’t share here (though it’s easy enough to find if you’re interested). Depending on who you talked to, he’d been bullied, or recently dumped, or both, and so he brought a handgun and a rifle to school, walked into that crowded morning common area, and opened fire (a skilled member of the school’s Rifle Team, it would later be asserted that he intentionally aimed low to the ground so as not to kill anyone – a “cry for help” mass shooting, if you will). In the end, he wounded six classmates and was preparing to take his own life when Assistant Principal Greg Fowler bravely, insanely, stepped out of the front office and talked him down.
We were extraordinarily lucky.
The students in Kyle Rankin’s controversial new film Run Hide Fight are not so lucky. They, like so many schools (and offices, and churches, and concerts, and nightclubs) suffer heavy casualties at the hands of their mass shooters, an indiscriminate quartet of archetypical outcasts, conscripted by megalomaniacal ringleader Tristan (a scene-stealing, scenery-devouring Eli Brown) into an entirely-too-believable-in-2021 plan whereby they’ll livestream their attack into eternal fame and glory. Almost cartoonish in their villainy, these troubled teens load a van with tactical gear and ram it right through the cafeteria wall like the damn A-Team, use homemade bombs to blow up large portions of their school (as well as a number of teachers and police), and murder their peers with coldblooded glee. And they might have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for that meddling Zoe (what should have been, and hopefully still will be, a star-making turn for Isabel May), their hunting-enthusiast classmate with the heart of gold. Crawling through air ducts like she’s John McClain, and rigging traps like she’s Kevin McCallister, Zoe takes the shooters down in increasingly creative fashion (with a timely assist from her Afghanistan veteran dad, a power-grizzled Thomas Jane), keeping the overall body count in the low double digits and, without question, saving a lot of lives. Oh, and the ghost of her dead mom (Radha Mitchell) shows up periodically to offer advice and help her out of jams too. Can’t forget that.
Now, if this all sounds a little disrespectful and unserious, well, it is and it isn’t.
Run Hide Fight traveled an extremely rocky road to its release earlier this year, first facing something of a pre-backlash all the way back in 2019 (before it was even done filming!) for its supposedly distasteful and/or exploitative depiction of school shooting violence. It then saw its original production company (the Dallas, Texas-based Cinestate) collapse amid a flurry of #MeToo scandals and left-wing outrage, before ultimately ending up in the hands of the odious Ben Shapiro for release via his Daily Wire website (sigh). And yet, for all its stylized set pieces and action hero tropes, it’s still lightyears ahead of critical darling fare like Polytechnique as regards the “seriousness” and “respect” with which it treats its fraught subject matter.
Indeed, it’s a shame it took someone as divisive as Shapiro to finally get this project across the finish line, because despite copious, handwringing accusations of its being a thinly-veiled endorsement of that old rightwing chestnut “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy (or gal) with a gun,” the film manages the neat trick of remaining largely apolitical. I’m a pretty staunchly anti-gun liberal (I feel I’ve earned this position fair and square. If you or your loved ones have also been shot at, and you came away from that experience feeling differently, well, you’ll find no quarrel with me) (though no one needs an AK-47). But that said, I did not see Run Hide Fight as an especially pro-right, or even pro-gun movie, so much as just a wildly impassioned appeal to do something other than what we’ve been doing for the past 20+ years.
So, just to dispel some basic concerns: no, Zoe does not come to school packing heat, nor is it ever suggested that she should have. Or that her teachers should have. Or that restrictive gun laws were somehow to blame for the attack. Or for any failed attempts to thwart it. Whatever you’ve read, this is simply not the case. I am a lib. I have watched this film. I have not been owned. Horse’s mouth.
At most, we get a cursory argument for (maybe) arming school resource officers (not the worst idea in the world) and a lot of nods to the fact that none of our responses to these crises, as currently constructed, work for shit. Part of what makes these particular shooters so terrifying is that they know exactly how their school will react, how the police will respond, and how the media coverage will play, and Tristan manipulates it all in real-time like he’s conducting a semiautomatic symphony. His crew stays one step ahead of every outdated protocol because they’ve seen them all fail a hundred times before. Meanwhile, there are several great moments that overtly champion the kinds of basic fixes we now think of as “common-sense gun laws,” but still can’t seem to get so much as a floor hearing in Congress (including a marvelously cheeky scene in which Tristan directly addresses his live feed – and thus, also us, his implicit, fourth-wall viewers – to viciously mock the whole darn system, up to and including the well-known loopholes that allowed him to procure military-grade weapons in the first place).
All of which is to say that, if you walk into Run Hide Fight expecting some kind of Michael Bay-scale NRA promo, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Its greatest strength, and the one that sets it far, far apart from the other three films I’m discussing here, is its attitude. Its ballsiness. Its had-it-up-to-here, how-in-God’s-name-are-we-still-letting-this-shit-happen fury. If it’s courting controversy, it’s easy controversy. Dumb, clickbait, movie headline controversy. The kind that begins and ends with people who haven’t seen it and never will. But for those who go so far as to actually watch Run Hide Fight, what you’ll find is a devilishly smart, nuanced work that wants to talk about all the messy, ugly, difficult stuff that “seriousness” and “respect” demand we avoid; a film that is angry enough to scream louder than all the other endless screaming matches around this issue, if only to stun everyone into uncomfortable silence long enough to start a real conversation.
(Personal disclaimer: I know, I know. Ben Shapiro. Yuck. But in this one instance, just hold your nose and do it. Producers, as a general rule, aren’t artists. They’re just money men. And bad people throw money at good art all the time. Hell, I can see Harvey Weinstein’s name on my Pulp Fiction poster from where I’m sitting typing this. Movies take a village, and whatever your politics, this one deserves your support).
The Heritage High School shooting was front-page news in Georgia. I still have the Atlanta Journal Constitution from that day, and probably the next few after it. Exams were canceled (saving more than a few grades, and likely even expediting some graduations) and after a lone, final day to come clean out lockers and sign yearbooks, we muddled our way into a Summer full of righteous indignation and heated debate over how to fix this urgent new “school shooting problem.”
“We need metal detectors!” our parents decided, almost immediately. “And more security! And regular, random checks with drug-and-bomb-sniffing dogs!” the school board declared. “And everyone should have to wear clear plastic backpacks! And all the lockers should be clear plastic too!” Everyone was full of ideas. These are just the ones I remember. I’m sure there were more. No one was suggesting we arm teachers yet, and universal background checks were still just a twinkle in the Clinton administration’s eye, but everyone was in agreement: we could never let this happen again.
Summer came and went, however, and when I returned for my sophomore year, things were almost exactly the same. A friend of mine attempted to start a fledgling activist/support group – S.O.S. (Save Our Schools) – but two years before Facebook, and with nothing remotely comparable to the mass mobilization power of social media today – it barely got off the ground. As for all those big changes everyone was so adamant about over the Summer? Well, a discerning eye could spot a few places where they touched up the bullet holes in the cinderblocks, and the Patriot mascot painted on the wall of the gymnasium was, rather conspicuously, no longer bearing his musket. But that was about it. Our lockers and backpacks remained opaque. Our metals went undetected.
The six victims, now infamous, were celebrated at an early Fall pep rally (the girl who was injured the worst would eventually be crowned Homecoming Queen), and no less than three different motivational speakers were invited to come talk us through our scarring ordeal (the most memorable of these was a man named Dean whose visit was presaged by a schoolwide blanketing of cryptic posters which read simply “Dean is Coming!” and with which, needless to say, much vandalistic fun was had by all). Likewise, when our marching band was invited to come tour the locker rooms and play on the field at The Georgia Dome (Go Falcons) in the context of some vaguely charitable PR move, a quick-witted trumpeter hit the deck and yelled “flashbacks!” at the sound of a t-shirt cannon firing free swag in our direction.
It was really funny.
We all laughed.
We couldn’t help it.
The adults around us had all grown so serious and were working so hard to make us be serious, but without actually, you know, doing anything particularly serious about the thing we were all supposed to be so serious about, that it became impossible to take any of it seriously anymore. No one ever quite figured out what to say. Or what to do. Or what it meant. So we all just carried on. By exam time, the halls were full of pranks again, as well as dark, winky jokes about how nice another shooting would be right about now. Just in time for that Algebra II final.
We were just kids. Incredibly stupid, incredibly lucky kids.
As for concerns that a film like Run Hide Fight could be seen as glorifying its villains, or even inspire copycats (and I will admit, the shooters’ scheme is remarkably well thought out and executed) they don’t really hold much water for me (no more so than the average crusade against shoot ‘em up video games or satanic rock music anyway). If a person wants to do something like this, no movie is going to be the catalyst, and Run Hide Fight, in particular, is hardly an endorsement of even the best laid evil plans. The shooters are wholly unsympathetic monsters, all of whom meet their comeuppance in satisfyingly grisly fashion. For all its provocative hypotheticals and satirical moxie, it’s still just an action movie at heart.
And besides, for a true how-to guide, you’d need to look no further than Ben Coccio’s 2003 indie Zero Day, a film which has staked its claim as both the best and by far the least heralded of this foursome (probably because it is very, very upsetting).
Presented almost entirely as the first-person video diaries of its two shooters, Andre and Calvin (clearly modeled after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold), Zero Day plays like a lo-fi, living document of the musings, stratagems, and day-to-day lives of a pair of plain-sight monsters during the months leading up to their meticulously-planned bloodbath (we eventually learn of a safe deposit box where they’re stashing the tapes for posterity, so as to leave no doubt as to their mental states and motives – or lack thereof). The footage is grainy and intentionally unprofessional. The actors (Andre Keuck and Cal Robertson, both superb) are complete unknowns and largely improvising. And from these ingenious artistic choices there emerges a kind of visceral disconnect between how well you, the viewer, start to feel like you know these boys, and how profoundly everyone else around them does not (and perhaps in turn even, how little anyone really knows anyone, least of all aloof, camera-wielding teenagers). These two seem a little odd, sure. A little cynical and lost. But in a timeless, harmless kind of way. They feel like kids you knew. Maybe even kids you know. And because of that, their story feels extremely, unnervingly real.
Perhaps most real of all is the way in which Coccio’s screenplay makes his viewers strangely complicit, offering no quarter from its killers’ malevolent worldview. Scenes of the boys celebrating birthdays with their families and cautiously flirting with girls are interspliced with scenes of them practicing assembling assault rifles and plotting how to best effect maximum casualties – a whiplash dichotomy that breeds a kind of pervasive hopelessness; because we know what’s coming, because we can’t stop it, and because we see how easy it all was for them to hide. Likewise, when the boys, at last, leave their camera behind – sitting on the dash of their car, pointed toward the school – and we’re treated to a still shot of them storming the entrance armed to the teeth, there flickers a brief moment of hope that we might be spared the actual spree; that maybe this ominous final shot is closure enough. But no. For the final five minutes, Coccio switches over to even grainer, greyscale security camera footage and we see the entire, stomach-churning ordeal unfold in real-time. (Trigger warnings seem rather beside the point for this particular article, but if ever one was appropriate, it’s here. ZeroDay pulls no punches. It’s a very tough watch. You have been warned).
For those still curious, the only place I could find this movie was on YouTube (where it’s available in its entirety for free, save a bomb-making scene, likely excised for legal reasons). It is not at all hard to understand why it did well at festivals and promptly fell off the grid. It’s about as far from the weepy virtue signaling of Polytechnique as, say, Full Metal Jacket is from Saving Private Ryan, and it makes the cathartic heroism of Run Hide Fight look like a silly, Tarantino-esque revenge fantasy. Even as a fan and advocate, I can see the arguments against it better than any other film on this list. As for where it clocks in on the old “serious and respectful” scale though? I’d say the boys answer that pretty well themselves via the diary entry they record the night before their attack, wherein they methodically tick off each all-too-predictable explanation people might latch onto for what they’ve done and why they’ve done it, only to dismiss them with a glaring, Kubrickian grin.
Bullied? Nah. Not these guys.
Depressed? Sure, but who isn’t.
Lousy parents? Not in the slightest. Love you Mom and Dad!
Violent video games? They’re fun, but come on, get real.
Marilyn Manson? Ahnt! Try again.
They go so far as to burn all their personal media, just to further ensure that the world will have no one else to blame; nowhere to look for meaning or comfort. They are committed teenage nihilists, committing an almost Shakespearean act of idiot-teenager nihilist logic, and when Andre stares dead-eyed into the lens and asserts “there are no reasons,” I absolutely believe him. This movie is relentlessly confrontational. It asks the toughest questions – questions that have far less to do with guns, or laws, or politics than they do with the nature of 21st-century adolescence and the world we’re leaving to future generations – and then openly admits that it has no reassuring answers. It aims its camera at truths that the rest of these films don’t touch, or really even consider, and refuses to let you look away.
What could be more serious and respectful than that?
Three years after my impossibly lucky incident, I graduated high school and headed on to the University of Georgia. There I soon got involved with University Union and the student center movie theater – back then, a cherished bastion of foreign language, arthouse, and independent cinema – and I still remember vividly the night I walked over from my dorm to catch Gus Van Sant’s 2003 Palme d’Or-winning Elephant. I knew what it was – a very serious, very sober attempt to dramatize, grapple with, and maybe even better understand the Columbine massacre – and I felt like I could handle it. But by the time the credits rolled I was on the verge of an emotional breakdown. The film’s visceral depiction of what happened that day – what could very easily have happened again to me and my friends a month later – had brought fears and anxieties to the surface that I didn’t even know I was repressing. Feelings for which I didn’t even have a name. I ran all the way back to my dorm, where I sobbed and dry heaved for several minutes. I’m not quite sure, but I may have even called my mom. It was horrible at the moment – distressing and confusing, enraging and deeply saddening – and yet, in the long run, it still stands as one of the most powerful viewing experiences of my life.
When I watched it again last week for this article, there were parts (plural) where I quite literally laughed out loud.
Elephant is not a bad film. I want to say that right off the bat because I’m going to be pretty hard on it here. I think at the time (just four years after Columbine, but, not to give it too much credit, also only a few months before Zero Day) it was trying to do something virtually impossible, and in a lot of ways succeeded. The zig-zaggy matrix of interconnected students we meet over the course of the first hour or so (all of whom, by virtue of the film’s principle conceit, ultimately end up dead) is a wonder to behold – a realistic and poignant slice of high school life that, with just a few tweaks, could very well stand on its own merits alongside films like Dazed and Confused or The Myth of the American Sleepover. It’s that good. And yet…
Van Sant’s shooters are patently absurd, written to the cheap seats and, through no fault of their own, dutifully played that way by Alex Frost and Eric Deulen, our second set of Harris/Klebold avatars (watching both of these 2003 films so close together, it was almost mortifying to see Elephant, the far more celebrated of the two, get so wrong what Zero Day got so right). To wit, every rationalization theory that the Zero Day’s killers rejected out of hand, Elephant giddily piles on, until its sociopathic duo are so overburdened with tangible motives that they become less like believable characters and more like ciphers for America’s extant grief. Or, to put it more bluntly, if you’ve ever wanted a reason for why Columbine happened, Elephant will happily give it to you. Eric and Alex are bullied. They do enjoy shoot ‘em up video games. They are growing up in bizarrely restrictive and/or neglectful households (a recurring motif of Alex practicing Beethoven on the piano like some mad Phantom of the drama club is so self-serious as to nearly slipping over into high camp). They do share interests in Nazism and possibly even Satanism (a prominent devil’s head dangles from their rearview as they roll up on the school). They might also be closeted homosexuals (at the very least, they are intimate together the morning of the attack). It’s all there. Every hypothesis you ever heard about Harris and Klebold in the days after Columbine, aggregated into two-game, but overtaxed young actors trying to be all demons to all people.
And of course, none of this makes the final 20 minutes of the film any easier to watch – it is still a harrowing sequence that serves to more-or-less faithfully recreate the horror of Columbine from the inside, and the deft, verite-style character studies that occupy that first hour effectively multiply that horror tenfold as they are brutally snuffed out one by one. Elephant, for all its problems, is by no means for the faint of heart. It does, however, leave something of a questionable aftertaste when the smoke clears. This film won the Palme for Christ’s sake. Back then, it felt monumental. Bold and necessary. And probably it was. But today, it reads something closer to desperate, both for its cast and crew and for the critics who lionized it all the way to Cannes gold. Everyone wanted answers, and Elephant tried to oblige, as best it could. How could it know that nothing would have changed by now?
So, where does all this leave us?
For my part, I’m mostly fine. Thanks for asking. Obviously, these films hit very close to home for me, but I would never claim to be suffering from any form of PTSD, much less anything remotely comparable to the lasting trauma inflicted upon survivors of high-casualty attacks. I’m a sensitive guy, and my incident absolutely affected me in ways that, at the very least, still occasionally compel me to write 6,500+ word articles about it from time to time. But that’s about the extent of it. Furthermore, I sincerely doubt I’m the only person who had a minor panic attack the first time they saw Elephant (I’m loathed to use the word “triggered” because I’m 37 now, and I don’t feel like it’s the world’s responsibility to protect me from my own bad memories, but I guess that’s what you’d call it).
As for the other three films previously discussed here, only Run Hide Fight elicited a similar response to what I felt during that difficult student theatre screening back in 2003. Zero Day is disturbing, but its full-time focus on its killers, at the expense of getting to know any of its victims, leaves it lacking that interpersonal punch. Likewise, Polytechnique is trying so hard for that deeper connection that it just winds up a cloying appeal to National survivor’s guilt. But in Run Hide Fight, despite its being a very different animal from Elephant, I found some of those same buried feelings welling up again. I’m not ashamed to admit, a few scenes led me into full-on crying jags: kids protecting each other; administrators putting themselves in harm’s way; teachers leading students to safety. The things I remembered from my own experience. The things that rang true.
So I have to wonder then, why has this latest entry in a hot-button genre that’s likely only getting warmed up, been met with so much resistance. While none of these films escaped some level of PC scrutiny, two of them also received some of the highest honors in the land. So what gives? Is it the perceived commercialism? I could buy that argument. But then, I don’t remember anyone shutting down the Fox or FX networks when half-baked school shooting subplots popped up in Glee or American Horror Story or Sons of Anarchy. Is it the lowbrow genre conventions? That may be a little closer to the truth, but I don’t recall anyone crying foul when Lynne Ramsey’s blood-curdling We Need to Talk About Kevin (arguably a better film than any of the four covered here) examined this same topic through the lens of the “bad seed” horror movie. So what then? Is it really just the fact that Zoe fights back? That someone made a school shooting movie that’s about more than just how sad and hopeless it is to see young people die? That thinking about this issue from the point of view of present-day students makes us uncomfortable, and that thanks to our 24/7 outrage cycle we genuinely can’t get past our hissy fit gun politics long enough to understand that modern high schoolers just might appreciate a solid, satisfying popcorn flick that shows them kicking ass and taking names against an existential threat we’ve callously ignored for two decades, and which, like it or not, they now face head-on virtually every day of their lives? Is that it? I think that might be it. I’m the horse. This is my mouth. Saying that’s it.
In this way, Run Hide Fight feels like a changing of the guard. It’s been twelve years since Polytechnique was released (and eighteen since Elephant and Zero Day). Twelve years in which there have been more, and worse mass shootings than I can even begin to recap here. A new take wasn’t just overdue. It was imperative. If it hadn’t been Cinestate or Shapiro, it would’ve been someone else. A few years down the road, with a smoother rollout and better marketing, someone like Florence Pugh might be starring with, yes, Quentin Tarantino behind the camera. It’d probably even get some Oscar buzz. Because try as we might to think and pray these stories away, they aren’t going anywhere, and pretty soon the adults who’ve been treating them so seriously and respectfully are going to give way to a generation of kids who lived through them and are raring to tell them themselves. Fiercely. Outrageously. Sans somber Beethoven sonatas. And definitely not in black and white (see, I told you we’d tie Old Denny-V back into this).
From the darkly prescient proclamations of Andre and Calvin to the vigilante victories eked out by Zoe and her peers, these movies are just the opening salvo (I haven’t quite worked up the masochistic nerve to check out Paul Greengrass’s 22 July just yet, but it’s almost certainly in the mix as well). A lot more young people have died this way since Columbine, and a lot die in Zero Day and Run Hide Fight too, but to look at those two statements and decide that it’s somehow the movies (or video games, or musicians) that are the problem is facile bordering on delusional. No one should be angry that movies like these are getting made. If anything, we should be angry that school shootings have been allowed to flourish into such ubiquity that people now feel compelled to make fucking movies about them.
All of which is to say, when people decry these kinds of artistic statements as being “unserious” and “disrespectful,” what they really mean is something closer to our nation’s current conservative comeback du jour: “fuck your feelings.”
I get it. I really do. We’re sick to death of mass shootings. We don’t want to think about them any more than we already have to, which is damn near every day. It’s strange how much my own fatality-free incident has come to feel like a microcosm of the crisis, if only because it drives home how much we now know the news cycles by heart. Whether the body count is 0 (like Heritage) or 13 (like Columbine) or 17 (like Parkland) or 26 (like Sandy Hook) or 49 (like Pulse) or 58 (like Las Vegas), nothing ever changes. Whether it’s a half-dozen scared teenagers asking us to S.O.S., or 1.2 million marchings through D.C. for their lives, nothing ever changes. Whether it’s 81% support for banning bump stocks, or 90% support for Universal Background Checks, nothing ever changes (notably, in the wake of the recent twin tragedies in Atlanta and Boulder, even leftwing comedic firebrands John Oliver and Samantha Bee both opened their weekly shows with despairing, white flag statements of exhaustion, claiming they were simply out of ideas as to what else they could possibly say or do to move the needle). Our Congressmen and -women might bang their fists and yell about assault weapons and high capacity magazines, and our school boards might bang their fists and yell about metal detectors and clear plastic backpacks, but try as we might, we remain unwilling or unable to change the conversation around the way we deal with guns. There holds fast this paralytic certainty that all solutions are unrealistic. That even trying them would cause more trouble than it’s worth. That this problem is fundamentally unfixable. And so these things that used to be the thing we could never let happen again, are now just something that happens.
We got used to it.
We got tired.
We filled in the bullet holes.
We painted over the patriot’s musket.
We don’t want to talk about it anymore.
Leave us alone.
Be serious.
Be respectful.
I think, by now, my point is fairly clear. These films may not be everyone’s cup of tea – certainly no more so than Full Metal Jacket or Natural Born Killers or American History X or Redacted were everyone’s cup of tea. They are all deeply disturbing works of art (even Polytechnique) that draw on deeply disturbing realities – but just like other controversial films before them, they are most definitely not doing anything. Making art is a form of protest, and protest is a foundational American right. It’s the right that protected the Westboro Baptist Church when they picketed the funerals of Sandy Hook victims, and Alex Jones when he called that same tragedy a false flag plot to take away Americans’ guns – so if you want to get mad about school shootings and free speech, maybe start there. The sad fact is, if our government won’t provide us with heroes on this issue, then we’re bound to start creating our own, and if marching on the nation’s capital won’t make us heard, then maybe playing on 1,000 movie screens will. As long as our elected leaders continue to balk on this issue, then the responsibility must fall to the activists and the artists and the survivors to keep reminding them of just how badly they’ve failed us.
What’s disrespectful is forgetting.
What’s unserious is giving up.
What’s unforgivable is doing nothing.
On a final note, I just want to be absolutely clear: if you are a survivor of a mass shooting – of any shooting – be it one as unfathomably lucky as mine, or as horrific as the ones depicted in these films, and you find such things triggering or unserious or disrespectful, then, by all means, protest with your wallet and don’t go. No one’s forcing you, and I’m not trying to convince you. I know what it feels like to stand quietly in a supply closet and wonder if you’re going to die, but I have no idea what it feels like to walk out of that closet and find people I love dead on the ground. I know how lucky I am, and what was cathartic for me may well be unbearable for you. We all recover from violence in our own ways, and in our own time. But just because it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean it can’t be of help to someone else. There is room in this conversation – desperate need in this conversation – for all kinds of survivors, and all kinds of voices. Violent art is not the problem. Violent art just comprises one of our countless, inevitable attempts to heal.
Dave Fitzgerald