Education Week - August 29, 2018 - 16

School Shootings
Deeply Entwined
In Pop Culture
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 14

outcasts who plot to shoot up their school.
Although Shepard and his publisher list the
book in the general category of fiction, the work
has some of the hallmarks of young-adult fiction. That category has seen a mini-boom in
novels about school shooters.
Richard Russo, the author of the Pulitzer
Prize-winning 2001 novel Empire Falls, an epic
aimed at a grown-up audience that includes
a pivotal subplot involving a school shooting,
based the shooting in his book on a 1997 incident at Heath High School in Paducah, Ky. But
the 1999 Columbine incident unfolded just as he
was writing the novel.
Russo addressed the challenge of dealing with
such an incendiary topic in a July 29 essay in
The New York Times Book Review, writing that
society turns to novels "for a deeper understanding of life than we get from politicians and others with ideological axes to grind."
Novelists don't have all the answers, Russo wrote, but they have
"moral imagination which, over
time, can help heal wounds but
also has a nasty habit of opening
them, as my novel did and continues to do."

Video Games, Movies, and TV

And many TV dramas, both before and after
Columbine, have felt the need to devote an
episode (or two) to a school shooter storyline,
including "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Glee,"
and "One Tree Hill."
The latest TV show to address the topic
of school shootings is "13 Reasons Why," the
Netflix production known for its controversial
depiction of a high school student's suicide.
The show's second season-which debuted
on the same day in May as the Santa Fe High
School shooting-includes an integral subplot
involving the evolution of a boy tormented by
the campus jocks into a potential shooter,
with a plot twist conspicuously occurring in
the narrative on April 20, the date of the Columbine incident.
In a "Beyond the Reasons" discussion aired
after the second-season finale, Brian Yorkey,
the creator of the show, said that "in portraying guns in a piece of popular entertainment,
I think you do really have to do some soulsearching about whether what you're doing
is glamorizing guns and gun use, and if it's
contributing to the problem or trying to contribute to the solution."
But some critics argue that depicting school
shooters on shows popular with teenagers
may only propagate such incidents.
"When we publicize school shootings,
through media coverage or binge-worthy tele-

Active Shooter
-Acid Publishing Group

VIDEO GAMES
While the debate continues about whether violent videogames contribute to school violence,
there have been at least two videogames that actually depict school shootings.
"Super Columbine Massacre RPG!," released in 2006, is specifically based on information
known about the Columbine High killers, though the game's cartoonish graphics are a far cry
from the realism of more recent violent games.
Earlier this year, a game called "Active Shooter," which was designed to let users play
the role of the school or office shooter, was briefly made available in preview form on a popular
online store before being pulled.

When we publicize school shootings, through media
coverage or binge-worthy television, we normalize them ...
and the more we talk about them, the more they happen.

Not all works with themes
of mass school violence are as
high-minded as a Pulitizer-winJOSHUA A. KRISCH
ning novel like Russo's.
Science editor at Fatherly, a website
In May, the online retailer
Steam pulled a preview version
of a video game called "Active
Shooter," which allows players
to be either a school or office
shooter or a SWAT-team member. The game vision, we normalize them and we talk about
was reportedly developed by a 21-year-old them," Joshua A. Krisch, the science editor at
Russian who was surprised at the furor it Fatherly, a website aimed at dads, wrote on
created.
the site in May. "And the more we talk about
Also this spring, after the Parkland and them, the more they happen. School shootings
Santa Fe incidents, the Paramount Network are contagious."
cable channel dropped plans to air a TV-series
Citing "13 Reasons Why" among other
version of the movie "Heathers," a 1988 black shows, Krisch said TV producers were being
comedy about a clique of snobby high school irresponsible by "telling the same Columbine
girls that features killings of students, sui- story over and over again."
cides, and an attempt to blow up the school.
Tom Nunan, a former network-television
"This company can't be speaking out of both and studio executive who is now a lecturer
sides of its mouth, saying the youth move- at the University of California, Los Angeles,
ment is important for us and we've done all School of Theater, Film, and Television, said
these wonderful things to support that, and that school shooter storylines represent "a
at the same time, we're putting on a show fraught subject, for sure."
that we're not comfortable with," Keith Cox,
"I suspect that most studios and networks
the Paramount Network's president of devel- would probably propose to creative [profesopment and production, told The Hollywood sionals], 'Is this really worth it? Isn't it posReporter in June.
sible we will create some residual harm someHowever, Paramount Studios, the parent of where?' " he said.
the namesake cable channel and the producer
But Nunan, who has worked for the ABC,
of the show, still was seeking to sell the com- Fox, NBC, and UPN television entertainment
pleted series to another American TV outlet divisions, noted that pay-TV channels such as
and had sold it to multiple overseas outlets.
HBO and subscription services such as NetfThe more typical mass-media response to lix and Hulu are offering edgier fare.
school shooters has been a periodic wave of
"On these subscription shows, the content is
movies and TV episodes.
not as controlled," he said.
In 2003, director Gus Van Sant won plaudits for the haunting film "Elephant," a de- Stage Audiences Engaged
piction of a Columbine-like school shooting
from several students' points of view. Others
The theme has also resonated among playaround that time included "American Year- wrights and theater companies.
book" and "Bang Bang You're Dead," while
The 2005 play "columbinus" first appeared
more recent films include 2011's "We Need off-Broadway in 2006 and has been staged
to Talk About Kevin," adapted from the Lio- around the country since then, including at
nel Shriver novel of the same name, and this the acclaimed Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago
year's "And Then I Go," adapted from Shepa- this past spring. Written by Stephen Karam
rd's Project X.
and the late PJ Papparelli, "columbinus" is
16 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 29, 2018 | www.edweek.org

set in an American high school with teenage
archetypes (or stereotypes) such as the Jock,
the Prep, AP, Faith, Perfect-as well as the
Freak and the Loner, who take on the roles of
the Columbine killers in the second act.
That's when the play takes on a more documentary feel, with the audience listening to
an actual 911 call made by a teacher from the
Columbine High library as the shootings there
unfolded.
A new play with a school shooter theme debuted just days after the Parkland shooting in
February. "Ripe Frenzy," by Jennifer Barclay,
opened in Watertown, Mass., on Feb. 24 as part
of a three-city rollout by the National New
Play Network.
The work depicts a high school stage that is
preparing for a production of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," when students and adults become glued to their phones as word spreads of
another mass shooting at a high school.
Barclay, a theater instructor at the University of Maryland College Park, said via email
that she and a colleague, Jared Mezzocchi,
"wondered how social media and journalism
might both be perpetuating the problem of
mass shootings in our country, because of the
notoriety and obsession they create for the
shooter."
"Ripe Frenzy" uses "Our Town" as "a framework to examine what feels like is the new
American normal: the town wrestling with the
aftermath of a mass shooting," she said. "Theatre is unique in that it demands us to find
empathy if we're going to write a good play, to
perform a good play, and then to be an engaged
audience member."
While Columbine has been a key reference
point for many fictional works, only a few have
centered on the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook

Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in
which a disturbed man killed 20 children and
six adults.
One is the 2017 play "26 Pebbles" by Eric
Ulloa, which tells the Newtown story in a
documentary style similar to "The Laramie
Project," the play about the 1998 murder of gay
college student Matthew Shepard.
Another recent work to address Newtown is
the novel Only Child by Rhiannon Navin, published in February just days before the Parkland tragedy. It's not a young-adult novel, but
it recounts a Sandy Hook-like shooting from
the point of view of a 6-year-old who lost his
10-year-old brother.
But Jim Shepard, who recently helped turn
his novel Project X into the critically praised
film "And Then I Go," offered a surprising lesson coming from an accomplished novelist.
"If you want to have an impact" on the conversation about mass school violence, he said,
"literary fiction is not the way to do it. No one
is reading in great numbers."
And movies aren't being effective in that conversation, either, he said. Despite his participation, the film version of Project X ended up a
bit "sanitized" in his view and failed to depict
"the comedy of junior high."

The Role of Art
Poets have entered the conversation as well.
In December, Beacon Press published Bullets
Into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun
Violence. The collection includes works by more
than 50 poets, including Richard Blanco, who
read at President Barack Obama's 2012 inauguration, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita
Dove, with responses by a range of people such
as gun-control activists and parents of school
shooting victims.
It's a measure of how deeply embedded in the
national consciousness school shootings have
become that they are a touchstone for artists
across the spectrum aiming to grapple with serious issues.
"Art doesn't happen in isolation," said Adriana
E. Ramírez, a writer and critic at large for the
Los Angeles Times, who wrote about a March
reading by several of the poets who contributed
to Bullets Into Bells. "The guy who makes the
TV show" about a school shooter "probably read
the book of poems."

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Education Week - August 29, 2018

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