Growing up in the Netherlands, it’s not immediately obvious (even to myself) that the history of the United States is also partly mine, but through TV series and movies — as well as the news — it’s also a country I lived in and grew up in.
Yet unlike presidential elections or the September 11th attacks, I don’t remember Columbine happening, as I was just eight years old at that time. I’ve read about the shooting many times afterwards, as it left a permanent mark on American society. There are so many sides to the tragedy: the loss of life, the violence, its causes, and how two teenagers could do this — a debate that has never really ended.
Over the last few weeks, I revisited this event by reading Sue Klebold’s A Mother’s Reckoning, her account of raising the son who became one of the two shooters, and I rewatched Gus Van Sant’s Elephant.
Klebold’s book is by no means an objective account, but rather the journey of her making sense of what happened with and by her teenage son. The part I dislike is how the key parts can be summarized as “Dylan good, Eric bad”, but it’s hard to blame her for that. It’s a rare and personal account into such an event, and I kept returning to the opening chapter — the phone call that split her life into a before and an after.
Elephant does something different. It follows ordinary teenagers through an ordinary day of school. I imagine many people will find it an extremely boring movie, but that’s exactly the point. The film covers a slow and mundane day, so that it shows exactly the ordinary life that has been lost.
And it’s not just about the United States. Both the book and the film bring me back to a world before smartphones, and in part, my own teenage years. The school’s long hallways, the slow grind of homework I never wanted to do, school as the entire centre of the day. I was an introvert, more comfortable doing my own thing than loosening up at a party, raised to say thank you inside a set of Christian values I kept without quite keeping the faith. And the body that went with all of it: clothes that fit perfectly, staying lean no matter how much fast food you put into it, never too cold in shorts, never too warm in a sweater. A life still without worry, where the body simply works and you don’t yet notice it working.
They belong to a world before smartphones, and they return me to my own teenage years — long hallways, the slow grind of homework I never wanted to do, school as the entire centre of the day. I was an introvert too, more comfortable doing my own thing than loosening up at a party.
That too is the tragedy of events like Columbine. Across Sue’s pages, she describes her son’s look as extremely ordinary. Also the victims were just like us. And each day we get is one that was never offered to them.
