Harkness
t seemed like a major turning point in the culture,” says Brady Corbet. The actorturned-filmmaker is referring to his decision to begin his second feature, Vox Lux, with a Columbine-style high school massacre.
The film itself is something of a state-of-the-nation-style meditation on the anxieties of the 21st century digital age – a wild, pop music-infused odyssey starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law. But in setting the prologue in 1999, the film invokes the massacre of 12 students and one teacher by two Columbine high school seniors on 20 April of that year as the moment things all changed. “It was the new face of terror,” says Corbet.
When I speak to Corbet, it’s just two days before the 20th anniversary of Columbine. It’s also the day that an 18-year-old Florida woman, said to have been obsessed with the massacre, is found dead in the mountains west of Denver from a selfinflicted gunshot wound. A few days earlier she had forced the closure of local schools – Columbine among them – after authorities became concerned that she might be on some kind of armed pilgrimage to the school. Clearly, then, the shooting still exerts a terrible hold on the collective psyche of the country.
Corbet, who grew up in Colorado a couple of hours’ drive from Columbine, thinks it’s a significant event for anyone around his age. “I was in elementary school when it happened,” says the 30-year-old. “I think anyone who was in elementary, middle school or high school was really rocked by that event because it did become more commonplace. It really left a major mark on my childhood.
“Now I have a daughter of my own and she participates in school shooting drills the way that I used to have fire drills when I was a kid. It’s something that has become very much a part of American life.”
Indeed, one only need check out Bo Burnham’s new film Eighth Grade to see the extent to which such drills have been normalised. In one of the funniest and most disturbing scenes in his coming-of-age comedy drama, his 13-year-old protagonists are pretty blasé about such drills, too distracted by what’s on their phones or what’s happening with their hormones to pay much attention to the military tactician with a replica gun giving them survival tips.
“It’s just part of their everyday life,” says Burnham, 28. “We just tried to put the white noise of their lives in the background of whatever they’re struggling with. It’s typical kid stuff and what’s happening in the background is a very hyper-violent, hyper-sexualised culture.”
Though Burnham doesn’t think this is all that different from how kids would have reacted during the duckand-cover nuclear bomb drills that school kids in the 1950s endured, he does concede the whole process is scary and horrifying.
The line between fame and infamy has really, really blurred
“Columbine happened when I was nine and the spectre of a really violent act happening was always a part of my school life.”
However, Corbet’s movie is more interested in looking at the bigger cultural picture.
In line with new reporting standards, it doesn’t dwell on the perpetrators the way other films about mass killings have (such as Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tim Sutton’s Dark Night or the found-footage films Zero Hour and The Dirties). Instead it focuses on survivors, following the character of Celeste – played as a teenager by Raffey Cassidy and as an adult by Natalie Portman – as she emerges from the trauma of the school shooting that opens the movie to become a stadium-filling pop star of Britney Spears/lady Gaga/taylor Swift proportions – a superstar who,