Becoming Your Fantasy in Virtual Munich Beer Hall

Of all the bizarre sidelights to the horrifying massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., Tuesday, the most bizarre may have been the story of the students trapped inside the school who called local TV stations on their cell phones and provided brief commentaries on the action. According to one report, they signed off only because they feared the intruders might be watching television themselves and thus discover the whereabouts of the cell-phone users. All of which suggests that even for the perpetrators and their victims, television was the great mediator.

By now, this is hardly surprising. Like so many real-life dramas in America, the Littleton tragedy became a media event even before the smoke had cleared and anyone knew what was really happening. Copters buzzed overhead, reporters swarmed the scene and commentators were soon delivering sententious analyses of what it all meant, giving us a sense of deja vu.

But tragedies like this are media events not only because the media immediately latch onto them. Often they are media events in two far more important senses: first, because the perpetrators usually seem to have modeled their behavior after certain figures in the popular culture; and, second, because the rampages seem ultimately to have been staged for the media on the assumption that if you kill it, they will come. Or, put another way, what we witnessed at Littleton was not just inchoate rage. It was a premeditated performance in which the two gunmen roamed the school dispatching victims, whooping with delight after each murder. Without pop culture, the slaughter would have been unimaginable.

Begin with the killers. In the inevitable post-mortems that follow these horrors, it was reported that the outcasts Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were part of a high-school clique whose members wore long black trench coats and which dubbed itself the Trench Coat Mafia, a cinematic image if ever there was one. They were also devotees of the computer games “Doom” and “Quake,” in which players prowl virtual hallways shooting virtual victims with virtual guns. They worshiped Adolf Hitler, loved Goth music and had a special fondness for Marilyn Manson, the mordant rock star whose satanic persona is designed to scandalize parents of his fans. In short, Harris and Klebold were creatures of pop culture.

Given how much these two seemed to have been shaped by movies, music and computer games, it is tempting to blame the media once again for providing guidance to young would-be sociopaths and to call for greater responsibility from those who command our pop culture. But there have always been alienated teenagers, and the media have always supplied models for them, often violent ones, and yet most of them managed to resist emulating the violence. In fact, many observers have argued that the media may have had the opposite effect: letting us displace our anger rather than vent it. Disaffected teenagers in the 1950s and ‘60s had James Dean, Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley to give their rebelliousness form and help channel it. Disaffected teenagers in the ‘90s have Leonardo DiCaprio, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Manson.

Still, there is a real difference between then and now, and the difference is not the kinds of figures teenagers idolize; it is the kind of consciousness one brings to idolizing them. In the past, one may have identified with pop icons and affected their look and attitude, but few of us were deluded enough to think we could actually become Brando or Presley. We appropriated from them; we didn’t see their reality converging with ours. They were “up there” on the screen. We were “down here” in real life. Never the twain shall meet.

What has been eroded is that distinction between the fantastic and the real. America is now so saturated with images that it seems we live within them, helpless to distinguish the genuine from the fabricated, the real from the confected. Life itself has become an entertainment medium, where the distance between “up there” and “down here” has closed considerably and where we feel empowered to be whatever we want, as Klebold and Harris so unspeakably demonstrated.

One reason teens of the past may have been better able to distinguish between having fantasies and actualizing them was that their own reality may have been more firmly rooted in a sense of place. It may be no coincidence that many of the recent school shootings occurred in relatively new communities like Littleton and Springfield, Ore., where malls and houses were sprouting rapidly, or in declining communities like West Paducah, Ky., where the verities were under siege. It may be too simple to say that rootless, malleable communities with little identity of their own, save the identity stamped on them by mass culture, give rise to rootless, malleable children with little identity of their own, save the identity borrowed from mass culture, but it may not be too far off, either.

As for malleability, patching together a role from bits of pop culture, Harris and Klebold became part James Dean, part “Doom”: alienated teens with an attitude. Having found their role, they then wrote a script for it. Decked out in their trench coats, they would enter the school and blast away as they seen countless heroes do in countless movies, always with a bon mot to the defeated. “What are you whining about?” one was supposed to have said to terrified students. “You’ll all be dead soon, anyway.”

What helped give these fantasies body is yet another new instrument of the entertainment age: the Internet. Movies provided a personal reverie for those disaffected teenagers of the past, a dream they harbored alone in the sanctuary of their rooms. The Internet, where Harris had a Web page, has taken those personal dreams of power and the lost souls who dream them and collectivized them, creating a virtual Munich Beer Hall where anger feeds anger, hate feeds hate. With the Internet to connect them, teenagers are no longer silent sufferers. They can martial their suffering in cyberspace to realize it in real space.

To what end? Harris and Klebold were nobodies in a high-school world where, as always, the attention went to the athletic and the attractive. Columbine High even had closed-circuit TV that, by one account, kept recycling the exploits of the school’s athletic teams and, in doing so, kept stoking the anger of the misfits outside the charmed circle. Gunning down athletes was clearly the misfits’ revenge against the system that ignored them. But it was more. This particular revenge fantasy was devised, incredibly, to win its protagonists media stardom, to wrest from national television what they couldn’t get from their own closed-circuit TV.

The sad fact is, their scheme worked. Everyone now knows the names Harris and Klebold. Journalists ransack their pasts to find motives, their pictures stare out at us from every newspaper and magazine and their words are immortalized. They are celebrities: the writers, directors and stars of a highly successful show that, for the time being, is the talk of the nation.

Unfortunately, in a country where celebrity so often trumps other values, they are likely to be mentors as well. Wherever there is an alienated teen whose sense of estrangement is reified by the Internet and energized by media models, there is a potential Littleton. Wherever there is a lonely teenager who desires the sanctification of the media to compensate for his own feelings of powerlessness, there is a potential Littleton.

When you live within a virtual reality, you have to expect some addled individuals won’t accept the difference between the movie or video screen and the screen of life. But don’t blame the media. Blame the general condition of modern American life that confuses realms so thoroughly that killing villains in “Doom” and killing children in a school cafeteria can seem pretty much the same, save for the fame the latter bestows.*