WASTELAND PART TWO
Teenage Wasteland?
Even though the two movies I discuss in this section came
out two decades apart, both have the same theme, the aftermath of a school
shooting. The 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School is regarded as the catalyst
for what has become a nationwide nightmare. The first modern school shooting occurred
at Grover Cleveland Elementary School on Monday, January 29, 1979, in San Diego,
California. On that morning sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer shot and killed two
adults and wounded one police officer and seven students under the age of
thirteen. While data reveal that school shootings date back to the 1800s, prior
to 1979 most killers were males who had personal grudges or gang members fighting
over territory. The 1979 shooting differed because it was committed by a girl who
targeted strangers, an act that she ambiguously explained with the
incomprehensible statement, “I don’t like Mondays.”
At the time, Bob Geldof of the Irish band The Boomtown Rats tried
to cash in on the tragedy by writing a song about it and some years later a Japanese
rock band named itself “I Don’t Like Mondays.” Since I consider both acts appalling,
I did not include links to either of them. I have, however, provided a link to an
Amazon documentary from 2006 that contains interviews with Brenda, her parents,
and several of the people involved in the incident, including some of the
victims. Nowadays, most of what is known about the tragedy can found in a book by
N. Leigh Hunt entitled I Don’t Like Mondays: The True Story Behind America’s
First Modern Day Shooting which was published in 2022. Although he offers an
in-depth retelling of the event, including details not previously revealed, Hunt
was not able to provide a definitive explanation of what caused Brenda to do
what she did.
Cleveland
Elementary School shooting (San Diego) - Wikipedia
List
of school shootings in the United States (before 2000) - Wikipedia
Watch
I Don't Like Mondays | Prime Video
Home Room 2002
This movie was produced, written, and directed by Paul F.
Ryan. In 1998 Ryan and fellow student Jason Ensler won the Viewers Choice Award
and the Best Student Film Award at the Temecula Valley Internation Film
festival for their short subject The List. The film, which has an
overall score of 80% on IMDB, is a fictional tale about residents of a senior
living facility that start their own rock and roll band. The only other
information I could find about Mr. Ryan is that Home Room is his only
full-length feature and that he lectures at the Lawrence and Kristina Dodge
College of Film and Media Arts of Chapman University in Orange, California. If
you want to do further research on him, be warned: there are two Paul F. Ryans associated
with the entertainment industry and most of the information is about a man who was
born in the 1940s and did a lot of work for television. Paul F. Ryan, who wrote
and produced Home Room, however, is younger and never worked on TV.
The plot of the film focuses on Deanna Cartwright (Erika
Christensen), the only surviving victim
of a school shooting, Alicia Browning (Busy Phillips), a loner who was acquainted
with the shooter (Benny?), and Detective Martin Van Zandt (Victor Garber) who
is tasked with figuring out how the tragedy unfolded and why. All three of these
actors have enjoyed successful careers, but when the movie was made, they were
just getting started. Aside from playing Caroline Wakefield in the full-feature
film Traffic, Erika primarily made guest appearances on various television
series. Busy had never appeared in a movie and was best known for being part of
the main cast of Freaks and Geeks where she acted alongside James Franco,
Seth Rogan, and Jason Segal. Lastly, after portraying Jesus Christ in the film
adaptation of Godspell, Victor Garber had primarily appeared in made-for-television
movies.
The story opens with the sound of sirens, gunshots, and helicopter
blades before zooming in on a member of the Swat team stepping over bullet
shells before collapsing to the floor. Meanwhile, an understandably shaken police
detective Van Zandt enters a classroom to peruse what is now a crime scene. Five
hours later they are back at the police station interviewing students where
officers reveal that along with murdering six of his classmates, the “boy” also
assassinated his parents and put two more kids in the hospital. Detective Van
Zandt and his assistant Detective McReady (Raphael Sbarge) decide to question
Alicia Browning because she officers saw her standing next to the shooter and some
of the students say they were friends.
Alicia looks like someone who would hang out with an
assassin. Her nose is pierced, she is wearing a safety pin in one ear, her hair
and makeup are black, and she refuses to talk unless somebody gives her a
cigarette. Thus far, Van Zandt has only been able to learn that the shooter was
a good student who didn’t start fights so to coerce Alicia into telling him
more, the detective reminds her that she has a record for shoplifting and he
can use it to prevent her graduating if she doesn’t talk. Rather than being
intimidated, however, Alicia only comments cryptically, “Bullies have to
graduate so they can become police officers” insinuating that Detective Van
Zandt is the type of person who tortures people to get what he wants.
Ignoring her insult, Van Zandt continues by asking if she
knew what the shooter was planning beforehand, to which she simply responds,
“No.” Although he doesn’t believe it, he lets her go for the present then
informs Detective McReady, who thinks Van Zandt is being too hard on the girl,
that she stole his lighter. What McReady does not realize is that his boss is being
pressured by their captain to solve the case quickly and needs to find out everything
about the shooting as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Alicia goes home where her
disabled father tries to find out how she is doing. She reassures him that she
is okay then goes into the bathroom to shower away the blood that covers her
body and saturates her hair.
Twelve days later, Alicia, now a platinum blonde, shows up
at the school. Unable to believe that she’ there, Principal Robbins (James
Pickens, Jr) tells her that the school is still closed. Not seeming to
understand, Alicia explains that she needs to go the library to study because
she is already a year behind and must graduate in the spring. He refuses to be
swayed, however, and she becomes upset, yelling, “What the f--- am I supposed
to do all day?” before stomping away. A few hours later two policemen show up
at her house. Explaining that the principal sent them, they take Alicia to a church
where students and victims’ families are gathered. As she walks in, her
classmates turn and start whispering to one another, watching her with sidelong
glances. When a victim’s mother and father run up to her begging for information
because the other kids will not talk to them, Alicia leaves. However, Principal
Robbins stops her and offers to drive her to the hospital so she can visit Deanna,
who the other kids have been avoiding. Realizing that his offer is a demand,
she relents.
When Alicia enters Deanna’s room, she sees a girl with one
side of her head shaved, surrounded by a plethora of flowers and stuffed
animals, who is inappropriately lighthearted and chatty. Disgusted with the
whole gambit, Alicia turns around and leaves only to encounter Principal
Robbins waiting for her outside. Noting that she only spent four minutes with
Deanna, he threatens to keep her from graduating if she does not go back inside
and pretend to visit. Meanwhile, back at the school the detectives peruse the school’s
yearbooks to learn more about their reluctant witness. What they discover is that
before her gap year, Alicia looked like all the other kids which makes them wonder
whether whatever changed her in the past might have led her to participate in a
shooting in the present.
Although she is glad to have company, Deanna is not easy to be
around because she brags constantly about her intelligence, excellent grades, and
academically superior friends. Ironically, even though she has fully recovered
physically, she cannot leave the hospital because she suffers from “repressed
memory anxiety.” Since they think their daughter is out of the woods, her
parents have virtually abandoned her, leaving Deanna to recover on her own by
watching television and taking medication. As the afternoon drifts toward
evening however, her symptoms start to reveal themselves and she becomes noticeably
agitated, finally confessing to Alicia that she is “dying inside.” Troubled by the
girl’s emotional fragility, Alicia, who is not as hard-hearted as she pretends
to be, returns the next day voluntarily.
The girls talk about various things before the topic turns
to boys and smoking. Alicia swears that “boys like girls who smoke because they
are easy” to which Deanna, who is not as naïve as she pretends, retorts that
Alicia is anything but easy. Then she asks, “How do you stay so detached from
this…you haven’t missed a beat” which Alicia ignores. As evening approaches Danna
begs her to stay just until Leno goes off the air, because even though she cannot
remember the shooting, she is unable to sleep because of it. Noting that the
girl has not received so much as a phone call all day, Alicia agrees and soon both
girls fall asleep. When a nightmare wakens Deanna, she decides to make Alicia
more comfortable by removing the gloves and notices angry red scars on her
wrists.
Despite their glaring differences, the girls begin to bond,
so when Deanna’s parents show up to urge her to spy for the police and find out
what Alicia knew of the shooter’s plans, she resists. She even defies Detective
Van Zandt’s manipulative request to at least help the other victims’ families.
Unwilling to do betray Alicia, however, Deanna decides to foil the plan by
telling Alica to leave and never come back. Offended, Alicia flees, but after thinking
about it, she realizes that something is not right. She sneaks back to the
hospital and finds Deanna outside, holding a syringe of potassium chloride and
trying to get up the nerve to inject the poison into her vein. When Alicia
confronts her, Deanna admits that she cannot cope with memories of the shooting
and that the pain is killing her. To her dismay, rather than sympathizing,
Alicia retorts, “Good, it hurts because it is supposed to. What would it say
about you if it didn’t?” She offers to trade Deanna a special gift in exchange
for the syringe, and because she trusts Alicia, Deanna agrees. However, Alicia’s
surprise is a visit to the morgue to show Deanna what death really is. She points
out that being dead is not only freedom from pain, or anger, or violence, but is
a total absence of feeling anything. In other words, Deanna should appreciate
the fact that she is still alive.
A few weeks after Deanna is discharged from the hospital, Detective
Van Zandt arranges a meeting for the students in one of the classrooms. I am
stopping here because this scene explains critical things about Alicia and the
shooting itself. If you want to learn how the story ends, you really need to
watch the movie. It is not streaming on any of the usual services, but you can
find it online for free. I have included a link that worked for me and
hopefully is still good. If you like it enough to own it, you can also buy it
for a reasonable price.
The Fallout 2022
Twenty years later, in response to the countless school
shootings that had occurred in the United States since Home Room was
released, Canadian actress Megan Park wrote and directed The Fallout
which also recounts the aftermath of a school shooting. Born in 1986, Megan began
acting in small roles when she was six years old and by her early twenties had
played parts in several television shows. She also appeared in quite a few made-for
TV movies, and some lesser-known full length films. Then when she was twenty-six
Megan began to direct music videos and write and direct her own short films. Her
first full length feature The Fallout was nominated as one of the best
streaming movies of 2021 and earned her an award for best director. Further,
the film’s star Jenna Ortega (who you might recognize as Wednesday Addams in
the Netflix series Wednesday) was nominated for her acting. Although it
contains gun violence, rough language, and substance abuse The Fallout
earned a respectable 70% on IMDB.com.
The movie opens on the Cavell house, a comfortable home in a nice working-class neighborhood where sixteen-year-old Vada (Jenna Ortega) and her younger sister Amelia (Lumi Pollack) live with their parents, Carlos and Patricia (John Ortiz and Julie Bowen). Like most days, Vada rides to school with her best friend Nick (Will Ropp) where they enjoy talking about school, music, and other innocuous stuff. However, Vada is more than just silly and sarcastic. Despite her critical commentaries about teachers and casual wardrobe of baggy shorts, oversized t-shirts, and retro Nike sneakers, Vada is an insightful student who takes her education seriously. Family is also important to her, and when she gets a 911 text from her sister, she requests permission to go to the bathroom so she can find out what is going on. Fortunately, Amelia’s emergency is just finding out what to do about her first period.
After giving Amelia some sisterly advice, Vada ends the call and goes into the
bathroom where stylish Mia Reed (Maddie Zielgler), who is famous at the school for
her dance videos, is standing in front of the mirror applying makeup. Suddenly,
the girls hear shots, and thinking quickly, Vada pulls Mia into one of the
stalls. They climb onto the toilet seat so their feet cannot be seen, and struggle
to stay quiet. Someone enters the room, runs into the stall next to them, then terrifies
them by crawling under the dividing wall. Fortunately, it is only Quinton
Hasland (Niles Fitch). Ordinarily a chill person, he is uncharacteristically shaking
and covered in blood. When the girls ask him if he is hurt, he says the blood
is his brother’s. Soon they hear police sirens screaming outside and officers storming
up the hall commanding someone to drop a weapon. The shooting resumes for a few
seconds, then all is quiet and the emergency is over.
Back at home, Vada evades answering her family’s questions
about the tragedy by hiding in her bedroom and texting Mia. Mia explains that
her dads, who are artists, are in Japan on business and she is alone. Learning this,
Vada leaves her phone on in case Mia needs to reach out. As the days pass, the
shooting has unexpected impacts on everyone in Vada’s life. Nick decides to start
a movement to stop school violence, Quinton, whose brother died, keeps himself
available for his devastated parents, and Vada’s mother hovers constantly, unconvinced
that her daughter is okay. Vada says she is fine, unwilling to reveal the bad
dreams that shake her awake every time she falls asleep.
The first time Vada goes to Mia’s house, Mia pretends she has
not been standing by the door waiting for Vada to arrive, and Vada acts silly
to pretend that she is comfortable. The girls’ awkwardness is understandable
because they are strangers who come from diverse backgrounds. Mia, an only
child with wealthy fathers, lives in a large house tastefully decorated with
expensive furnishings including original artwork. Since she spends most of her
time alone, Mia appears more mature and worldly than Vada, but she nevertheless
has been affected by the shooting. Rather than being plagued by nightmares like
Vada, however, Mia cannot sleep at all. She finally asks Vada to stay until she
falls asleep, and even though it means risking her mother’s ire by being out so
late, Vada agrees. In return, when she notices that Vada is uncomfortable going
to Quinton’s brother’s funeral, Mia offers to go with her. Eventually, Vada will
go to every victim’s memorial and carefully tuck each of the memorials’
programs into a special box.
For the first couple of weeks after the shooting, Vada’s mom
agrees to let her stay home if she goes to see the school therapist Anna
(Shailene Woodley). Vada goes but does not benefit from it because she is not
honest. She says she sleeps fourteen hours a night rather than revealing that
she is plagues by nightmares, and even though she still hasn’t returned to
class she insists that she is fine because she’s “really good at managing (her)
emotions… (and is) very chill, a very low-key person.” At no time does she admit that she takes so
many baths so she can cry in secret. Doubtful, Anna attempts to uncover the
truth by giving her a worksheet to write down her feelings.
Even though she is always leaned on her family and Nick for
support, after the shooting Vada primarily socializes with Quinton and Mia. In
fact, she frequently goes to Mia’s house because there are not any nosy parents
there. Meanwhile, she keeps her mother in the dark, not even revealing that she
has new friends or what they do all day. Finally, concerned about the changes
she sees in her daughter, Patricia tells Vada that it is time to go back to
school in hopes that life will resume some semblance of normalcy. Of course, Vada
knows that is not possible because nothing will ever be the same again, but she
cannot tell her mother that without revealing how badly the shooting affected
her, so she obeys.
Just as she suspected, when she walks into the building everything
is different. There are security personnel who scan students for weapons, and classes
that focus on what to do if there is an active shooter. Still suffering from
PTSD, Vada cannot even go into the bathroom, and loud noises throw her into a
panic. She tries to relieve the tension by buying some Ecstasy, which renders
her unable to function. So, she hides out at Mia’s drinking and experimenting
sexually, then turns around and freaks Quinton out by attempting to make out
with him.
In contrast, Vada is barley able to relate to the people to
whom she has always been closest. She disrespects her parents and sister and avoids
Nick, who was her best friend until the shooting occurred. When he confronts
her about it, she tries to explain “that she feels like she’s drowning” in the
aftershock of the trauma and is dealing with things in her own way. Fed up, Nick
responds, “you have not dealt with anything. That is the problem.” She walks
out in a huff and gets hold of Quinton who she thinks will understand what she
means when she says she feels “numb. He empathizes but rather than allowing
himself to become paralyzed by what happened, he is trying to find something
useful in it, “I think about how this can’t be for nothing.”
Finally, when Vada’s sister Amelia apologizes for sending
the text that put Vada in harm’s way, Vada realizes that people have been
treading lightly with her because they think she blames them for what happened.
This encourages her to examine her emotions and talk about how she feels. She begins
with her father, confiding that that she does not know what is wrong with her,
“I feel so empty.” In turn he helps her process her emotions by vocalizing her
hatred for the shooter, (Matt Corrigan?), who has made her afraid to do anything
including sleeping or going to school. Once she can voice the feelings that she
has been denying exist, Vada begins to heal.
At her next appointment with Anna Vada tells the truth, expressing
her admiration for Nick’s dedication to making things better, and her regret
that the shooting caused their friendship to end. Revealing that her strongest emotion
is rage at the senselessness of her classmates’ deaths, she now understands that
her denial has been blocking her recovery, finally admitting, “I’m having a
really hard time moving on.” She goes one step further by telling her family the
things she has been hiding from them, most importantly her relationship with
Mia. However, she does not clarify what will happen between her and Quinton,
possibly because she does not know.
Summary
I found it interesting that these two movies had such
striking similarities. Alicia and Vada are both social outsiders who refuse to
conform to social norms. Both pretend that they are ‘fine’ when they are
falling apart while at the same time providing emotional support to others. Likewise,
Deanna and Mia are both pretenders. They should be popular because they have the
accoutrements of wealth and privilege: sumptuous homes, expensive wardrobes, good
grades, and bright futures, but it is a façade. Their families are too busy for
them, and they do not have any friends. None of Deanna’s classmates ever come
to the hospital to visit, and none of Mia’s classmates ever call or come by her
house. It is Alicia and Vada who have the support they need to weather their
traumas. On the other hand, Deanna is trapped in the hospital because she is
too emotionally fragile to be discharged and Mia is a prisoner inside her sumptuous
house because she is terrified of going outside.
In fact, these stories are so similar that I wondered if
Megan Park was influenced by Home Room, or whether both writers crafted
stories that they felt reflected reality. For instance, making the main
characters female allows for a deeper understanding of their emotions because
in our society females are more likely to turn inward when faced with a crisis.
In Home Room, Paul Ryan attacks the problem by making the victims exclusively
female. Park, however, lightly dips into the gender issue by including Quinton who
uses his brother’s loss to look for meaning in the tragedy and Nick who takes a
more typical masculine stance by turning his understandable rage into action.
Megan
Park interview: 'The Fallout' writer and director
Discussion
One of the least understood elements of school shootings is who the victims are. In general, homicide perpetrators and victims tend to be male. However, in the case of serial murder although 97% of the murderers are male, over 60% of the victims are female. School shootings, however, are classified as mass killings; are their characteristics more like typical homicides, serial killings, or something else? A mass killing is defined as an event that occurs in one place where more than two people are wounded. There is plenty of data about mass shootings including location (twenty-four percent occur in schools), number of victims, and even the peak time of day, which happens to be late morning. Perpetrators are highly likely to be male (96%), somewhat likely to be white (54%), and in the case of school shootings, tend to be of school age (12-18). However, there has been little information collected regarding victims’ gender. Is there a trend in who school shooters target?
Details about School Shootings
One such study conducted by Johnson, Lipp, Corbett-Hone, and
Langman did look at victims’ sex. They used data from fifty-four shootings that
took place in the United States, Canada, Finland, Germany, Brazil, Scottland,
and Ukraine and the authors published their findings in Psychology of Men
and Masculinities magazine in 2024. The results suggested that more than
fifty percent of school shooters had histories of violence against women (VAW).
While many of their targets were strangers or acquaintances who had either ignored
or rejected them, others were family members like mothers and sisters. Perpetrators
who attacked females before the school shooting had behaved negatively toward them
in the form of stalking, sexual harassment, or death threats. On the day of the
shootings, fifty-two percent of the perpetrators purposefully targeted not only
girls with whom they had negative histories, but females in general. Thus, in Home
Room when Deanna comments that the shooter wounded her accidentally and Alicia
tells her that in fact, he aimed at her specifically, the story rings true because
it was not an accident that Deanna was wounded, but that she survived.
Mass shootings in the
US: Fast facts | CNN
Mass
shooting | Definition, Statistics, Weapons, & Locations | Britannica
How
Common Are Female School Shooters?
School
shootings in the United States - statistics & facts | Statista
Tying it all together – T.S. Eliot and The Who
The Waste Land 1922
Artists became concerned with the social impact of
modernization early in the Twentieth Century, after the First World War. In
1922 T.S. Elliot published “The Waste Land” one of the most well-known and
complex poems in the English language. The poem is an extremely intricate piece
of literature that utilized complicated imagery and drew on various sources of ancient
mythology to describe the damage caused by the war. “The central message of
“The Waste Land” is the profound spiritual and cultural decay of post-World War
I Europe, a civilization suffering from a loss of meaning, faith, and
connection to its past.” (What is the main message of “The Waste” ? By Warren Boutin / August
8, 2025).
It is beyond the scope of this post to explain the poem, even
if I could, which I cannot. However, I included a link to a good summary which you
can read. Here it is sufficient to note that the epic piece dealt with the loss
of innocence that the war wrought. Another example of this theme can be found in
W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge (1944), where his
protagonist Larry Darrel is traumatized by his experiences in the field. It is
one of my favorite novels and has been adapted into a couple films. I prefer
the 1984 version starring Bill Murray who does an outstanding job.
What
is the main message of "The Waste" ? - Scifi Dimensions
Baba O’Reilly 1971
A later example of art which examined the impact of modernization
on civilization was Pete Townshend’s unfinished rock opera Lifehouse. Following
his success with the rock opera Tommy, Townshend began crafting a story
about people overcoming the emotional vacuum that technology has caused through
the medium of rock and roll. Although some songs became popular, “Baba O’Reily”
best describes this futuristic culture, which he calls a teenage wasteland. The
lyrics end with the sobering thought that all modern youth is “wasted!” I
included a link to the song, but if you are interested in hearing a rough draft
of the entire rock opera, it is on Spotify.
Figuring it out – Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx
In the late nineteenth century Emile Durkheim invented a new
way to study social phenomena using the scientific method. He called it Sociology.
His approach involved gathering empirical data then analyzing them objectively.
His primary objective was to explain anomalous social behaviors like
suicide and crime which he believed resulted not from flawed actors, but from
flawed social structures. Thus, he argued that current social problems arose
when communities changed from agrarian where people had similar occupations,
religions, and family dynamics to modern that provided them with options in
these areas. Because Durkheim acknowledged that people benefited from the freedom
to decide, he thought sometimes they became disconnected from the social milieu
that caused them to experience a state of Anomie or “normlessness.” In the most extreme cases, people expressed
their lack of social attachment through criminal behavior or suicide. He sought
to resolve this dilemma by suggesting that modern businesses form “occupational
groups” to restore a sense of community,
“When this regulation of the individual is upset so that his
horizon is broadened beyond what he can endure, or contrariwise contracted
unduly, conditions for anomic suicide tend toward a maximum.”
Suicide by Émile
Durkheim | Summary, Quotes, FAQ, Audio
Although Durkheim was a structural functionalist who thought
the social structure benefited people, he was influenced by Karl Marx, a conflict
theorist who believed that societies with capitalistic structures alienated citizens.
He believed this occurred because privately owned companies were only
interested in profit and made people work in a way that benefited them. Thus, unlike
Durkheim, Marx thought the social structure alienated people from their work
and their coworkers, and they could not be happy until they were able to choose
what they did and how they did it.
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere
of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society
regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one
thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a
mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
Marx's Theory of
Alienation In Sociology
Thus, the people who wrote and produced the movies discussed
in this series are concerned with the social problems in our society. Whether those
problems arise from anomie, alienation, or something else, and whether the
solution to these problems is to adjust, replace, or demolish the social
structure, something needs to happen. There are a startling number of suicides
and school shootings in our country and that cannot be just because there are so
many bad people.
Right now, the free link to see Home Room is still working. Just
scroll past the introduction in Spanish, to find the movie, which is in
English. Ryan won awards for the film at a couple of the smaller film festivals,
and considering the sobering topic, the movie’s ratings are decent. The overall
score on IMDB is 71%, and the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is even higher,
78%. If you decide you want to own the movie you can buy the DVD new on Amazon
for $35 or get it used on eBay for as little as ten bucks.
Although the topic is the same, The Fallout enjoyed
more success than Homeroom. Megan Parks won three awards for narrative
and directing, and Jenna won for her acting. Even though the overall rating on
IMDB was only 70%, Rotten Tomatoes’ critics and the audience were both impressed
with the movie, 90% and 83%, respectively. Right now, if you have HBO Max, you
can stream it for free, otherwise it will cost $11 or more to rent it, so you
may want to buy it. Even though Amazon Prime does not have any DVDs right now, a
seller on eBay has them for around $25. Just be sure you get the one with two
girls on the cover because there are other DVDs with the same name.
I have not decided what I am going to do next, so I will
just say hasta luego.
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