Day Twelve: Zero Day

I didn't exactly intend to rent Heavenly Creatures and Zero Day at the same time, but I knew before watching them that there would be a lot of thematic crossover. And there is: a pair of best friends coldly driven to murder by what they see as a world against them and their genius. Zero Day is a fictionalization of the Columbine massacre, told almost entirely through the eyes of the two boys who carried it out. I'm strangely drawn to pop culture about Columbine. It's one of the first major media events I can clearly remember reading about in the newspaper and hearing about at school. One of my favorite movies is Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine, and while that has a lot to do with his quick and fascinating exploration of America's love of guns and violence, some of the most chilling and resonant scenes in the documentary focus on the day of the shooting itself, playing 911 calls from that day and surveillance camera footage of the gunmen striding around their school cafeteria as they carry out the shooting. I also really responded to Gus Van Sant's Elephant, another fictionalization that came out around the same time as Zero Day, and She Said Yes, a memoir by one of the victim's mothers.

Although the subject matter and some themes are similar, Elephant and Zero Day could not be more different stylistically. While Elephant dreamily and painfully follows several students through the day, a very normal and even boring school day up until the shooting, Zero Day starts about a year before the shooting and leads up to it entirely through the boys' video diaries about their "mission," their plans for what they call "Zero Day." The boys, Andre and Cal, are both fairly likable, very articulate and seemingly clear-headed about their plot. Although they speak derisively of their popular, entitled peers and really only feel comfortable with each other, they each have loving, involved families. Their video cameras capture their matter-of-fact weapons stockpiling and personal ruminations about their plans, but they also capture cheerful, normal conversations with their parents, who seem only to have their best interests in mind. My heart ached to think of those parents dealing with their children's inexplicable murderous rage and suicides.

It's never really clear why the boys decide to shoot up the school, aside from talk of how it will be a wake up call to tell people to appreciate their lives and respect others. The film doesn't show them coming up with the plot; it's in place from the beginning, and Cal says at one point that they never actually discussed it, just always knew. Like the girls in Heavenly Creatures, they speak almost reverently of the fortune of finding each other, of bringing their geniuses together. The film almost deliberately refutes popular media explanations for their behavior: the loving families, as mentioned before, along with the boys' burning of their CDs and video games to show that those things did not influence them. Though their careful discussion of logistics shows them to be coldly premeditated murderers, the boys still come off as so intelligent and in some way decent in the film that you can't help but sympathize with them. I certainly wasn't cheering them on as they prepared for the shooting, but I couldn't help but understand their feelings of detachment from their peers, especially when Cal goes to the prom and is shy and uncomfortable around his obnoxious, judgmental (very real-seeming) classmates. Of course, most kids who don't fit in take it out in writing, or painting, or music, or just muddle through until they can escape to college; they don't open fire on their classmates.

At the end of the film, all I could think was what a waste it was: these smart, resourceful kids could have directed their sensitivity and intelligence at something constructive and meaningful. Instead, they died at 18 and took several innocents with them. And I don't know if anything was learned from Columbine. Other shootings have happened since, and kids still sneak guns and knives into my high school. And people seemed to spend too much time in the aftermath blaming it on various problems with America and society to focus on the boys themselves. So for that, Zero Day is to be commended.