MADreads

Searching for answers

August 3rd, 2009 Katie H.

It’s apt that the only image Dave Cullen’s harrowing account of the 1999 Columbine school shootings is the cover photo: the school framed low on the cover, ‘Columbine’ superimposed over it, against a cloudy sky.  It begs the question: what is Columbine?  Is it the literal image of a high school, and by extension a community just like thousands of others scattered across the nation?  Do we see Columbine as synonymous with tragedy, the word that comes to mind with each school shooting, ‘another Columbine?’  Or is it proof of an evil that would drive two promising young men to indiscriminately kill for no reason whatsoever?

Cullen has covered Columbine since the shooting for Salon and other publications, and his continued familiarity with many of the key players and documents gives Columbine as complete a picture of the shooting as has yet appeared.  It’s a complicated, emotional book, and (inevitably) has its flaws.  Given how well-documented almost every aspect of the shootings were (victims inside the school were able to watch SWAT teams attempt to rescue them live on CNN), almost everyone has a notion of what happened.

Cullen writes of investigators’ struggles to overcome tainted witness accounts, erroneous press conclusions and the public’s unwillingness to shake preconceived notions of why the killers went on their rampage.  Probably the most controversial aspects of Cullen’s book deal with the surprising amount of warning signs the boys exhibited before the deaths.  Concerned parents’ complaints, arrest records and copies of Harris’ hate-filled website were in police hands long before April 1999–a fact that was blatantly covered up by authorities.  Cullen’s other conclusion–that Eric Harris was a psychopath with little hope of rehabilitation–is one that many people, especially parents, have a hard time coming to grips with.  With no truly guilty party left alive and no tangible reason for the crime, the emotional toll continues to be felt by survivors.

It’s tough to avoid the sense of voyerism that comes with books about tragedies, and Columbine in particular.  Cullen tries to give a sense of the killers’ thinking, sprinkling in phrases presumably meant to be taken from Harris and Klebold’s point of view, but which only seem to break the flow of the narrative.  On the whole, however, Cullen treads the emotional tightrope deftly: the scenes are graphic but never gratutious.  Depicting the shooting first, Cullen later shifts back and forth between the ‘after’ (the investigation and the grieving families) with the ‘before’ (Harris’ acquisition of weapons, Klebold’s obsessive journal entries about love).  The effect is chilling and sometimes maddening in presenting the aftermath along with so many missed chances for intervention.

Regardless of your feelings on faith, gun control, parental responsibility, press coverage or police incompetence (all of which are impossible to ignore here), Columbine requires a high level of emotional hardiness and a scrutinizing eye towards its journalism.  But ultimately, the key to truly understanding why Columbine happened may remain out of reach.

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction