I watched Elephant today. It had a real Dogme feel to it, lots of natural light, on location shots and stuff. It's sort of based on the Columbine shootings, with two kids going to a school and shooting a bunch of other kids and some teachers. That's the whole movie. You get to see a few of the kids go through thier daily routine, but that's it. There's no character development, there's no conclusion. In a lot of ways it lacks the features to even make it a story. If I'd submitted something like that to my writing teacher back when I was doing that kind of thing he'd have handed it back and told me that characters have to change to make a story and killing the characters off isn't change.
But still I think it's worth watching. One thing people want out of Columbine and this movie is some kind of explanation. They want to know what when wrong so that all these people died. They're never going to find out what went wrong, because everything went right.
One of the ways kids learn to be people is through being dehumanised by thier peers. Anyone who's seen South Park could tell you that. Most kids figure it out implicitly and join in and learn to be proper little excluders, but there's a small percentage that can't understand. These one's are missing something in thier upbringing or brain chemistry that stops them from making the links needed. There's no single cause, but they add up and the kid just can't fit in. These are the ones that kill themselves, the ones that run away, the ones that do really stupid shit to try and fit in. Some of them retreat and find other rejects to hang around with. Some of them figure it out explicitly once they reach adulthood. And there's the kids that react aggressively. They see the people who dehumanise them as subhuman. It's not them that's wrong, it's everyone else.
This is all normal. Everyone's seen it happen or had it happen to them. Everyone's taken part in one side or the other.
Then you've got America where people are told thier destinies are thier own. Thier forefathers fought and died so that they could use thier strength, knowledge and power to live out thier dreams. The weak and the stupid fail and those are the ones who let others control them. What happened in Columbine wasn't inevitable, but in a country of millions there was a good chance of it happening eventually, and a good chance of it happening again.