Listen to the Context Collapse podcast version: The Disturbing Visual Culture of the Columbiner Fandom
This is a story about a small group of people who idolize those that the rest of us would consider evil. School shooters have become a recurrent concern in modern America, and Columbine is often considered to have set the 'cultural script’ or ‘blueprint' for future perpetrators. What I talk about in this isn’t particularly pleasant, but I’ve stayed away from graphic descriptions. It is also not an attempt to dissect the perpetrator’s ideology, and this is not addressed.
My area of work is in visual culture, and I’m particularly interested in marginal images or outlaw perspectives, hence my preoccupation with memes even before they were considered a legitimate object of study. This essay was originally written in 2014 as I was in a morphine-induced hospital daze and whilst I have updated it to reflect today’s usage of social media and representations of gun violence, I wanted to revisit it. It is helpful to look back to not just the event of Columbine itself, but how online communities responded to it and represented it a generation later. The way these cultural events are recycled when they become removed from their original press coverage and aftermath reveals a countermovement that wants to humanize the killers rather than mythologize them. It tells a story of how these opposing systems of visual representation both feed a cycle of harm in their own way.
The word ‘Columbine’ can conjure up many images; of chaos and violence, of juvenile delinquency, of grainy figures brandishing firearms in a way that feels all-too-familiar. The term ‘Columbine’ has become so synonymous with the disillusionment and death drive of young people seeking to avenge their inferiority complexes through acts of obscene violence that it is perhaps no surprise that online communities exist in which the perpetrators have become poster boys. Columbine has become a metonym for the white ale rage of the ‘underdog’ that can only reverse the social hierarchy through violence. ‘columbine’ has become an umbrella term to represent active shooter events in contemporary America, usually carried out by young heterosexual men.
Even decades after the event took place, shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are being discussed, commemorated even fawned over by these self-proclaimed ‘Columbiners’ who see the events of April 20th, 1999 as being an extreme symbolic critique of contemporary teenagerhood.
This community online is small and mostly remains anonymous (for obvious reasons). I’m going to refer to this group as ‘Columbiners’ because it is the term that the community uses when it is referencing itself, but they have also used this term to speak to ‘outsiders’ whether that is the press or other internet users who do not share their morbid obsession.
Just as Charles Manson was hailed as an icon for the marginalized and disaffected, the columbine perpetrators have become the poster boys for a specific brand of teenage delinquency. Although mass shootings account for a small proportion of firearms deaths (of the 9199 people killed by firearms in the US in 2013, only 486 of those happened in mass shootings) their emphasis on spectacle often results in a huge amount of media coverage. There is a saying in journalism along the lines of ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ The violent acts get the coverage as we sit, transfixed and unable to look away.
In this way, these active shooter events take on a cultural significance that other tragic realities of modern violence frequently fail to – because it doesn’t make for compelling news. Sociologist Glenn Muschert explains that in the early noughties
‘America was on the brink of a moral panic concerning nihilistic youth culture. Since then ‘columbine’ has become a keyword for a complex set of emotions surrounding youth, fear, risk and delinquency in 21st-century America.’
The Tumblr platform was at its most used between 2007-2015. Tumblr is a blogging platform that allows for easy anonymity and whose user experience is based around hyper personalisation – users can tailor their blog content exactly to reflect what they want, not only in terms of what they show on their site but the layout itself, and their feeds are an early example of algorithmic customisation too. Suggestions are made based on previous likes, people you follow, and search terms you engage with in the form of hashtags.
Communities on Tumblr have accepted the anonymity of individuals as part of the platform’s benefit – many only ever speak through their pseudonyms and with avatar profile pictures. Where ‘fans’ were once characterised as loners suffering from (in Lewis’ words) ‘a disease of isolation rather than a disease of contagion,’ the online environment’s collective spaces and freedom from social norms through anonymity have reversed this. Communities are frenzied crowds, attempting to outdo each other in their emotional fervour and provocative memes and ‘takes,’ on the topics at hand. Indeed, the columbine community was most active on Tumblr when I originally undertook this research in early 2014 – its fast-paced stream of user-generated content and its ability to reblog imagery while adding your own textual or image-based response adds the capacity for dialogue within communities.
One of the most interesting elements of the community is how they appear to grieve for the perpetrators. It seems, in many ways, to be an ongoing process for them. Some scholars have identified what they call a ‘scopophilic’ impulse which drives us to memorialize the deceased visually – to maintain some visual reminder of the people who are no longer physically present. That is precisely why we cherish photographs of loved ones after they are gone, or why sometimes it is too painful to look at that video of your old dog.
It is in part because of this that the role of imagery in the aftermath of what is commonly called ‘classroom avenger’ shootings is particularly important. Couple that with the internet’s capacity to create, disseminate and manipulate images instantly and globally and you have a dangerous combination of misplaced emotion and avenues for propaganda. First, the 24-hour news cycle and now the connected participatory internet have reversed the previously intimate process of mourning and made it public.
Lingel said that where mourning rituals happen without an ‘accepted moderator’ (in western circumstances this would usually be a priest or other celebrant, or even a therapist or family members), the memorializing process becomes democratized. This allows for different displays of grief to take place. This can manifest in broadly positive ways – consider the international flood of flower bouquets at embassies the world over in the wake of Princess Diana's death – but can also open the floor for ‘unorthodox’ displays of grief. These can take place publically, with or without the sanctioning of the families of the deceased.
The online environment is conducive to this unorthodox mourning as it allows for grieving rituals unhindered by mainstream social norms, religious conventions, or even personal connections to the object of grief – and can therefore result in offensive imagery being created and circulated as people and events become further removed from the immediate reality of the incident. The emphasis that social media has on the persona of the individual (whether anonymous or not) and on the importance of generating ‘clicks’ ‘views’ ‘reblogs’ and ‘re-tweets’ means that much of the activity on these platforms is characterized by vocal and attention seeking behaviour. This creates an environment of competition where posts and images become commodities in a market where eyeballs are currency. Columbiners often try to create the most shocking sort of content that is bound to generate the most discussion or peer admiration.
In the Columbiner community, these images most often take the form of memes and digital collages. These media forms are ideal for such groups because they allow members to ‘remix’ them via digital manipulations and without the need for technical expertise. Because community members can create, adapt and reshare images instantly, this is where the ‘hive mind’ phenomenon starts to become apparent. Columbiners are not just consuming imagery but producing it to create their own personal amateur internet artefacts. Wells calls this ‘electro-bricolage’ - sticking together different elements via software to create altered images. These images construct a counternarrative to the one first published in mainstream media.
Baudrillard proposed that in postmodernity – the era in which we find ourselves – the fixation with the production and reproduction of the real creates an obsession and hysteria surrounding images. He suggested that every time an image is reproduced it undergoes a sort of ‘murder by simulation’ - becoming a copy that has less power and meaning as it becomes removed from its original author, context, space and time. Eventually, all images are just a ‘simulacrum’ - a meaningless and unsubstantial imitation – of their former selves.
Photography is often said to objectify and disempower its subjects by rendering them passive. So, what could we say for electro-bricolage of meme-making?
The subjects can be placed in any setting, in any context. They could be given a new cultic value if they are copied and pasted into images that follow the conventions of religious depictions. Memes and digital collages become meaningless because they are constantly revisited, manipulated, and reimagined.
Media images suffer the same fate as the simulacrum because corporations mindlessly broadcast continuous footage of the often limited available images connected to events. In addition to this, the imagery they can show is often heavily censored, which may make it more appropriate for audiences and respectful to families of those affected, but also obscures and sanitizes the visceral, gory reality of what has happened. That can only widen the symbolic gulf between audiences and events. It may lead to mass desensitization as static CCTV and childhood photographs of perpetrators become familiar recurring motifs of the cultural aftermath of active shooter events.
They can also become crude jokes, where they are thrown together with unexpected visual elements or provocative text on a single virtual plane. These ways of creating visual outputs are not just about replacing existing media but about adding to it or skewing it to suit a different worldview. Its capacity for shock and transgression is clear; Baudrillard said that we are living in an era of ‘allegorical resurrections of death’ through the image - the Columbiners take this quite literally to reimagine and rework narratives using found imagery to reflect the will of the author who sees the perpetrators as victims of social hierarchy. Coulter said that the power of digital documents is that they are inauthentic copies of real images as a matter of definition and can consciously play on that fact. He believes there is no escaping the ‘vast emptiness of the virtual’ and the creators of such images can never be artists but are a symptom of a techno-social age.
Dark humour is also a recurring theme in the Columbiner community who deliberately make perverse imagery they can label as ‘ironic.’ Of course, since the early 2000s, we have seen this trend of what are colloquially referred to as ‘edgelords’ committing violent or murderous acts. There are communities online where the initially ironic investment in ideas becomes a ‘permissive’ area for the sincere exploration of concepts such as fascism, eugenics, misogyny etc. It is often crass, vulgar, insensitive and stomach churning. The ‘humour’ they are using here offers them plausible deniability that images can never be violent in and of themselves – they are to be ‘taken with a pinch of salt’ or just ‘pushing the boundaries of good taste’ - even when the cultural scripts they reinforce are all-too-real, and often bloody.
The images columbiners use knowingly reference American popular culture. By pulling familiar elements of what we might see in newspapers or on television and placing them alongside the CCTV footage from the day, or forensic images shot by police for evidence, they are suggesting that they belong together. They are pulling them both down to the same symbolic level of meaning. They suggest that something is rotten in both systems.
One example is a meme in which the perpetrators are cut and pasted into an image of cartoon characters Beavis and butthead, two crude teenagers who embody the fratty ‘bromance’ culture of the late 90s and early 2000s. Beavis and butthead are already familiar, already media figures. They are known for their vulgarity and typically masculine interactions that usually revolve around toilet humour or casual misogyny. The theme of ‘bromance’ recurs in the columbiner fandom – both in its imagery and its written posts. Bromance was thought to be an attempt to reconstruct traditional notions of masculinity into a model that accepts an ironic acknowledgement of laddish culture but absorbs homosexual or feminine mannerisms. These are depicted under the guise of platonic rapprochements. Many images reimagine Klebold and Harris as a couple, with one meme showing them sitting on a sofa in gendered ‘snuggies’ sharing a bowl of popcorn. An image of married bliss, a deceptively cute and naïve image of the pair. These odes with ‘bromantic’ overtones could be seen as a direct response or challenge to traditional media outlets. The columbiner community tends to perceive the perpetrators as misunderstood and has a disdain for how they are reported in the news media, so they push back against these narratives with their homegrown imagery.
One meme shows Klebold and Harris in the iconic Titanic scene at the helm of the ship. The caption reads ‘newly released image from the basement tapes’, referring to the videos that the pair made in the run-up to the atrocity. This scene is one of the most universally recognizable to western audiences. It suggests that the men were ‘soulmates’ of a sort – two like-minded people who could have been romantically entwined under different circumstances. It seems unsurprising that a community of the self-professed alienated sees something special in this suicide-pact friendship and that this is one of the enduring themes they play upon within the community and the media they produce. Placing one of them in Rose’s role is a considered reaction to the hypermasculine representations of perpetrators in the news who are painted as full of virile rage and frustration. Feminizing Klebold and Harris is a way in which the columbiners can co-opt a paradigm of innocence for the objects of their affection. This helps to humanize them because there is still a reluctance to see women as capable of gratuitous violence. Women are always more innocent, only resorting to such behaviour if there is ‘no other way’ to resolve things.
Another image puts the faces of Harris and Klebold onto a stock image of a couple watching a flatscreen television. On the screen is a screen capture from their self-made videos – the basement tapes. They are positioned as a cookie-cutter American white middle-class couple – like the demographic profile of the affluent and racially homogenous suburb of Denver they grew up in. They are watching their video tapes which formed a part of the manifesto that they left behind, that was subsequently attempted to be decoded by the press and investigators.
Another is a tasteless parody of a high school musical poster that does not need to be described in detail. The high school musical cast is constituted of typical American high school archetypes; the heart throb athlete, the popular bitchy girl, the outsider, the artistic weirdo... from a columbiner’s perspective the film might express something about the hierarchy of high school society. The image might be an attempt to reframe the events of Columbine as an act of personal social revenge against this structure in which some students are revered and others alienated, rather than as a political act or satanic one as many news outlets reported.
Yes, on the one hand, the image is intended to offend and shock by reappropriating a light-hearted musical comedy with the inclusion of graphic violence, but it also underlines the reality of schools not being immune to gun violence. Unfortunately, the image emphasizes through visual sadism the enduring tragedy of these acts; that they can take place anywhere and increasingly do, even in classrooms.
They might also be intending a critique in there regarding ‘the rest of the world as consumers’ - us as opposed to them – why is it that mainstream audiences simply accept what is shown to them? Do they ever consider outsider perspectives? Seltzer, who authored a book called Life and Death in America's Wound Culture thinks that the public arena is seeing the overlap of intimate life and private spectacle... which has created a culture of ‘addictive violence where private desire and public fantasy cross.’
Memes that define the ‘school shooting starter pack’ reduces the tools of a mass shooter into a sort of perverse shopping list. Like the media coverage that follows a broadly similar format following the events, the image evidences the development of a now formulaic and immediately recognizable cultural script for the perpetrators. Another transposes Klebold onto a Fresh Prince of Bel Air graphic, particularly inflammatory given that Klebold espoused neo-Nazi ideologies and had a fascination with social Darwinism and eugenics.
There is certainly a mainstream appetite for the 24/7 news cycle and its continuous coverage of specific atrocities over structural injustices or systemic issues such as poverty or healthcare underinsurance. More recently we have seen the phenomenon of true crime, first in television broadcasting and now podcasting taking hold of typically white middle-class consumers. Part of the Columbiner’s narrative seems to try to underline this hypocrisy by being completely overt about their fascination with the violent and socially unacceptable.
Seltzer goes on to argue that instead of people thoughtlessly accepting images of violence in their mass media, it is the prevalence of fabricated violence (in films, tv shows, and video games) that has complicated our relationship with media representations of actual violent events. The entertainment format has been assumed by news corporations as the de facto presentation style. Much of the imagery created by the Columbiner’s has a ‘humorous slant’ which references popular culture. Lewis said that popular culture was a ‘crucial ground’ on which people can construct meaning. This is because it is omnipresent and familiar, giving it the power to be universally understood without much context or explanation.
The sensationalization of figures in the public domain by the American media creates celebrities out of mass shooters by according to them equal parts airtime and fame. They become household names, like actors, singers, and politicians. They stop being seen primarily as killers and become aestheticized objects of fear inhabiting the public domain and capturing the imagination and terror of the public. Criminals are becoming demonic idols. They are the personification of What woods called ‘blackest impulses from the basement of the human condition.’
Because they become known as individuals through this massive press coverage, in which their past and potential motives are discussed and explored at length in a search for understanding the ‘why’ of their violence, they become figures that the public can develop a parasocial relationship with. That relationship can be one of condemnation – but it can also be one of idolization – because the act has a human ‘anchor’ - a face – onto which we can place meaning.
The way that mourning has moved from the private to the public sphere makes it susceptible to vulgarization and can contribute to a culture of morbid fascination with shooters and their acts long after they have taken place. The images created in these communities are a resurrection of death – not just of those who have died but of those who have inflicted death.
Henry noted that there is a ‘cultural script’ that exists for school shootings. This ‘blueprint’ is not only a how-to guide but an active radicalisation tool. Hitlin explained the media cycle as follows: a murder, saturating media attention, then a series of ‘why did he do it?’ pieces mixing pop psychology with popular sociology.’ The mass media reimagines mass shooters as mythical beings. The quest to understand the act (presumably to prevent similar atrocities) is often lost in the [process of sensationalisation that defines a lot of modern-day journalism. The columbiner community sees itself as doing the opposite – they are making ‘human’ these ‘mythical monsters’ by relating their own experiences, concerns, and social challenges with their own. ‘They were just like us’ they say, while the media naively says ‘these shooters cannot be of our own.’
Kearny suggests that the ability to produce and circulate imagery for the everyday person can offer up new and meaningful ways of understanding and processing events (including violent ones) that can be cathartic and resolve personal emotional conflicts as well as collective grief. This seems far from being resolved in a culture that is at once fascinated by but scared of and unwilling to confront death.
The Columbiners represent an opposing impulse in which images are weaponized and feed the misgivings of the alienated online by attempting to reposition the shooters as heroes, heartthrobs, or just ordinary people who failed to find their place in the world and saw no other way out. The images intend to humanize as opposed to demonize, to infantilize instead of mythologize, and to romanticize instead of culpabilize. In a way, they could be seen to be trying to reverse the established cultural script in the way they memorialize and communicate ideas about the events of Columbine and those responsible.
The anonymous nature of Tumblr, and now other online forums to which these groups have migrated, is often cited as the cause of a splintered reality phenomenon in which users cultivate alter egos that become more extreme, and less anchored to reality in the online space.
By creating imagery that subverts mainstream media coverage the Columbiners unintentionally expose the damaging role that media coverage plays in the aftermath of events. By conflating images of violence with the formatting of entertainment and an insistence on the shooters as ‘angels of death’ they suggest that these people cannot be rationalized. If they cannot be rationalized they cannot be explained. If they cannot be explained they will remain an occasional tragic reality of contemporary life that no amount of gun control, deradicalization or discourse can stop from committing mass murder. This is a convenient excuse for a culture hellbent on projecting an image of morality and idealism that does not want to examine itself closely for fear of what it may uncover in terms of its perversions, obsessions, and violent origins. The novelist J. G Ballard summarized this best when he said that ‘the suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.’
Bibliography and Reference list
Muschert, Glenn W. “Research in School Shootings.” Sociology Compass, vol. 1, no. 1, Sept. 2007, pp. 60–80, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00008.x. Accessed 7 Oct. 2019.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Lingel, Jessa. “The Digital Remains: Social Media and Practices of Online Grief.” The Information Society, vol. 29, no. 3, May 2013, pp. 190–195, repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1617&context=asc_papers, 10.1080/01972243.2013.777311. Accessed 1 Nov. 2019.
Harrison, Colin. American Culture in the 1990s / Monograph. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
James, Carrie. Disconnected : Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap. Cambridge, Mass., Mit Press, 2016.
Gournelos, Ted, and Viveca Greene. A Decade of Dark Humor : How Comedy, Irony, and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 America. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers : Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. Hoboken, Taylor and Francis, 2013.
““Just Normal Kids” Killed 13 People: The Columbine High School Shooting in 1999.” Pennlive, 20 Apr. 2020, www.pennlive.com/life/2020/04/just-normal-kids-killed-13-people-the-columbine-high-school-shooting-in-1999.html.
(““Just Normal Kids” Killed 13 People: The Columbine High School Shooting in 1999”)