Does Zero Hour glorify the shooting?

Are reenactments like this counterproductive considering the increasing frequency of school shootings? Curious to know your thoughts.

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I don’t believe so.


They did one on the Oklahoma City Bombing. It didn’t glamorize Tim mcveigh

What percentage of mass shootings are done solely because of copy cats and hero worship? Could those shootings be prevented if we had no noterity etc..

sympathyforEandD wrote:

Are reenactments like this counterproductive considering the increasing frequency of school shootings? Curious to know your thoughts.

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No.
It gives a decently accurate portrayal of what happened that day, nothing more, nothing less.
As Screaming stated, they have multiple episodes of other well known massacres.

It's kind of like someone saying that a forum like this causes more shootings since we openly talk and post photos and videos about Columbine. It just isn't true.

In my opinion, no. It's just a documentary that presents facts and nothing else. Zero Hour wasn't even very graphic. The deaths are not shown. Now... if they had shown each victim being shot in graphic detail I might think it leads more towards glorification. But nowhere in the documentary did it ever say that what Eric and Dylan did was a good thing/it needed to happen/etc. It just presents facts about the shooting, that's it.

Do fangirls on tumblr make cringy edits of the actors? Yeah. They glorify the shooting through Zero Hour, but the documentary itself does not glorify the shooting.

I think it all goes back to the myth that violent video games and movies are to blame for school shootings.

It's true that a majority of shooters were into some sort of violent entertainment, but so are tens of millions of other Americans.
The ratio between people who then go out and shoot up a school is so minuscule that it's barley a grain of sand on a beach.  

The issue really boils down to people placing the blame on the wrong things.
They end up wanting to place the blame on the first thing they can think of, yet fail to realize that mental health issues are the real culprits 90% of the time.

After Columbine I remember every news station was harping on the violent video games and movies the boys were into, but never once do I personally remember hearing anything about mental health and the reform that was and is still needed to this day.

It honestly doesn't matter.

I've been meaning to make a post on it for a while now but I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter if you glorify a killer or not, the next guy, the next copycat is still going to put them on a pedestal, because they're either too demented to understand that shooting innocent people is wrong, or their definition of "innocent" is way out of whack with conventional morality.

I do think it made Eric and Dylan look cool but I don't think it glorifies them on purpose nor do I think it turns people into copycats. At worst it turns 14 year-old girls into fangirls, that's all.

I was really interested in the way the actors portrayed them, especially during the shooting. I felt like they showed remorse at the end (the actors, I can’t confirm what e and d felt) and I liked the way they portrayed John and Dylan and their interaction.

Neah wrote:

I do think it made Eric and Dylan look cool but I don't think it glorifies them on purpose nor do I think it turns people into copycats. At worst it turns 14 year-old girls into fangirls, that's all.

That's kind of what I was getting at. The film still I posted in the OP makes these guys look like two edgelord badasses rather than murderers who gunned down innocents who hadn't even picked on them.

It's important to take a step back once in a while, and to remember that while we may be fond of the boys on a personal level, what they did was still unjustifiable. At the end of the day, they're still murderers.

Cool responses guys, thanks.

Actually, I do see your point [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. It does make them look like two “edgelord badasses” and could very well inspire legions of fangirls and boys. Young people latch onto stuff like that. In fact, when looking for pictures of the real E and D, I came across countless pics of the actors! So even knowing that these are actors portraying the real people, the actors have fans!

However, that said,it shouldn’t matter. It was a reinactment of a historical event. As others above stated, it didn’t linger on shots of kids of kids dying, or have lots of gore. It was interesting and informative. As an adult, it really irks me when it’s suggested by the authorities or censors what I should or should not see. I should get to choose that. And if I don’t want my kid to see it, then it’s my job to make sure they don’t. I would love to see an even longer, limited run type series about Columbine. I would love to see the basement tapes.

Really depends on what you mean by "glorifying" and to be honest I find when people use that term in relation to mass murderers, they often probably dont know what they mean by it. Like theres many people including the imbeciles at No Notoriety who think simply reporting on the basic facts about a mass shooter is "glorifying" them which I highly disagree with. The only incident that killers have been glorified was when Time released their May 3, 1999 magazine with the headline stating: The Monsters Next Door, I see that as glorification as it tries to dehumanize Eric and Dylan, making them seem and sound more scary than they actually were in reality until the shooting happened.

In relation of Zero Hour, I don't think it glorifies Eric and Dylan, yeah it focuses on them but that's not exactly the same as glorifying them as some people may think. It's just a cut and dry documentary on what happened on that day in my opinion.

I think more documentaries need to be done on mass shootings. Even if it may give future shooters more inspiration to go on a shooting of their own. I watched 77 minutes, the 1984 McDonalds massacre, the police footage of the crime scene including the bodies hasn't left my mind. I think if more people saw the actual aftermath of these massacres it would hit them harder and make them really want to figure out how we can help/stop all this from happening in our society. Because honestly I have skipped over any mass shooting in a few years to me its just been another mass shooting in America its just another day. If people see the actual damage it definitely makes them thing again.

QuestionMark wrote:

It honestly doesn't matter.

I've been meaning to make a post on it for a while now but I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter if you glorify a killer or not, the next guy, the next copycat is still going to put them on a pedestal, because they're either too demented to understand that shooting innocent people is wrong, or their definition of "innocent" is way out of whack with conventional morality.

I'd like to expand on this a little bit.

In Roger Ebert's review of the movie Elephant, which is loosely based on the Columbine shootings, he quotes French movie director Francois Truffaut, in that it was hard to make an anti-war movie because war is naturally exciting. Ebert in his writings then goes on to praise Elephant for managing to be an "anti-violence" film, by "draining violence of energy, purpose, glamor, reward and social context. It just happens.". He then goes on to say that because of this incredibly dry depiction of a violent act, the movie would be unlikely to inspire copycats or imitators of any kind.

He was wrong.

On March 21st, 2005, Jeffrey Weise murdered nine people and then shot himself, killing seven of his victims at the high school he had attended in previous years. According to a friend, Weise owned the film and would skip over most of it just to get to the parts where the two perpetrators plan and carry out the shooting. On his Newgrounds account, he even listed the movie as one of his favorites.

Let's use a totally different example. The song Pumped Up Kicks was written and performed by the band Foster the People as their way of raising awareness of gun violence and teenage issues. But instead of doing anything to prevent violence, the song has been used as a sort of anthem for school shooters, being overlaid with footage from the Zero Hour documentary or being liked by actual school shooters (ex: Nikolas Cruz).

This isn't even unique to school violence or rampage killings. The movie Scarface and the TV show Breaking Bad offer strong indictments of gang violence and the drug trade but are favorites among drug dealers. American History X has been held up by some Neo-Nazis as an unintentional approval of their politics despite being ostensibly an anti-racism film. The Nirvana song Polly was intended to reflect the horror of sexual violence but was sung by a pair of rapists as they assaulted their victim.

So what gives?

To touch a bit on my original, quoted post above, there are certain people who are not going to get on board with you if you're trying to condemn something they like. You fundamentally cannot make a film that's "anti-violence", because there's always going to be someone in your audience who likes violence too much to be swayed by how you portray it. Moreover it's almost fundamentally useless since most people have already had it codified in their minds that violence is wrong - years and years of guidance by parents, teachers, friends, bosses, and other authority figures like the police practically ensure the you're already going to be "anti-violence" to begin with, barring certain exceptions to the rule. But we're getting off track.

tl;dr here? If even Randy Stair, who's hopelessly ridiculed and made out to be the biggest joke among rampage killers can have a group of people who think he's worth deifying, then asking the question "is this glorification?" concerning a dramatic recreation of Columbine is a moot point.

I like documentaries of events like this as it gives you an idea of what it must of felt like to be in that situation and to give more detail into what happened. Although I am not a fan of this documentary, the actors were pretty cringy to watch, their dialog and reenactments were very over dramatic. I think doing stuff like this to get the audience to "hate" the people even more or to deface them.

I think if you are going to make a documentary that only facts and reasonable reenactments should be used to prevent from it being one sided like the media portrays it. Everything else is subjective.

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thelmar wrote:

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I try my best.

If I was to state it a different way, there are certain actions you can successfully criticize in media.

You can make an anti-smoking ad by showing the debilitating effects of lung cancer.

You can make an anti-alcohol ad by showing the effects of liver damage.

You can make an anti-reckless driving ad by showing the hefty prison sentences one could get if caught, or the debilitating (and often fatal) potential consequences.

You can't make an anti-violence ad by showing violence, or its effects, or even the consequences. Violence has a certain appeal to it that you can't overcome with some people. And yeah, it's true that a chain smoker, an alcoholic, or a reckless driver won't heed the above ads I listed and will offer excuses for their behavior. But none of them are going to take the ad and twist it into a symbol of pride or try to emulate the actions in the ad on a conscious level the same way a violent person will consume violent media no matter what its tone or message and find it exciting or worth copying.

I think the perfect example of this is A Clockwork Orange. The protagonist Alex DeLarge is a violent psychopath who gets thrown in prison for murder and ends up mentally tortured into being unable to commit violence, even in self-defense. Because of this all his former victims get the opportunity to beat the shit out of him and give him back what he did to all of them. Despite this enough people have imitated Alex's violent actions in the film for it to become newsworthy.

Has anyone ever wanted to go eat more chicken because of some documentary showing how digusting factory farming really is? I wonder...

Ah, if only I could articulate myself with as much finesse as you [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

You've summed up my thoughts completely!

Quote :

Has anyone ever wanted to go eat more chicken because of some documentary showing how digusting factory farming really is? I wonder...

It certainly hasn't made me want to eat less that's for sure.

Imperator wrote:

Quote :

Has anyone ever wanted to go eat more chicken because of some documentary showing how digusting factory farming really is? I wonder...

It certainly hasn't made me want to eat less that's for sure.  

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Oh, me either. I love Popeye's.

TBH this question kinda pisses me off. In what way is it glorifying it? It's just a simple reenactment! Nothing more!

I don't believe so. I think it obviously dramatizes it but there's a very sober, eerie feel to it throughout. I think it's far from a glorification.