lecture delivered at:
Working Papers in Gender Series, "Geeks, Jocks, and Gender: Reading Adolescent Cinema After Columbine." Syracuse University English and Women's Studies Departments. Syracuse, NY. 1999
and
Youth Schooling and Popular Culture Symposium. Syracuse, NY. 2002
Geeks, Jocks, and Gender: Reading the New Adolescent Cycle in Cinema after Columbine
As I've suggested elsewhere, what is important about studying representations of adolescence in American popular cinema is that the adolescent constitutes a "special" category for cultural production and has a unique function with respect to the reproduction of dominant norms. The teenage years are transitional -- identities are not fully formed and subjects are not yet constituted as moral and political agents. These unfixed subjects threaten to cross the boundaries which civilization erects in order to define itself as civilized, and thus highlights the fragility of the symbolic order that would maintain bounded oppositions at poles apart -- oppositions marked by the line between human and animal, male and female, living and dead, clean and unclean, natural and supernatural, innocence and evil, adult and child. Since the status of the adolescent with respect to citizenship, class, and sex is conditional at best, adolescence, as Henry Giroux has argued, is an empty category inhabited by the desires, fantasies and interests of the adult world. Representations of adolescence are "open" texts: negotiable with respect to binary calculations and contingent with respect to context. Hence, they are ambivalent with respect to authors, texts, and readers and can be interpreted for multiple and contradictory ends. Representations of adolescence may be at once productive of normative social meanings and at the same time a threatening site of rupture. Adolescence is a site of sanctioned rebellion while at the same time strictly controlled and regulated as a phase that must be reigned in and properly passed through so that youth will grow up to become part of parent culture, its dominant ideals, and binary logics. While all variety of cultural "transgressions" are permitted around the ambivalent trope of the adolescent, they are permitted precisely because these transgressions are deemed "safe," manageable and containable -- youth mature and grow out of "it" through structures of enculturation that strengthen the rule of Law. Adolescence is a sort of safety valve where the floodgates of sex, gender, and class transgressions can be opened up and then (in theory) willfully shut down and contained and order returned. But, the possibility for leakage is the transgressive promise of these adolescent texts -- the residue of which may shift the lines of intelligibility, throwing the stability of dominant oppositions into crisis.
In the last decade, images of adolescence have figured with increasing frequency in American popular narratives -- both fictional and factual -- featuring violence as central to the drama of adolescent life. These images of teens as perpetrators and victims of violence have been reflected back and forth between the cinema and the popular press. While some commentators condemn depictions of violent youth in movies and TV as inspirations for real events, others claim these images to be the subcultural voices of protest for tyrannized youth. Most notable of incidents that warranted the "news" category of late, was the violence that transpired at Columbine H.S. in April of 1999. Carrying several weapons and setting off homemade bombs, Eric Harris, 18, and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded about 26 others before they took their own lives.
Concurrently, on the fiction side, there has been a virtual explosion of popularity in movies (and TV shows) featuring teen characters in gruesomely violent dramas, announcing the triumphant return and revision of the teensploitation kill pic. Beginning with Scream in 1996, the popularity of the genre has continued to gain increasing momentum. These films have their roots in previous cycles of adolescent cinemas and particularly in the slasher genre which is, according to film critic, Carol Clover, "a transparent source for cultural and subcultural attitudes towards sex and gender" because it is less likely to be mediated by things like plot and, Clover continues, "because of its crudity and compulsive repetitiveness, gives us a clearer picture of current sexual attitudes." The slasher cinema that Clover refers to has evolved and changed and been updated with larger budgets and name brand stars who easily move between TV and film -- perhaps inaugurating a new media star text. A reading of the new teen kill pick still demands the critical lens of gender because they still, again quoting Clover, "present us in startling direct terms with a world in which male and female are at desperate odds but in which at the same time, masculinity and femininity are more states of mind than body." Furthermore, a reading must also consider the adolescent text as an exigence for recuperative discourses of enculturation which reaveal the current terms of citizenship. These updated slasher films have become part of and inseparable from the Columbine narrative as they have been blamed for inciting kids to violence, restricted from teen consumption, and mustered as evidence of the actual conditions of high school life. Given 1) the transaction between of the "fiction" and the real in shaping a narrative of Columbine 2) Clover's assertion that violent teen kill pics are allegories of gender and 3) the ambivalence of the adolescent text, I want to examine the ways in which the Columbine incident has been "read" and constituted as a media text -- an intertext -- woven through by popular cinematic texts while at the same time, the Columbine drama has obliged a revised reading of recent adolescent cinema. Such an approach highlights the fact that to "read" a text is simultaneously to constitute it, to give it meaning, and to reconfigure social realities and relations in the process.
It becomes the task in what follows to survey cultural uses of the adolescent in contemporary cinema as well as in contemporary "news" coverage, specifying the textual reversibility of these sites. I will first lay out the opposing responses to the Columbine incident with respect the fictional texts it seemed to both reflect and mirror back. Then I will lay out and examine what I find to be the four common features of contemporary adolescent cinema that bear on the readings of the analogue in the "news" texts. Finally, I will argue for an alternative reading strategy that will make possible a critique that accounts for the relationship between "actual" and "fictional" events without aiming to secure and fix a correct meaning, but rather to determine "what meanings and affects can legitimately be read in them." Such an approach promises to effect social change without reinscribing restrictive norms of gender, sex, class, and race but, on the contrary, describes the terms for imagining and activating new socialities, subjectivities, desires, and wills.
Responses to Columbine
While both denouncers and defenders of the cinema's violent adolescent landscape respond to the Columbine shootings as a call for social change, both ultimately reproduce a discourse reifying gender, class, and racial norms. Denouncers of violent media often disregard the fact that the main characters in all the real life tragedies are consistently male, white, working or middle-class, and living in rural or suburban areas -- thus, denouncers of violent media inadvertently reinscribe the paradigmatic straight, white, bourgeois, male subject as universal. Those that defend the media, on the other hand, describe a new suffering subject -- a white, male, bourgeois victim -- again, casting the universal male subject at center stage. The question then is how to examine these events through the lens of gender -- since attitudes about gender, as Clover maintains, might be at the bottom of the "fictional" counterparts. How is it that we can do such analysis without reinstalling a normative subject or drawing the subject's legitimacy from individualized, injured subjectivities and thus pronouncing once again that it is male activity that is the problem and it is hence, male (not female) activism that might lead to real social change -- again positing agency as a male prerogative -- is it possible (YES!). Such a fixing of the adolescent subject as male forecloses the promise in the ambivalence of the adolescent texts, codifying the meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification. I will show in what follows, how seemingly opposing readings of the Columbine incident both similarly recuperate and codify gender norms, fix the ambivalence of adolescence, and thereby limit the possibility for social change.
The violence at Columbine High that seemed to echo similar incidents in Springfield, Oregon, Jonesboro, Arkansas, Fayetteville, Tennessee, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, West Paducah, Kentucky, Pearl, Mississippi, and Conyers, Georgia (to name just a few) has inspired countless commentators to speculate on what provoked such adolescent rage. The incident was immediately read as a consequence of the proliferation of violent media and the irresponsibility of parents who did not police their children's activities. The meltdown in Littleton was taken up by defenders of V-chips, ratings systems, warning labels, and filtering software and a conservative outpouring of censorship followed with a rash of absurd regulations and policy strategies intended to control "anti-social" adolescents. Law and order types found a platform for their long-standing plan to turn high schools into military camps. Trench coats, backpacks, black clothing, white make-up, Goth music, and computer gaming symbols on t-shirts were banned in schools across the country accompanied by marked increases in gratuitous locker searches and metal detector installations. Pressure from media watchdog advocates of such measures persuaded the WB network officials into postponing the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season finale scheduled to air the week after the shootings due to its possibly inflammatory content (a giant serpent at high school graduation). President Clinton also seized the triangulating moment, calling for both stricter gun laws and a Hollywood summit on teen violence.
Writers like Sissela Bok were vindicated for their conservative platforms that denounce violent media which, according to Bok and others, causes adolescents to suffer from increased aggression, fear, desensitization, and an appetite for more involvement in violent activities. In her book, Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment, she argues that too much of any passive consumption of entertainment damages children's health by taking away opportunities for sports (as if that's not often violent) and other creative activities. In an interview with Ray Suarez for NPR's Talk of the Nation, Bok argues that especially "outsiders" -- kids who don't fit in -- are in danger of being possessed by violent images. Bok explains to Suarez that "children who feel uncertain, who feel unpopular, who have no self confidence and who feel bullied, they're often the ones who spend more time watching violent entertainment, and they get their kicks in that way, and then indeed they can act it out as well." [who doesn't feel uncertain, unpopular, and bullied in high school?]. Bok's universal adolescent subject is, by default, white, male, and middle class. In fact, Suarez makes the important point that different neighborhoods in the country pose different questions of real and imagined violence. For some children, the danger of being beaten, shot, or brutalized in one way or another is more proximate than for others and as adolescents, they will come to different conclusions about the relative safety of the world. Bok rejects this call to reflect on the totalizing category of "adolescence" and insists on generalizing from what is clearly a white, male, bourgeois paradigm. Her position on the dilatory effect of violent media accompanied by a universalizing notion of the adolescent is echoed in numerous currently popular discussions of American youth violence (Franklin Zimring, .
Not surprisingly, an equally vigilant response was organized around reading the Columbine incident as the tragic consequence of a society that stifled non-normative expressions of selfhood and individuality. The term "Geek profiling" was coined by Jon Katz, a Rolling Stone and Freedom Forum contributor, referring to the profile of the "outsider" described by Bok (and her ilk) and to the automatic mistrust and harassment of anyone who sported a trench coat or black nail polish in the days after the Columbine high massacre. Katz, the central conduit for a geek backlash movement introduced the term "geek profiling" in his new-media column for the Web site Slashdot which banners every page "News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters." His Slashdot column, "Voices From the Hellmouth," was named in honor of that great allegory of (white) high school angst, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ('Welcome to the Hellmouth' is the name of the first episode for the WB network). In his column, Katz observed that "in the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country went on a panicked hunt for oddballs in High School, a profoundly ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that left geeks, nerd, nonconformists and the alienated in an even worse situation than before." Katz claims that the big story out of Littleton is not that kids are out of control and violent, but that "for some of the best, brightest and most interesting kids, high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and anger . . . The big story was the spotlight the Littleton Colorado killings has put on the fact that for so many individualistic, intelligent, and vulnerable kids, high school is a Hellmouth of exclusion, cruelty, loneliness, inverted values and rage."
The response to his invective against violent media ragers and geek profilers drew e-mails from thousands of self-identified "geeks, nerds, dorks, and Goths" that crashed Katz's home computer every day for a week and crashed the entire Slashdot site night after night. Of the thousands of responses that got through, most were testimonies recounting school traumas with the classic fervor of the brutalized and oppressed. The students and graduates (whom Katz calls "survivors") almost without fail confessed to having harbored murderous fantasies against the jocks, the preps, and school in general. And they pleaded for compassion for every terrorized teen. Katz argues that the media has been "trying to get this message out for years" in a "string of comically-bitter teen movies from Hollywood and TV -- that for many kids, school is horrifying" and populated by forces of darkness. Katz again received more than a thousand e-mail messages in response to a two-part series called "Ticket Booth Tyranny," which talks about the sudden post-Columbine ticket booth harassment of teenagers trying to see movies with profane language or sexual imagery. In the weeks following Columbine, the 17 and under crowd were particularly pissed about being blocked from seeing Eyes Wide Shut, South Park and American Pie and media watchdog groups condemned the tasteless and untimely release of the teen splatter pic called Idle Hands about a seventeen year old slacker/dope smoker whose right hand becomes possessed, killing his parents and his two best friends.
Jane Dark, writing for the Village Voice astutely observed that a very strange thing had started happening. People began having something resembling empathy for the shooters -- not for their crime but for their crisis -- for what they told us about the terror and class divisions fissuring even affluent high school life. Katz explicitly writes that ”Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, along with the completely innocent people that they slaughtered, are also victims deserving of compassion." It appeared that Klebold and Harris were being reclaimed like the white boy's answer to Rodney King -- as with the highway of folks pulled over for "Driving While Black," geek profiling drew suspensions, abuse, and mandatory counseling for a wave of kids whose only crime was "Schooling While Weird." As Dark observes, the "geeks did something radical -- they got their hands on the discourse." That discourse that Dark is referring to is, of course, the discourse of identity. White, middle class boys appropriated the language and gesture of what was once the progressive stake of gay and lesbian anti-homophobic advocacy, civil rights movement politics, and feminist rallying. The kids who are talking about it have learned the codes of identity politics elegantly. Of Katz's thousands of responses to his Slashdot column, he received "hundreds comparing Littleton to Stonewall. I asked them, 'are you gay?' Most of them said 'No.' It was just that the analogy struck them, that this was their politicizing moment." But, this time, the group stepping forward to take its rightful place at the center stage in the drama of marginalization and oppression looks exactly like the big ballers and shot callers that identity politics developed in reaction to.
While Katz fails to specify the boy-ness of this crime, his rhetoric resonates with a popular interest in the plight of boyhood -- an interest, however, that just as thoroughly reinstalls a universal white male subject. William Pollack opens his best selling book (in the wake of Columbine), Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, with the pronouncement that "boys today are in serious trouble, including many who seem 'normal' and to be doing just fine. Confused by society's mixed messages about what's expected of them as boys, and later as men, many feel sadness and disconnection they cannot even name . . . Many of our sons are currently in a desperate crisis" (xxi). Pollack suggests that while we have rethought some of our ideas about girls, we are a society that is still judging the behavior of boys against outmoded ideas about masculinity that traps boys in what he calls a "gender straightjacket." Apparently having missed the last 50 years of American feminist, gay, and lesbian scholarship and activism, Pollack makes the novel declaration that boys are rewarded for conforming to ideals of masculinity, encouraged to be active, dominant, and independent (or masculine) while expressions of weakness, dependency, vulnerability, or empathy are labeled "feminine" and displays of such feelings are punished or stifled. NO DUH?!
Similarly, Richard Goldstein, responding specifically to the Columbine massacre and its aftermath, suggests that the crack down on nose rings and black nail polish was a subterfuge for a system that assigns status in proportion to gender conformity, relegating boys who can't meet the standards to the ranks of those that are included in America's most despised minority, the legion of failed men known as "faggots." Goldstein cites the rumors that the killers were gay by muck-rakers like Matt Drudge who seized on the fact that the shooters wore nailpolish as evidence that the killers were part of a pack of murderous nellies; by Jerry Falwell of Tinky Winky fame who reportedly called Harris and Klebold gay on Geraldo Live; and by another antigay divine, the Reverend Fred Phelps, whose followers picketed Littleton memorials with signs that claimed "Fags Killed Them." Goldstein embraces these accusations and turns Klebold and Harris's crime into a desparate critique of the tyranny of masculinity. So, in an odd turn of rhetorical events, Klebold and Harris -- despite their white supremacist discourse and murderous rampage -- became champions for antihomophobic advocacy. And, small l-libertarian defenders of the right to bear arms made rhetorical alliances with those who sought countermeasures to the oppressive norms of gender. Such alliances mark another familiar turn in the history of identity politics, where the well-off white boy is moved into the slot of the oppressed while simultaneously occupying the traditional role of the oppressor. Indeed, this ultimately forecloses the possibility for systemic social change as censorship and scapegoating have never been about progressive social change and speech authorized by the mere fact of suffering is rarely about equality or the massive reorganization of social power.
It may very well be that the high school massacre in America does indeed jump racial lines -- and a fascination with the event certainly jumps gender lines-- but as Jane Dark notices "its the whitest, boyest crime ever invented." The events, and their backlash, and their audience, make a remarkable story. But it's the story of a fairly specific slice of the American population pie and a story that has been told and retold in film texts in various cycles of adolescent cinema. The direction I want to move in this paper now is towards an interrogation of how these readings of Columbine have been shaped by and simultaneously shape the readings of other cultural texts featuring "violent youth" -- most specifically, the image so currently popular in American cinema -- the teen kill pic. I am here concerned, not with whether these filmic images incited the violence at Columbine, but how their representations of adolescents intersected with narrative explanations of the Columbine tragedy. What is so strikingly different about the film texts, as opposed to the "real" dramas is that they often do feature women as actively battling the forces of evil, particularly in the genre bending category of the updated slasher film. But, as Clover suggests in her discussion of slasher movies of previous cycles, gender in the slasher movie is reversible and ambiguous (the killer is castrated and Final girl is phallicized). It is the male killer's tragedy that his incipient femininity is not reversed but completed (castration) and the Final Girl's victory that her incipient masculinity is not thwarted but realized (phallicization). Slasher movies, according to Clover, invite identification with the female character (who often has a 'male' name -- like Syd in Scream) because she is masculine. According to Clover, such adjustments do shift the lines of intelligibility for gender representation even though they finally restore order (and resolve castration anxiety) by "eliminating women" altogether as either early victims or reconstituting them as masculine (Final Girl). Barbara Creed counters Clover and asserts that all these films do not resolve castration anxiety and that the final girl is indeed a girl (not a feminized male) and a monstrous threat to masculinity and thus, these films are powerful critiques of the norms of gender. Whether we believe that the slasher movie subverts or recuperates gender norms, the point is that the gender critique obliges a reader to stipulate the terms of gender representation at its most spectacular - a point that also bears on a reading of the spectacle of Columbine. The ambivalence of adolescence fixed in the reaffirmation of gender norms. I will now examine four main features of recent adolescent narrative cinema that have impacted on the meaning of "news" events of late and the ways in which they may or may not work to reinscribe gender norms and manage potentially transgressive adolescent texts.
Four Features of New Adolescent Cinema
First, adult voices virtually always emerge from the voices of children and teens. From The Exorcist, The Omen, and Child's Play, through Scream, Disturbing Behavior (1998, Dir. David Nutter, Wrt. Scott Michael Rosenberg), Cruel Intentions, Jawbreaker, and The Faculty -- the adult fear of adolescents speaking with authority and wit is projected onto monstrous teens. In Disturbing Behavior, for example, a mad scientist adult is inserting microchips into the pineal glands of all non-Jocks and turning them into a sports-oriented, preppy cult called the Blue Ribbons. They're evil ways are implanted in them by a nefarious adult whose bidding they follow, until their "natural" teenage hormones overpower them and force them to do "bad." CLIP By using youth to voice adult trangressions, the film ultimately projects the fear that we cannot control the technical/media limits of adolescence -- the modified V-chip that is implanted in the adolescent brain malfunctions horribly, releasing the monstrously violent and sexually extreme youth.
In fact, their monstrous precocity is often sexualized, which leads to the second feature of contemporary adolescent cinema: the regularized assertion of the possibility of non-straight affiliations and improper gender role playing. Clip: Cruel Intentions, Jawbreaker, Faculty, Carrie II, One of the Boys. What appears different about this new cycle of popular adolescent cinema is that the queer specter of the earlier adolescent movie is made manifest and the ambivalence of adolescent sexuality is often featured. While films of previous adolescent cycles often punished the implicitly gay character for being unspecifically different (usually jealous/in love with their friend), this new cycle names the outsider as such and often makes comedy of homophobic reparte -- a verbal harrassment that all "different social types" must endure, thereby, in some way, harassment becomes democratizing -- the great equalizer -- as all varieties of "outsiders" are subject to the "fag" treatment. Finally, the narratives are resolved with heterosexual romance - the proper management of an adolescent transgressive sexual "phase" again, defusing the fears of queer youth, the "gay gene" and the accompanying moral panic about gays and lesbians having children and spawning more of their kind.
This then brings me to the third feature of new adolescent cinema, the class system that is often the central plot device driving the narrative as the tyranny of class boundaries is often the main obstacle for the hero's struggle. Cliques are rigid -- the jocks, the geeks, the goths, the preps -- and crossing social lines results in conflict and high drama. It is usually, again, heterosexual romance that transcends class boundaries initiated by the need to come together to defend oneself against a common enemy (forces of darkness, or uncaring, evil adults) -- but finally, in the end, class logic is recuperated. Clip: disturbing behavior, she's all that, jawbreaker, the faculty.
This brings me to an explanation of the fourth feature of the '90s adolescent cycle which involves the collapse of real and representation through direct intertextual references to the plots, characters, and dialogue of other adolescent movies, particularly those that comprised the '80s cycle of adolescent cinema (or are nostalgic pieces often set in the '80s). The nightmare of adolescence, according to these movies, is the absence of history as progressive politics and social movements (like feminism, etc) are being erased from the collective unconscious. Adolescent rebellion can only be a rebellion against the recycled plots of other adolescent texts -- this is the whole deal with Scream -- Kevin Williamson, writer, and Wes Craven, director are the masters of intertext. CLIP Scream, the faculty, jawbreaker (Heathers, Rock and Roll high school), GO borrows dialogue from breakfast club. In The Faculty (1998), another Williamson script, directed by genre appropriator, Robert Rodriquez, adolescent alienation is literalized when aliens take over a high school. Different social types are brought together when the whole staff and all the students of a high school in Ohio are being infected by an alien parasite. The geek boy and the Goth girl figure out that all these sci fi movies like invasion of the body snatchers, and all these directors who made them were really visited by aliens, and maybe they are aliens themselves and they are just setting us up with these movies just so no one would believe it if it really happened. Case, the geek who hypothesizes this epistemological collapse explains to his new Goth friend, "everyone gets hung up on the science part -- they're getting to us through the fiction!" So, they are able to figure out the alien plot by recounting the plots of other fictions. In another very Breakfast Club ending, the Goth girl (lesbian) ends up wearing lavender and kissing the Jock, the drug dealer ends up on the football team, and the geek ends up with the head cheerleader. So the players have changed, but the institution stays the same. Casey's final word as he kisses Delilah Prophet, his new popular girlfriend is "things sure have changed, haven't they." Of course, the answer is NOT -- the ideals of high school life and success and gender conformity still rule and the movies haven't changed either.In another very Breakfast Club scene, all the kids have to take drugs in order to prove that they are not one of them (the drugs with no-doze dehydrate and kill the alien parasite).
Even The Blair Witch Project is a film that was about film -- about making one -- and then the scary part comes when the film they are making becomes the film they are in. In fact, I would argue, the reason why Blair Witch was so popular was because it was ultimately a Kevin Williamson movie. Teens from different social groups are forced to get along under extraordinary circumstances to do battle against unexplained dark forces of evil. The only way to survive is to know the codes of film -- for them, it was to continue making their documentary -- because the filmmakers aren't supposed to die in a documentary. Anyone who gave up on the film project, died.
(I would also add a fifth feature -- the tv/cinema star image)
The ultimately gender normative prerogative in a whole tradition of adolescent cinema informed the conflicting readings of the Columbine drama. I am not, here, arguing that Columbine is in fact imitating fiction, rather, I am suggesting that diverse respondents are reading it as yet another adolescent drama that derives its narrative formula from popular cinema -- one that explicitly invokes the question of gender. Rephrasing the killer's assertion in Scream that "movies don't create psychos -- movies make psychos more creative" -- I would contend that movies don't incite kids to violence, but they do compel adults and an adult media to read that violence through an oppositionally structured dominant logic. Henry Jenkins (Prof. of comparative media studies at MIT) makes the case even more explicitly for the extratextual impact of media on the reading of the Columbine events. He maintains that while movies and interactive games cannot be blamed for Klebold and Harris's shooting spree, Klebold and Harris did construct a media mosaic that was indisputably dark and disturbed. But, Jenkins notices, millions of other teenagers use the same puzzle pieces to construct a very different mythology with which to identify. Jenkins concludes that "You can't say that popular culture did something to [Klebold and Harris] . . . Its more accurate to say they did something with popular culture." When they become part of secondary news-based/documentary [discussion of Frontline documentary on Kip Kingel] narrative, the confusion between an exploration of adolescence and a commentary on the lives and behavior of real-life adolescence becomes difficult to disentangle. While the cited films may have indeed played a role in the Columbine shooting, their role was not that of encouraging violent behavior through modeling (as denouncers of "violent media" would have it). Rather, the films provide a narrative to high school life that reinforces a class system and reinstalls the universal, straight, white, bourgeois subject. And, while the films teach us that we cannot read Columbine outside an analysis of gender, Columbine teaches us that we cannot read popular adolescent cinema outside a critique of the rhetoricity of adolescence.
As I said at the outset, adolescence is an open and ambivalent text. The critical project that I hope to initiate is not to manage or cover over the ambivalence of adolescence, but rather to specify the historicity and the consequences of such ambivalence in cultural texts. Critical readers of culture and theorists of social change might perform the multiple, undetermined, and contingent possible permutations of such representations. We may rehearse subversive as well as complicit interpretations made available in a single representation rather than recovering a single meaning. The promise of such a transactional approach to reading the adolescent text is that it pays attention to the transgressive possibility of the popular adolescent text -- the leakage, as I referred to it earlier -- the stuff that gets by normative interests -- bringing those norms to crisis. I do think that the intersections of real and representation in responses to Columbine marks them as panicked discourses -- doing damage control for a crisis of cultural norms -- it becomes my/our next job to specify the nature and consequences of those trasgressions.