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1999 Movies and Millennial Masculinity CHRIS HOLMLUND On 20 April, the 110th birthday of Adolf Hitler, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold executed a plan they had hatched more than a year earlier . Storming Columbine High School near Littleton, Colorado, the two teens killed thirteen people and wounded more than thirty before committing suicide. Having named themselves the Trench Coat Mafia, the eighteenyear -old Harris and seventeen-year-old Klebold fired an estimated nine hundred rounds using two shotguns, a semiautomatic carbine, and a semiautomatic handgun. Terrified students with cell phones flooded 911 lines as more than eight hundred police massed outside. Mercifully, the thirty-plus pipe bombs the young killers had rigged around the school did not detonate . The media could not resist posing larger questions. Why would two white kids in a wealthy suburb close to Denver do such a thing? What was happening to our nation’s youth? What shape was American masculinity taking on the verge of what was widely—and anxiously—regarded as the new millennium? How much were the media, violent video games, and the Internet to blame? By the end of elementary school, it was reported, most children have seen eight thousand murders on various visual media (Cloud, “What?” 39). And from videos that Klebold and Harris had taken before their crime, released in December, it was clear that media violence really turned them on. “It’s going to be like fucking ‘Doom’!” said Harris, referring to one of his favorite video games. “Directors will be fighting over this story!” predicted Klebold. They speculated whether Spielberg or Tarantino would make a better film out of their story. With everyone—“niggers, spics, Jews, gays, fucking whites”—a potential target, the two promised they would “kickstart a revolution!” Not surprisingly, in May, when President Bill Clinton implored cinema owners to require young people to show photo I.D.s before granting admission to R-rated movies, Americans were not mollified. Nor were they 225 satisfied in June when Clinton commissioned a study on possible links between violent films, video games, and child violence. The killings continued to haunt the American imaginary the rest of the year. Hate crimes by kids and adults—not to mention racially motivated killings by cops— occurred nearly every month. Also troubling, hate had logged on. Rightwing racist and fascist Internet sites had increased by 55 percent the previous year, and local cells boasting a philosophy of leaderless resistance were mushrooming (Cloud, “Trading” 30). Renewed cries for gun control went unheeded; the National Rifle Association even held its national meeting in Denver, despite charges of poor taste in site selection. Chaos and violence were global themes. In the last days of November, more than 100,000 anti–free trade activists, labor supporters, and environmentalists rioted outside the annual World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in what became known as the “Battle of Seattle.” After months of air strikes, NATO peacekeepers entered the Serbian-dominated province of Kosovo in June only to discover that Serbs had massacred as many as 10,000 Albanians. Boris Yeltsin resigned suddenly as president of Russia on 31 December and designated Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to replace him. China cracked down on the Falun Gong spiritual sect, but continued human rights violations proved no obstacle to the country’s membership in the WTO. The United Nations imposed sanctions on Afghanistan for refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden, while U.N. weapons inspectors prepared to resume their work in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. There were deadly mud slides in Venezuela, earthquakes in Turkey and Taiwan, and the West Nile virus arrived in New York. Nearly one-third of the world’s population— which by this time had reached six billion—was infected by the TB bacterium , and more than fifty million were HIV positive. Climate change and disease threatened the world. On the brighter side, the world economy was booming, led by the United States for the ninth year in a row. A less auspicious statistic was seldom reported, however: the income gap between rich and poor was widening rapidly. The Dow Jones average ended the year at nearly 11,500 for the first time, and the U.S. budget showed an unprecedented surplus of $236 billion. The euro was introduced as the currency of the European Union. There were positive political and scientific developments, too. Northern Ireland was granted home rule; Panama assumed control of the Canal Zone; and Doctors without Borders...

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