Freaks, Aliens, and the Social Other: Representations of Student Stratification in U.S. Television's First Post-Columbine Season

Subdivisions
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
Subdivisions
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out

—Rush, "Subdivisions" (1982)

Times have not become more violent.
They have just become more televised.

—Marilyn Manson, "Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?"

A curious temporality connects the horrific carnage that took place at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. Prior to the massacre of twelve students and one teacher and the suicides of the two teen assailants, Columbine had no real relevance outside of its immediate locale. Rather, the school could have been viewed as a relatively banal template of middle-American normalcy, with its suburban location, its balanced commitments to scholarly and athletic excellence, and its widely publicized dedication to Catholic Christian values. Columbine was, simply stated, undistinguished from other schools of its kind; it was just like schools throughout the nation, a fact that reinforced the fear and concern among authorities, parents, and students, who believed, "If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere." Yet since the incident, our society can speak of the post-Columbine era in a meaningful way. The temporality of the term simultaneously connotes a period of individual pain, familial suffering, anger, solace, healing, and national soul searching as well as a new historical period into which Americans have collectively entered.

This essay's focus is on the first post-Columbine television season, during which three teen-oriented, high school-based programs—Freaks and Geeks, Popular, and Roswell—premiered. Columbine in many ways constitutes one potential referent for these three programs; indeed, since April 1999, fictional and nonfictional narratives of school harassment, social stigmatization, alienation, and violence can be associated with the images and discourses of the Columbine moment. The dominant analytic questions are, In the aftermath of the Columbine incident, what factors of teen experience and school dynamics were narratively nominated? Whose points of view are privileged in these portrayals? How might these programs be read in relation to Columbine? As I will argue, the Columbine incident exists as a powerful influence on the framing and interpretation of these programs as they attempt to capture and depict school stratification and teen anxieties and interactions in either dramatic or comedic forms.

"We Are . . . Columbine": Reading the Aftermath

During the immediate aftermath of the Columbine incident the nation rapidly assumed the duties of assigning sense to the aggressors' actions, constructing a history of the act that was frequently defined as being "incomprehensible." The predominant objective among mainstream media was to determine a rationale and somehow establish why these particular young men—Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—did "it," probing the past by charting their activities in the days and months leading up to the occurrence. For example, the cover of the May 3, 1999, issue of Newsweek posed the question "Why?" in large font, while Time's cover on the same date read: "The monsters next door. What made them do it?" As Time reported, "the story of the slaughter at Columbine High School opened a sad national conversation about what turned two boys' souls into poison" (Gibbs 25), establishing the notion of life before Columbine and life after.

The Boston Globe zeroed in on a crucial facet of the school's social environment involving teen subcultures and social difference, with articles appearing under the headlines "Outside Culture: A Guide to Terms that Emerged from Colorado Tragedy" (April 23, 1999) and "Looking Closely at Littleton Means Seeing the Corrosive Effect of Humiliation" (Brelis E1-2). Time reporter Adam Cohen similarly identified the school's social order and the hierarchy of power existing at Columbine as a significant factor in the incident, with his analysis appearing under the headline "A Curse of Cliques" (44-45). As these articles...