Why school? - interview with film critic Camille Paglia - Interview

Interview, July, 1999 by Ingrid Sischy

The massacre at Columbine High School in April - and the school shootings that have made headlines before and since - have focused the nation's attention on the state of our teens, in the frenzy to explain appetites for destruction, blame has been assigned far and wide: to popular culture, technology, absentee parents, negligent teachers. But what really is driving young people to violence? As part of our Interview special on teen culture old and new, we invited critic Camille Paglia to wrap her mind around today's high school experience.

INGRID SISCHY: Why do you think American suburban high schools have become such apocalyptic places?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: I have serious questions about whether public school education as we know it is helping people or twisting their psyches. It's an unnatural construct, and it's a relatively recent development in the history of the world. It's a cage for all kinds of natural hormonal energies that cannot get expressed, and I think the whole system should be smashed and we should begin over again. The explosions of violence that we've been seeing are occurring mainly in suburban schools because they are a world unto themselves. They don't have the reality of an urban environment nor its multiple types of people with different interests. In suburban and rural environments, the school has taken on way too much importance in young people's lives. It has become the ultimate symbol of a reality that you want to destroy if you can't get it to work your way.

People keep saying video games and movies caused the violence. It's absolutely the reverse. Part of the attraction young people have to violent video games is simply a reaction to their imprisoning school system and their namby-pamby suburban environments, which are completely homogenized from coast to coast. Video games are the only things that give young people a sensory experience. These young people are longing for something, and their entire world is that of popular culture and media. I'm not saying that's terrible. But for kids in these banal environments, popular culture has become this hallucinatory, atomized freak show. They live in a freak show in their minds. And the harsher and wilder the video games or the speed metal music, the more inspired the young people feel, because there's nothing else in the cultural environment to inspire them.

It used to be there were spiritual messages coming from popular music. The message my generation was getting from the music and the great foreign films of the '60s was about something bigger than the suburban nothingness of postwar American culture. The music of Jimi Hendrix or the Stones was all about connecting with something greater than yourself, and that sense is gone now. So I really understand this impulse toward the drama of guns and bomb threats. Because what else do young people have to look forward to? A great job? Public service?

When I think back to when I grew up, in the late '50s and early '60s, I realize I felt like a prisoner myself. I felt the same warehousing that I see these young people suffering from now. I've often said The Twilight Zone was the ultimate statement about that era because it showed the nice orderly surface of life being disrupted by subterranean, occult, or demonic forces. Only when I became an adult did I realize that our parents had been repressing the horrors of reality, trying to give us a better life than the ones they had. They lived through the Depression, World War II, the atom bomb, and they wanted to keep this elemental reality away from us. But it was still there: Everyone I knew had parents with some experience of war.

But these young people today have nothing. Nothing has happened to them in their lives. And when you have a situation like this, one of blankness and anomie and apathy, you get a recipe for the rise of fascism. Young men like the murderers at Columbine are drawn to Hitler because he had a mission. A huge, panoramic vision like Hitler's is attractive to them; it gives them some sense of what it is to be a man. But look at Hitler. Look at the Nazi leaders. They were mutants. None of them was a specimen of masculinity. But they were in love with the cult of manhood. And whenever there's a humiliation of men - as Germany suffered after World War I - you get this longing for the phallic, rigid, ejaculatory, gun-toting warrior.

So one of the biggest problems is that there has been a suppression of the masculine in our culture, and not just because feminism has been questioning it, but because there is no room in our service-sector economy for anything genuinely masculine. Now men and women do exactly the same kind of work; they are interchangeable in the office. You have to be like everybody else, and the training starts early. By sitting still in school you learn how to sit still in the office. Everything is repression, bringing you down, taking the rough edges off. Making sure you fit into that little square hole. We've been saying to young men who are at their hormonal height: "Sit in that chair. And if you can't sit perfectly still for an hour and a half, then there's something wrong with you." Ordinary, healthy male energy is treated as something that needs to be reformed, so there's all this massive doping with Ritalin. People say tobacco and alcohol are bad, but Ritalin is fine! I say, give them tobacco, give them liquor. These things are life enhancing, creativity enhancing. Great art has been created with both tobacco and liquor. But what we've got instead is widespread use of prescription chemicals. Shouldn't it tell us something that we need massive amounts of Ritalin to keep the kids in class?