Bulletproof, a new documentary on US schools in the era of mass shootings, traces a horrific, absurd, and mundane status quo
Bulletproof, a sly, sharp-eyed documentary on US school safety in the era of mass shootings, traces a horrific and absurd status quo. A lockdown drill at an everywhere high school, students crouched under desks, in corners. A tracking badge system for a district in
Texas City, Texas, which shows administrators every person’s exact location on campus; a first-grade teacher in
Colorado learning to shoot a gun so she can protect her “kiddos”; a department head displaying his district’s 22 AR-15s, since “being in the tactical field myself I understand the importance of superior firepower.” Cut to high-schoolboys playing
basketball, a homecoming game, cheerleading practice, banter on the bleachers.
It’s a quiet gut punch of a film, one that takes in the culture of violence in the US through observations of routine rather than infamous ruptures. Numerous documentaries – Song of Parkland, Us Kids, and After
Parkland on the aftermath of the
shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school on 14 February 2018 – have examined the unfathomable and sickening mundanity of school shootings in the US, as well as a youth-led movement to restrict access to guns. But Bulletproof, directed by Todd Chandler, takes a more oblique yet still chilling approach: the normal that routine violence, fear and political gridlock have wrought on school districts across the country.