Weapons: An Allegory for School Shootings
Spoiler alert. Please do not continue reading if you haven’t seen the movie and would like to.
I emerged from the movie theater, anxious to text my friends that I had just seen Weapons, and I couldn’t shake this strange thought.
It’s not immediately obvious, but upon reflection, this movie is about school shootings.
There is one — only one — obvious hint. This takes place during the dream sequence of Archer Graff, the grieving father of one of the missing 17 children. Archer dreams that he follows his son into a house that looks just like his, and as he gazes up at the sky, he sees a giant assault rifle floating above the house. The gun glows with the red neon letters of a clock: 2:17, the exact time that all the children ran into the streets and disappeared.
Why is there an assault rifle floating in the sky? Once we learn the real reason why the kids disappeared — witchcraft, to put it simply — we realize this wasn’t foreshadowing at all. Definitely not foreshadowing in the way that the audience sees Aunt Gladys at least three times before we officially “meet” her. So what is the assault rifle, and what does it symbolize?
The plot of the film centers around what is essentially a mass casualty event; an entire classroom of kids, all taken out all at once. The exact moment.
One moment they’re there. The next moment they’re not.
As the audience begins to piece together what happened through the perspective of different characters, we get a taste of what it’s like in the aftermath of something as horrific as a school shooting.
With a mass shooting, there is no “mystery” to solve, because we know exactly what happened — but still, it cannot be understood. Something so violent cannot be explained, even if you know minute by minute how it all went down. So we try to “solve” it, and never really succeed.
The second Aunt Gladys steps into Alex Lily’s house, she changes the Lily family household forever. The same way a shooter can appear seemingly out of nowhere, descend upon a school, and permanently change people’s lives in a matter of moments. People try to make sense of it, even though it simply makes no sense. It will never make sense.
I find it interesting that when Aunt Gladys asks Alex to return home with objects belonging to every kid in his class, Alex steals everybody’s name tags. He literally takes their names. Their names, their identities, are stolen from them — and then they just become a number. The 17 missing children. I find it eerily familiar to how the media reduces children to a simple statistic after a catastrophic event like a school shooting: how many dead, how many injured.
The American public becomes numb to the shocking monotony of gun violence in schools, and the only thing that sticks in the mind — if anything at all — is the number.
At the beginning of the movie, the narrator says that the whole town covered up what happened because they were so embarrassed that they couldn’t prevent it from happening in the first place. Why does this remind me of how this country cannot do a damn thing to end gun violence in schools, despite all of the bloodshed and outrage? We simply move on, brace ourselves for the next catastrophe to take place, and pray it doesn’t happen to us.
At the end, the children survive, and yet the movie doesn’t end exactly on a hopeful note. We are told by the narrator — who I assume is Alex — that some of the children have started talking again. Perhaps they are finding a way to navigate their trauma. But the last shot is of Archer’s son, Matthew, gazing with dead eyes into the camera.
The survivors appear into the world again, yet they are covered in blood. Still somewhat under the effect of a witch’s spell. Changed forever.
I believe this movie is asking us, how do we truly heal from such a violent event? Are there some traumatic experiences that cannot ever be completely healed?
Guns do eventually play an important role in the final showdown of the movie. Justine uses Paul’s handgun against him just before he strangles her to death. Then, she uses the handgun one more time to shoot James to prevent him from killing Archer. I can’t help but find it ironic that at the end of the movie, the schoolteacher is the one who uses a gun to disarm the villains — exactly what opponents of gun control suggest we do to protect our kids.
But I don’t think that’s what the creators of Weapons suggest we do. I’m still trying to figure that part out.
