Becoming Your Fantasy in Virtual Munich Beer Hall

AMANGANSETT, N.Y. — Of all the bizarre sidelights to the horrifying massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., Tuesday, the most bizarre may have been the story of the students trapped inside the school who called local TV stations on their cell phones and provided brief commentaries on the action. According to one report, they signed off only because they feared the intruders might be watching television themselves and thus discover the whereabouts of the cell-phone users. All of which suggests that even for the perpetrators and their victims, television was the great mediator.

By now, this is hardly surprising. Like so many real-life dramas in America, the Littleton tragedy became a media event even before the smoke had cleared and anyone knew what was really happening. Copters buzzed overhead, reporters swarmed the scene and commentators were soon delivering sententious analyses of what it all meant, giving us a sense of deja vu.

But tragedies like this are media events not only because the media immediately latch onto them. Often they are media events in two far more important senses: first, because the perpetrators usually seem to have modeled their behavior after certain figures in the popular culture; and, second, because the rampages seem ultimately to have been staged for the media on the assumption that if you kill it, they will come. Or, put another way, what we witnessed at Littleton was not just inchoate rage. It was a premeditated performance in which the two gunmen roamed the school dispatching victims, whooping with delight after each murder. Without pop culture, the slaughter would have been unimaginable.

Begin with the killers. In the inevitable post-mortems that follow these horrors, it was reported that the outcasts Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were part of a high-school clique whose members wore long black trench coats and which dubbed itself the Trench Coat Mafia, a cinematic image if ever there was one. They were also devotees of the computer games "Doom" and "Quake," in which players prowl virtual hallways shooting virtual victims with virtual guns. They worshiped Adolf Hitler, loved Goth music and had a special fondness for Marilyn Manson, the mordant rock star whose satanic persona is designed to scandalize parents of his fans. In short, Harris and Klebold were creatures of pop culture.