Interview With Dave Cullen – Author Of Columbine

June 8, 2009 at 10:59 am by Morbid  

We’re almost halfway through 2009, and my favorite read of the year has very little competition. I’m not sure if it will even be a contest. Dave Cullen’s Columbine was ten years in the making, and it may be another ten before we see its equal. Riveting, educational, and emotionally powerful, Cullen’s book has it all. Columbine has the potential to do real good if it reaches a wide audience. Seeing the book storm up the NYT Best Seller list and hang around for months is heartening. For those of you that haven’t read our review, please do so. If you don’t have a copy of the book yet, remedy that.

I was going to hold off and post this interview after hours. But the subject matter is too relevant to some of the stories we post here and in our forums. Thanks, swivel, for yet another great interview with some great questions and thanks to Mr. Cullen for not only the book, but for taking time out to answer the questions with what seems to be a lot of thought. – Morbid

swivel: I’m sure this book was a challenge to write and required some tough decisions from you and the publisher.  Could you share a little bit of the emotions you went through in order for this book to become a reality?

Dave Cullen: It was Day Two on this story that got me hooked. I wasn’t thinking of a book then, but I knew I would be coming back. The first afternoon was chaos: kids crying, screaming, hugging and spouting the most terrifying stories without stopping to breathe. It was unsettling to be out there, to say the least, but it was very much what you might expect.

The next morning took me completely by surprise. Nobody was crying. The boys, in particular, were just blank. At first I was afraid to ask them about it—I didn’t want to be the jerk reporter psychoanalyzing them. But I approached a group of boys gingerly about it and discovered they wanted to talk about it. I talked to kids about it all that day. They knew exactly what they were going through. It was the first of many times that I was impressed by how articulate they were about their situation. But they were just as candid that they had no idea what to do about it.

I was scared. Would this be a lost generation of 2,000 kids, permanently damaged? I had to find out. That’s when I knew I’d have to keep coming back.

That’s what a lot of the book ended up being about. Roughly half is about the killers—what drove them, how they evolved into killers—and the other half is about the survivors. Oddly enough, the survivors proved to be the tough part on me. I was naïve in the beginning, knew nothing about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and had no idea journalists could absorb it. Doctors, EMT, homicide detectives and anyone close to trauma can—it’s called Secondary PTSD. That sneaked up on me the first year. Eventually I got involved with a great organization called the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, which taught me a great deal about my own limitations and also about more humane ways to cover victims.

I’d like to say that made me smart enough to see the warning signs in myself when they returned, but I was a little pig-headed about it. In 2006, I wrote the toughest two chapters—especially the heroic attempts by two eagle scouts to save Dave Sanders—and then there was a spate of four school shootings in ten days and the combination knocked me off my feet. I was pretty much a mess for about a month, didn’t get much work done, and got seriously worried about my situation, and then I got help.

The good news about PTSD relapses for anyone out there experiencing one, is that they tend to be much shorter than the original bout. At the time, it doesn’t feel that way. It felt like I was back at Day One, which is terribly depressing. But that’s rarely true, and I got to therapists who were experienced enough to know that, and just telling me helped me get through.

swivel: The lack of photography for a work of non-fiction seemed odd before we eventually came to appreciate the move.  Was this an ethical or a publishing decision?

Cullen: I never envisioned pictures. Films influence my work a great deal, and songwriters do, too. I try to create my scenes visually the way films, songs and novels do. I like books that transport you to another world and allow you to create it in your own mind. If photos are necessary, then I haven’t done my job yet.

Now if the reader feels satisfied with the image but still feels curious about the actual people, or the expressions on their faces April 20 or during the recovery, that’s understandable, and that stuff is all over the web. In fact, I’ve got all sorts of pictures and links on my site, so they can get to it very easily if it will enhance the experience for them either after or during the reading. But I wanted the story to stand on its own.

swivel: We loved the structure of the book. Information is revealed in the same manner that it did over the days, weeks, and months following the tragedy.  How worried were you to stick with this unorthodox framework?

Cullen: That’s a relief to hear. The structure was my biggest challenge, in terms of the storytelling. It literally took me eight years to figure it out. I was never worried about working with an unorthodox structure, but I was endlessly worried about exactly how to build the trellis to hold this story, and how to get it just right.

I knew, for example, that I wanted to avoid the Saving Private Ryan Problem. The first 25 minutes of that film were electrifying. The storming of Normandy was violent, harrowing, terrifying—just riveting. Nothing in the 145 minutes that followed in that film came close, emotionally. There is a reason 99% of all films, novels, operas, symphonies, and plays climax near the end. Whether or not you resolve the plot at the end is not the most important issue. The timing of the reader/viewer’s emotional climax needs to fall toward the end for it to be a powerful experience.

So if I began four days before the attack, and began it around page 50–which was my initial instinct (give the reader enough time to get invested, but not too long to grow frustrated), then the emotional intensity would peak from approx pp. 50-100—a variation on The Saving Private Ryan problem.

That turned out to be the easiest structural problem to resolve. Juggling the ten story lines I planned, that was hard. But I was happy with the way it worked out.

swivel: Few people seem to be amenable to the idea that much of who we are is determined the day we are born.  Do you think this is due to an ignorance of the scientific literature, or to our desire to simplify and more easily assign blame for people’s choices?

Cullen: I think it’s a basic human desire to believe in Free Will—and the prospect that we have control over our own destiny. And I think we do, to a great extent. I recoil at the idea that we are chained to a particular outcome, and I don’t see it so. We are born with all sorts of gifts and limitations, but we decide what to do with them. I’m on about my fifth career, for instance. My life could have taken so many different routes, and sometimes has.

It’s tricky, though. There are limitations. I could never be an NFL linebacker or a piano player. My actual options about what I can excel at are somewhat limited. Those don’t sound particularly extreme, but for some people, someone severely disabled, for example, the options grow extremely narrow. And psychopathy, that’s a really tough one. We can’t be certain yet, but it seems inborn. So how much do we hold them accountable? I was shocked to discover that Dr. Hervey Cleckley, who wrote the original classic on them, The Mask of Sanity, made the argument that they were not completely responsible.

I think that’s unwise. We have to hold them accountable, because our safety depends on it. And while they don’t make the ethical distinctions we do, they make practical decisions. As long as they know we are holding them accountable, that will keep most of them in check to some degree. Letting them off the hook would be foolish, in my opinion.

swivel: Two of us had differing reactions to your portrayal of Wayne Harris.  In your opinion, were his notes on Eric’s behavior an attempt to exonerate, explain, foretell, cover-up, or something else?

Cullen: That’s interesting. I think it’s very unlikely that Wayne ever expected those notes to be seen by anyone, except perhaps his wife. He was just taking notes, organizing his thoughts. He wanted to be a good dad.

swivel: More speculation:  What do you think would have become of Eric and Dylan had they never met?  Would it have made a difference?

Cullen: It would have made a tremendous difference. Columbine was a perfect storm of events. So many things could have derailed it. But there’s no telling what might have taken its place. It’s highly unlikely Dylan would have murdered without Eric. He might have killed himself. Eric might have dreamed a different dream, but his fantasies were all horrible. He might have struck in a different place and a different time, but it probably would have been awful. The longer he lived, the more dangerous he would grow. He was funding his attack on his Blackjack Pizza wages, complaining about how quickly the money went. Imagine him with a five- or six-figure salary, building really big bombs and learning to make them properly.

swivel: We have no problem coming into schools at an early age and testing vision, hearing, spines, and allergies.  Is it only a matter of time before we add brain scans to this regiment and act on what we find?  If psychopathy turns out to be just as biological as near-sightedness, and proper medication is a constant prop no different than prescription eyeglasses, do you think the two should be viewed differently from an ethical viewpoint?

Cullen: You’ve hit on something important, that Dr. Cleckley saw intuitively, and has been illustrated with fMRI brain scans just in the past ten years. The brains of psychopaths do seem to function differently. So ethically, it gets thorny, as I alluded above. We don’t actually understand them well enough to answer these questions definitively. Thorough research on psychopaths is ridiculously overdue. We need to understand them better so we can identify, treat them and combat them better. We also need to expand programs which teach psychopaths to control their own behavior in more acceptable ways.

swivel: What major details did you have completely wrong in your own mind before you began seriously researching this book?

Cullen: Dylan. Dylan was the great surprise. I didn’t seriously contemplate the book until after I’d sorted out most of the myths, but I didn’t understand the killers at all. When I came to understand Eric, that gave me tremendous relief, but not surprise. He made sense. But Dylan was so much harder. The more I learned about him for awhile, the harder he was to understand. That journal he left looks nothing like a killer. All those fluttering hearts, and the love, love, love! This boy was going to open fire on people? It goes on for two years, and for most of that time, it’s hard to reconcile. His evolution is hard to believe. Dylan himself is a tragedy.

swivel: We have no doubt that this book is going to be wildly successful.  We are promoting Columbine as a must-read.  Does this put pressure on you to move from being a journalist to a full-time author?  What other books would you like to write?

Cullen: First, I’ve got to say that I’ve been blown away by the response, and I feel kind of awkward even responding. I’m grateful, though, that sites like yours have been so generous and helped the book reach an audience. Books are my first love, and the success of Columbine will help make more possible. I’m attracted to the long form: immersing myself in a place, a culture, an event—whatever takes hold of my curiosity—and hopefully taking the reader there. So I’ve dreamed of a life combining magazine pieces with books. Magazine writing gets me into the field, exposes me to new situations, and gives me a chance to cover more ground—I don’t want to spend ten years on every piece. But when a big one grabs a hold of me—whether from a magazine piece or on its own—I hope to tackle it as a book. I predict that books will occupy most of my time, but I don’t have a great track record at predicting my own future.

swivel: When you lay in bed at night and dream about the reception of this book, what is your greatest hope and your worst nightmare?

Cullen: The hope is easy: that it will move people. That they will get drawn into the story and not want to put it down, and when they finish, they will feel richer for having read it. I also hope it reaches lots of people. I don’t want to be coy about that.

The dreads could fill up the entire interview. But a handful stand out. The worst is if the people portrayed in the book felt I got it wrong. That would be the most devastating. Next would be a “so what” response. If people thought it added nothing to their understanding, that would feel like ten wasted years.

Columbine is a must-read. Cullen’s book begins the arduous task of dismantling a dangerous machine that resides in each of us. A machine that  leads to the repetition of tragedy. It’s our desire to attribute the cause of all actions directly to our environment, leaving no room for innate dysfunction. We do this to free up our blaming mechanisms and prevent the exculpation of those that do harm. However comforting this delusion may be, we will never make progress if we base our societal fixes on bad data.

The truths about sociopaths and psychopaths are disturbing, but we must try to absorb what good science is teaching us. Assuming that we know all there is to know of the human condition, and that every fact should conform precisely to our personal desires, is a recipe for disaster. The biological and chemical nature of life makes it inherently unfair. Twins may be born conjoined. A human can be born blind, crippled, autistic, or in thousands of other disadvantageous conditions. Fighting to assist those that have easy-to-spot physical deficiencies while we ignore (or worse, blame) those with behavioral ones is not simply cruel… it’s dangerous.