American Tragedy

A movie every parent should watch. Any parent could find themselves in the shoes of Sue Kiebold. The movie demonstrates the struggles kids go through and how parents don't always see the signs. A real life drama highlighting the need for more focus on mental health...particularly with our kids. An eye-opener that all parents should see.

I thought this was going to be an open account from the family of a mass murderer. Instead it was positioned as a mental health piece where she describes herself as a parent of a suicide child? Huh? Yes he committed suicide and he obviously had mental health issues but he intentionally and vindictively murdered and attempted to murder lots of people first. They have other parents discussing their kids actual suicides, again how is that relent to her? I do feel sorry for her to have had the loss of her son but she isn't looking at it rationally. I would have imagined she would have went on to help other parents of mass murders or spoke in schools about how school shootings are not the answer in addition to mental health awareness. Also low quality actors to show vignettes from the past just poorly done, actual images and videos would have sufficed. They kept showing Dylan in photos before he looked like the kid with long hair that shot up the school. Felt more they were trying to have you sympathize with Dylan rather than the actual victims.

So much has come out since Columbine that it's unbelievable to me that a 2019 documentary would act like there were "no warning signs."

Dylan was arrested multiple times before the shootings, his friends knew he was acquiring guns, and most importantly, the police knew that both Eric and Dylan were troubled youth.

There was a 2-year paper trail and even an instance where a teacher reported a story Dylan had wrote (about watching a madman shoot up a place) to the school, and the school spoke to him about it and dismissed it.

The tragedy of Columbine isn't that no one saw it coming but that everyone should have seen it coming. Eric documented things in meticulous detail on his public website that police had access to. He talked about physical evidence that they later found (pipe bombs). There was a search warrant made up for his house a few months before the shootings that the police never took to a judge.

They were both known to police, Eric's dad knew he was making bombs, and Dylan had also been in felony trouble to the extent that his room would have been searched by any reasonable parent.

They left blazing signs they were going to hurt someone, and everyone just ignored it.

I am left feeling lost as to the point of the film. I kept thinking "ok, now they will tell me, as a parent, what to do to prevent it from happening." Realistically, I know they can't tell me what to do, but give me some tools to use to at least send me in the right direction. They did give me #committobrainfit. Unfortunately, the website is not made for cell phone browsers, so I can't even see what it's about.

While I appreciate the personal hell Sue Klebold had experienced, where was "Dad" in all this? Ignoring the role of the father, pretending that fathers have no bearing on the positive mental health of young men, will not get us to a place of enlightenment. Breathing exercises are not a substitute. If we're going to address this issue head on, then everything has to be included and this documentary is extremely insufficient in that regard. I believe Dylan's parents are divorced; what happened? Unfortunately, this documentary is painting an incomplete picture in that the male's influence is ignored.