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Zero Day
Directed by Ben Coccio.Starring Christopher Coccio, Andre Keuck.
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Directed by Gus Van Sant. Starring Alex Frost, Eric Deulen.
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It's no secret that America has a continuing romance with violence. From James Fennimore Cooper's foundational The Leatherstocking Tales to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, there's always been an audience for shoot-'em-up entertainment. It's no surprise then that we now have two films­ Gus Van Sant's Elephant and Ben Coccio's Zero Day­ that examine and emotionally recreate the infamous 1999 shootings by Eric Klebold and Eric Harris at Littleton, Colorado's Columbine High School. A year after Michael Moore's provocative documentary Bowling for Columbine­ (less about the boys' shootings than a critique of US gun culture)­ these two fictional films are on movie screens. Both work in their own ways, and challenge us to reexamine the shootings and the inevitable homoeroticism of relationships among teenaged boys.

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Some of the writings and commentary about Klebold's and Harris's killing spree speculated (sometimes with homophobic intent) that the two youths were lovers, or at least homosexual, but the notion didn't really catch on in the popular imagination. Still we are left with the question of their relationship: what were they to one another? Just friends? Queer avengers of kids who were picked on? Psycho killers? Queer psycho killers?

Boys who are not jocks together are often seen as either homosexuals or incipient ones. But clearly there are more options for adolescent male friendships than jockdom and repressed, or open, sexuality (or, for that matter, mass-murder/suicide pacts).

While both Elephant and Zero Day are interesting fictional visions of this relationship, the latter gives a far better emotional and psychological portrait. This is surprising, in that Van Sant­ from his earliest film Male Noche to Good Will Hunting­ has specialized in examining the inner lives of young men. In Elephant he gives us a dispassionate look at the lives of a group of high school students. Two of them­ Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen­ are the killers who shoot most of the others we have come to know. Van Sant plays it cool here­ the point-of-view camera just roams the school's halls and we see students just going about their own business. This passive, fake cinema verité technique works well enough to convince us of the director's point: who knows why this happened? But all this Lack of Meaning scintillates with Meaningful Hints. Alex and Eric watch a documentary about Hitler on TV, they play video games, one plays Beethoven on the piano, they take a shower together and tentatively kiss. The sheer accumulation of detail encourages us to draw connections. But somehow we still don't know much about their relationship and it feels, when the film is over, like a cheat.

Van Sant's film won awards at Cannes and is a critical hit. Ben Coccio's Zero Day, on the other hand, is a low-budget first film that succeeds so much better with the same material. While Van Sant relies on a very slow, vérité style that is seemingly opinionless, Coccio's approach is far more animated. Zero Day is told through the first-person camera diary of Chris Kriegman (Christopher Coccio) and Andre Kriegman (Andre Keuck), as they carefully plan their assault on what they dub "Zero Day." They are doing this so that they leave behind an explanation for their actions­ and, as with Elephant, the "explanation" is nonexistent or unfathomable. (Interestingly, in both Zero Day and Elephant the characters have the same first names as the actors­ a nod to some sort of semi-realism.) But Zero Day gives us a far more vibrant sense of the relationship between the two protagonists. While there is not­ as in Elephant­ a scene that indicates they may have a physical relationship, we have a much greater sense of an emotional and even erotic bond between them. They are clearly "into" one another­ intensely so­ and their passion for each other and for their shared goal of killing their fellow students is palpable. In a very visceral way, Zero Day feels far more homoerotic then Elephant, even though it lacks the "hints" that Van Sant gives us to his protagonists' sexual interests.

Coccio allows us into the liminal spaces in this relationship not just as neutral observers, but experiencing the world through their eyes. As a result, Zero Hour is far more emotionally potent and powerful than Elephant. It is a perceptive, unique look into an intricately tangled relationship between two teenage boys.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com