 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
School violence has become a tragedy in our country. PEP SQUAD is irretrievably positioned to be controversial, chiefly because of the claim that media - film, television, computer games, etc. - is the culprit for violence in our society. It is the position of those associated with PEP SQUAD, none of which would be considered even remotely a violent person, that the film squarely addresses some of the causes of the violence occurring almost daily in our schools. These individuals, from writer director Steve Balderson, to co-producer and actor Eric Sherman, are eminently capable of not only defending attacks, but of illustrating the moral lesson in PEP SQUAD. Parents, and a more broadly society at large, must accept responsibility for the misconduct of its members, both those that perpetrate the violence AND those that enable it. Serious questions have been asked as to what each and every individual can do differently to produce different results.
Director Steve Balderson: On School Violence What do I think about school violence? Do you think I'm surprised? No, I thought about it before it was in the news. Thinking and doing are two different things. Nonetheless, before I dropped out of CalArts I thought about blowing up the school. When I was in high school I thought about shooting someone. I'm not surprised at all about what is going on. It's not about violence on television. It's not about radio, rock music or even drugs. It's about a society gone mad in its determination to make one way the right and only way! Don't you all see it? Society fails to recognize that there are individual perceptions, individual lives. Why? Because individuals in it, encouraged by the "group," have lost individual accountability. It seems to me that we no longer treasure the adventurer, the creative thinker. Hell, even the government requires that the pattern of our lives meets some "norm." You don't agree? Then why does a single person pay different taxes than a married person? We routinely reward acquiescence while reprimanding creativity. Kids aren't dreaming of murdering each other -- they're dreaming of the day when they can speak up and know that someone is listening... that someone in a position of power is listening. By the time they actually get to the point of pulling a trigger, those dreams have been suppressed beyond reason. I'm 23 years old. I've been successful. I'm not going to kill someone. But do you know how many times every day I'm not taken seriously. There's a county commissioner in the city where I live -- my God, she's an elected official -- and she repeatedly tells me and others that I really didn't make a movie! This is what young people are chafing at. Day in, day out they are told by parents, teachers, principals, ministers and other "older" authority figures that what they see or hear or dream is wrong. Remember the scene in Dead Poet's Society? When the kid killed himself? That's the same thing. It isn't about gun control. If guns never existed and all we had were knives and swords it would still be happening. I feel for the families of the murdered children. However, I don't know them or the situation, so have no idea if they were totally innocent or targets. I certainly went to school with some "Terras" and can attest that people like her -- twisted with a totally distorted perspective -- do indeed exist. Why are we so afraid to talk about this underlying issue? In all the television interviews I've done, I've brought up school violence and it never gets aired. Damn it, this is a wake up call and it's only going to get worse. It's time we stop blaming everyone else and look inside ourselves. The message is clear. Everyone has dreams. Everyone has a reason they are put on this planet. Who are our parents, teachers and society to say, "No, you can't be a filmmaker... or an astronaut... or a professional ballplayer!" Is it the fear of addressing one's own failures that causes the power structure to deny the dreamers?
co-producer Eric Sherman: On School Violence and PEP SQUAD I went to high school in the late 50s and early 60s. Violence at that time consisted of two or three kids from one "club" (read "nascent gangs") going nose to nose on the playground with some representatives from another rival group. By the time I got to college, the Vietnam war was raging, and school violence had come to mean protest marches with an occasional rock or bottle being thrown into the crowd. At the end of my college time in the "high 60s" armed National Guard were gunning down students on campus and school life was never to be the same. At that moment, death by firearms was considered to be, evidently, an option -- either for the authorities or the kids. In the mid-1990s, when Steve Balderson, an early 20s directing student of mine at Cal Arts, approached me to assist with his first feature project, PEP SQUAD, I saw this as nearly a meditation on the state of life for kids and young adults today. With all its humor and outrageous visuals, it remained, nonetheless, a speculative investigation on causes and roots of school violence and a highly detailed description and analysis of how kids can get so whacked out as to consider kidnapping and killing viable alternatives to that which otherwise faces them. With the rash of current high school shootings happening around the U.S., it could be argued that we should resist showing it anymore than the evening news already does. However, in order to handle a situation, one must first confront it, and I believe that Steve, in PEP SQUAD, calmly and simply faces the issue in a way rarely seen in American cinema. This is not the political statement of MEDIUM COOL, nor the dispassionate illustration of personal aberration as in HEATHERS. Rather, PEP SQUAD seeks to show what kids, conditioned to find a goal -- any goal -- and put it forth at all costs, do when they meet resistance in the form of aberration even greater than their own. The kids of PEP SQUAD suffer through their lives without parental guidance, but with the psychological industry's admonition to "adjust." They have no Vietnam war nor civil rights issues to unify them. They wander around campus and home wanting friendship, and wanting to get back to sleep -- where at least they can look at their dreams. Cherry, the anti-heroine of PEP SQUAD, decides to do something about it -- and horrible though her choices are, one weeps at her demise. Her greatest glory is her greatest defeat. The visual, aural and musical pleasures of PEP SQUAD do not mask the fundamental question of the film: how does one fight back? While certainly no endorsement of violence, the picture does show what will occur in a land where individuality and personal expression take a back seat to superficial senses of order and social calmness. - Summer,
1998
|
 |
 |