Citing a complete lack of visual originality and a tiresome reliance on neo-Nazi sartorial cliches, moderators for the messaging platform Discord issued a scathing takedown of the mass shooting video uploaded by teenagers Cain Clark and Caleb Vasquez.
To observe the footage of the horrific Monday evening rampage at the Islamic Center of San Diego is to endure a masterclass in aesthetic bankruptcy; the perpetrators, clad in the obligatory and frankly exhausting Black Sun patches, approach their atrocious acts with all the imaginative verve of a community-theater troupe, entirely devoid of the stylistic rigor that one might demand from modern visual media. We are living in an era of boundless digital expression, yet these young men chose to outfit their assault rifles with white-supremacist symbols scribbled in correction fluid, a choice so deeply uninspired that it borders on the insulting, suggesting a profound ignorance of the medium they so desperately wished to master.
One might examine the sloppy typography applied to the weaponry and hope to find a deliberate subversion of form—a desperate, textual cry echoing the prolonged spatial tension of Michael Snow's structuralist film Wavelength, which, for those lacking a foundational education in avant-garde cinema, masterfully exhausts the viewer through a single continuous zoom; one might even look for the grand, misguided rebellion of John Milton's Paradise Lost, or perhaps the garish, unhinged sensory assault of the 2003 live-action film adaptation of The Cat in the Hat. Alas, the discerning viewer is left with nothing more than a rote, paint-by-numbers recitation of accelerationist tropes, reducing what could have been a haunting commentary on suburban decay into a mere photocopy of a photocopy.
It is simply inexcusable to arrive at a massacre in 2024 still leaning on the crutch of an un-ironic swastika iteration, which reads less like a coherent ideological statement and more like a desperate, amateurish plea for relevance in an oversaturated market.
Even the getaway sequence fails to elevate the material, as the duo's subsequent flight in a BMW purloined from Clark's mother only compounds the narrative lethargy; the eventual denouement in the vehicle, wherein the seventeen-year-old Clark apparently shoots his accomplice before turning the weapon upon himself, feels less like a cathartic tragic climax and more like the rushed, unearned resolution of a syndicated television drama whose writers have abruptly given up. If the digital age guarantees that every atrocity will be broadcast to the masses, we might at least ask that our homegrown monsters stop boring us with the exact same visual palette.