The Oxford High School shooting in late 2021 that killed four students and the copycat threats that followed gave many of us here at Hamilton pause about coming to school. The Fallout (January 2022) focuses on the aftermath of a fictional school shooting from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old Vada (played by Jenna Ortega) who tries to navigate her life after dealing with the trauma. The movie starts off on a light note. She wakes up late for school, and she and her best friend, Nick, drive to school singing along to music, Starbucks in hand. This sets the tone for a “relatable” teenage movie. During her first class, a call from her sister prompts her to go to the bathroom, which is where she hears the gunshots. For six minutes, Vada and two other students hide in a stall while screams echo in the halls. When they finally leave the school, Vada is no longer the girl she was when she walked in. While people like Nick turn to activism, Vada can’t seem to feel anything at all. She ends up struggling with survivor’s guilt, anxiety, and PTSD, and not knowing what else to do, she turns to drugs, and alcohol, whatever she can do to numb her fear of being back. Her parents send her to a therapist where eventually she admits to feeling helpless. Her other classmates are trying to change the world, but she doesn’t feel like she can do anything about it. She is filled with anger. She talks about how she keeps looking for a reason she made it, a reason to be grateful. That there is some sort of purpose to her being alive while her fellow students didn’t make it. Vada says that there wasn’t a reason; no one deserved to die.
At the end of the movie, Vada seems to be doing better and is beginning the process of making peace with what happened. That is, until she gets a notification that 12 students died in a school shooting in Ohio. The movie ends with the sounds of Vada having a panic attack. A lot of people wanted this movie to have a happy ending, but it’s just not the truth. I think the ending was necessary to show the reality of these things. It’s a cycle that happens over and over again. It would’ve been unfair to end on a happy note. School shootings, in this movie and in real life, don’t just stop.
Overall, this movie does a really good job of capturing the tense, almost cold air that exists after something traumatic happens. I feel like a lot of people could see themselves in Vada, especially when at first she copes with humor and avoidance. This movie doesn’t just talk about how scary school shootings are and surviving or not, it shows the toll it takes emotionally on the students who do make it through those tragedies. It also shows how at this time, there is so much pressure on our generation to fix the wrongs in the world, a lot of us feel helpless figuring out where to begin. That was how Vada felt during the aftermath.
This movie is also very relevant today because school shootings are still events we have to prepare for. Especially when we see one happen in the news, going into our classrooms the next day is scary. Since 2018, there have been around 99 school shootings in the US. According to the Sandy Hook Promise, since 1970, there have been 1,316, a startling statistic. Furthermore, Everytown Research, a gun control non-profit, has recorded that 3,500 kids are shot and killed per year in school shootings, and 15,000 more are injured. Overall, it is estimated that 3 million kids are exposed to shootings each year. The more recent ones from the end of last year, including the one in Michigan, caused a lot of kids to threaten shootings of their own. There were even rumors circulating around Hamilton on 12/3/21 that a student was plotting a shooting (which have since been invalidated). Many kids opted to stay home after the event. Shootings trigger anxiety and insecurity around coming to class. This is on top of the fact that we are in a pandemic where there is already so much uneasiness. Adding onto the daily social and academic stresses we already experience as high school students–who wants to worry about being gunned down in the middle of Calculus? While The Fallout is just a movie, it is one that depicts issues that we as students are grappling with. It might not cause direct change, but it helps to spread awareness on a topic that people have been forced to talk about for far too long.
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