Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock update "Bowling for Columbine" for a country that still refuses to address one of its most preventable crises.
Bulletproof frames that students can tip over at the first sign of danger. A robot dog the size of a Pomeranian that jumps and barks at the sight of an intruder. Inflatable bulletproof vests so light that an elementary school child could inflate them and hide behind them. These are just some of the more sensible products showcased in the opening minutes of "Thoughts & Prayers," Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock's scathing and incisive critique: the least ludicrous selection of items that contribute to America's booming active shooter defense industry, which now generates more than three billion dollars a year.
Directors: Zackary Canepari, Jessica Dimmock
Stars: Quinn Davis, Tabitha Dwyer, Francis Brooke
Of course, it's a small price to pay for the ludicrous illusion that we're taking meaningful steps to protect our children from being massacred in their classrooms. In a decaying empire where common sense has been eroded by ideology, and the political will to solve a problem cannot compete with the macabre impulse to profit from it, the creation of a new business sector might be the only form of healing the world’s richest country can afford.
This scathing sarcasm—a superficiality that addresses the gun crisis with more seriousness than any of the Republicans in Congress—is present in every aspect of “Thoughts and Prayers,” from its title to the last detail. Seemingly impartial and lacking most of the easy tools for ridicule and the Jim Halpert-esque over-the-top reactions that helped "Bowling for Columbine" channel its rage into satire, Canepari and Dimmock's film may present itself as a serious look at "how to survive a shooting in America" (to paraphrase the ironically painful subtitle of a documentary that offers no useful instruction), but make no mistake: it's a serious comedy about the power of collective psychosis. Imagine Christopher Guest making a film about the madness of ritualized child sacrifice, and you'll get the picture.
It's profoundly unfunny, of course, just as you probably haven't laughed at any of the 38 times The Onion has seen fit to run the headline "'There's no way to prevent it,' says the only country where this happens regularly" since 2014, but the joke works nonetheless: at no point in this 90-minute film about products, courses, safety drills, and other things that might help people survive a normal day in America does anyone suggest that we should try to get rid of the readily available mass murder devices that shooters continue to use for all their mass murder needs, and which are basically manufactured for the sole purpose of committing mass murder. It seems like a good starting point!
Unfortunately, there's very little hope that will happen, so Canepari and Dimmock offer us a glimpse into what goes on in a country where everyone has to pretend there's no obvious answer to the leading cause of childhood death. While I'm skeptical of the inventors of a robot dog that detects AR-15s or whatever, how are people supposed to meaningfully address a crisis when resolving it isn't an option?
Jumping from one unsettling demonstration to another, and structured around preparations for a mass shooting drill at an Oregon high school, "Thoughts & Prayers" is sustained primarily by the tension between sincerity and absurdity. Just as it made sense for Michael Moore to adopt a stance of feigned ignorance when confronting the gun epidemic at a time when many Americans were only beginning to grasp the consequences of a politicized Second Amendment, Canepari and Dimmock are forced to adopt a more nuanced strategy now that Republicans have spent the last 23 years saying "We're all trying to find the culprit" while insisting that anyone who finds one easily and immediately is "politicizing a tragedy."
In that sense, it's easy to understand why "Thoughts & Prayers" oscillates between diverse perspectives, as if searching for a way out of an infinite looking glass. We meet a young woman from Long Island who has been taught that school shootings are a natural disaster (leading Canepari and Dimmock to overlay audio of mass casualty incidents with multiple victims onto images of hurricanes and other similar events). We meet a sweet and intelligent Advanced Chemistry teacher from Utah, a state where teachers are allowed to carry concealed weapons in school, who reluctantly enrolls in a target shooting course designed specifically for people like her.
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