Natural Selection Term Analysis

This exchange is taken from Cullen’s experience of viewing “The Basement Tapes,” a series of confessional, talk-show style videos which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold recorded in the weeks leading up to the Columbine massacre, and it demonstrates several key components of Eric and Dylan’s twisted but mutually needful relationship. As noted earlier, experts describe the relationship as a “dyad”—a murderous pair whose destruction is mutually assured. Cullen describes Dylan beginning to speak in “Ericisms,” and, at another point in this chapter, describes the boys as using “one voice”—Eric’s voice. Dylan was a depressed and suicidal young man whose explosive tendencies spoke to both a sensitive and angry interior. Dylan’s anger was initially directed inward, toward himself. Eric Harris, on the other hand, directed his rage outward, toward all of humanity. He was egotistical, narcissistic, and self-aggrandizing—and as his repetitious desires for mass murder, “natural selection,” and annihilation of both the landscape of the world as well as the people inhabiting it began to rub off on Dylan Klebold, the necessary “hotheaded sidekick,” Dylan’s speech began to mirror Eric’s, and his desire for violence expanded outward to mimic Eric’s desires as well.