A new documentary finds the limits of laughing at the school-shooter industrial complex

A feeding frenzy of capitalists have already smelled the blood in the water. Thoughts & Prayers fields sales pitches from purveyors of bulletproof backpacks, shielded tables, armored windows, VR simulations, tragicomic video games, alarms, locks, shelters, and more. Makeup artists mass-produce gunshot wound prosthetics—even bullet-riddled dicks and balls—to desensitize kids and teachers to the visual reality of violence. One expects to see Nathan Fielder in the corner, staring expressionlessly at this mutilated genitalia. These small business owners could be the most genuine people in the world and they’d still come off as sociopaths. “Every time there’s a tragedy, it economically benefits my family,” admits a salesman of bulletproof skateboards.

It’s objectively ridiculous and vulgar, and the filmmakers mostly allow the interview subjects to stew in their own damning words. Putting the impetus on teachers and children to set schoolwork aside in order to learn a few tactical best practices is delusional. If you weren’t already convinced of this going into the film, endless slow-motion footage of middle-aged teachers attempting to disarm burly men, hide realistic dolls, and apply kindergartener-sized tourniquets—and of kids running from a libertarian wacko armed with an airsoft gun and a Shocknife—will erase all doubt. So too will the moments where teachers sit in classrooms of their own to learn about firearms from a variety of lecturers who look like they stormed the capitol.

“The average, base-level human being on this planet is violent, superstitious, and savage,” one of these meathead Werner Herzogs muses. “And people think ‘Oh I shouldn’t have to do violence.’ What makes you think you’re so superior to everything else in nature?”

Thoughts & Prayers is aware of how silly all this is. Scenes are clearly played for laughs, like when children survive their virtual ordeal in a school-shooter video game only to clip through one another, their heads overlapping in a display of digital body horror. But as undeniably goofy as it may be to watch a flesh-and-blood kid grab an American flag off their classroom wall only to reveal that (surprise!) it’s also a riot shield, this blackened humor can only momentarily crawl from the pit of utter despair. It’s a contradictory state of consciousness that affects activists in all corners of society—one that armed librarians sum up succinctly. And yet, with its hands-off interview approach, gaudy needledrops, and cheesy titles, Thoughts & Prayers so thoroughly plays up the nonsensical state of affairs that it has trouble keeping a straight face.

As effectively as it spotlights the vultures of supply-and-demand responding to the country’s great modern tragedy, Thoughts & Prayers also seems stumped as to how it should respond. The macabre hoops that children and teachers are asked to jump through are juxtaposed with evocative testimonials from clearly traumatized kids. Active shooter simulations scored by pop music are knocked off-balance by the weeping aftermath of mass killings, set to a more somber choral soundtrack. There’s a limit to laughing at this nation’s self-imposed death sentence. At a certain point, nihilism lets the bastards win. The Onion knows this. Subconsciously, the Thoughts & Prayers filmmakers seem to know it as well. But as the movie’s school-shooter simulation culminates in a fake press conference, where a speaker deadpans that “what occurred today was tragic and unimaginable,” what is there to do but laugh?