The most subtly horrifying aspect of the frequency with which mass shootings occur in America is how they all start to blend together for those not directly involved. This year has already witnessed enough acts of public violence to fill a sprawling list on its own Wikipedia page, leaving the average human brain with no choice but to inure itself for the sake of self-preservation. People outside the sphere of an incident forge onward because if they didn’t, contending with the unthinkable mounting of grief would be all they would ever do. Ask someone off the street to name the single deadliest shooting in national history, and chances are that they’ll realize the events of 1 October 2017 have already receded into the homogenized soup of memory.
The creators of 11 Minutes, a new documentary miniseries streaming on Paramount Plus, want to break one harrowing day out of the numbing stream of bad news. “If you’re touched, if one of your loved ones is affected by this, it never goes away,” director Jeff Zimbalist tells the Guardian. “But the news moves on, people go to the next headline. So, how do you continue to engage people? You tell it through the archive, through the journeys of people with unexpected stories. The biggest balancing act was how you get this to be so visceral that audience members fortunate enough not to have experienced a mass casualty incident still understand it in an authentic and deep way, and how you do that without re-traumatizing anyone.”
