The Imagery of a Vandalized Church
Cameron and Len participate in writing offensive content on the church walls: "GOD DOES NOT LIVE HERE…JESUS WOULDN'T EVEN RENT THIS SPACE." The writings are a displacement of Len's abhorrence for religion. Cameron participates in the vandalism because he wants to astonish Len.
Symbols
Cameron recounts, "He (Len) always hated the symbols that we had to live by…The American flag. The church. The physical church buildings. You know how they try to make them look so traditional. He always thought that the buildings had become symbols and didn't have a real religious meaning anymore. Whenever he saw a symbol, he wanted to crush it.” Len is an anti-traditionalist individual who derives pleasure from disassembling tradition. He is a dissident who does not want to live or others to live in line with traditional ideologies.
Gun
The gun is symbolic of power: “It was okay. It gave him power, even if he didn’t use it. The whole thing with Brad was having power.” According to Cameron’s flawed thinking, Len having his father’s gun during a scuffle with Brad makes him authoritative because he could employ it to slay Brad, and that would make him the conqueror in the fight. Cameron highlights that massive power comes with possessing a weapon that could be used for self-preservation.
The Imagery of Leonard's Diary
The diary depicts Leonard’s nature as a vile, belligerent, defiant, rancorous, and violence-loving teen. In one entry, Leonard accentuates his proclivity for gun violence: “I dreamed about shooting. Me with the most powerful gun in the world. I shot, and the bullet travelled past a dozen countries and three oceans and killed me." The dream is a depiction of his unconscious desire to participate in violence and die by it. In the end, he dies “by self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
