I've never seen violence in 33 mm before. Usually, viewers witness the pulsation of the guns as if they were more important than the action itself. But in one film, the crisp picture gazes into the listless eyes of Columbine-eque killers.
Gus Van Sant's new independent film, Elephant, emphasizes what it should: people, rather than the anatomy of the AK-47 or TEK-9 at No-name High School. The audience flinches with each gunshot to cap the emotional reservoir brimming in their throats. Then it ends, fully unexplained.
Elephant contains eerie beauty: time-lapse shots of barreling clouds and the windswept, golden color of fall leaves. The film is a wound inflicted on audiences. Like a nasty gash, emotion seeps out without notice during the surreal opening of the film. At the first shot, pangs of pain pique my attention. Shudders cascade over the audience. Then, Elephant hemorrhages.
Knowing the film's premise, critics have been waiting impatiently for an inevitable climax worth the $6.50 admission fee. The movie divides viewers' souls. The sinister half of the mind asks to see bullets pierce through high school kids. The other half only wants to see why it won the Palme D'or award at Cannes 2003.
While this could be Van Sant's masterpiece, the title is ambiguous and even meaningless to average viewers. Nobody said how they saw the Elephant in all of those students, or whatever some surface-scratching analysis could offer. I did overhear some people arguing it was the school's mascot.
Here's the skinny on the title: Van Sant borrowed it from BBC filmmaker Alan Clarke's 1989 Elephant documentary about the crisis in North Ireland. Clarke quipped the North Ireland debacle was "a problem that is as easy to ignore as an elephant in the living room." Employing Elephant in the same sense, Van Sant painted a moving portrait honoring the proliferation of school shootings between 1997 and 1999.
With meaning in hand, Van Sant casted real high school students from the Portland, Ore., area to act like themselves in the halls of a decommissioned high school. Consequently, the acting is mediocre.
Luckily for its stars, Elephant doesn't require much acting skill. The film can be tedious at times, as scenes repeat from the perspective of different protagonists. Still, the repetition is an exercise in meditation before the climax. With exception of the three material girls, characters hardly speak during their scene in the film. But they sure walk a lot. Van Sant establishes a common thread with his main characters, so the audience follows the path of a particular character who represents a respective clique. This is a sketch of a middle-American high school.
The cast is formulaic. Average kid John is an angelic-looking blonde boy. There's a photography aficionado (Elias) and a nerd or two. Of course, there's the typical jock-and-cheerleader couple (Nathan and Carrie) who wear each other like fashion accessories. Adding on to No-name High's demographics, there are a few bizarre kids that never quite fit in. Picked on by their narcissistic peers, Elephant misfits Alex and Eric formulate a plan of mass murder. This is where Van Sant begins to overuse stereotypes.
Historically, school shooters have fit the stereotype of "outsiders." Whether they wear black trench coats, bear anarchy signs or whatever else, Van Sant did not transcend the cookie-cutter stereotype the media painted for audiences throughout the 1990s.
Elephant fails because its theme wanders. Alex and Eric somehow order bulky firearms. To boot, they watch documentary on the Third Reich and read their plan like a Nintendo strategy guide. I'm not saying Van Sant implied the two boys were Nazis, but the killers seemed oddly drawn to the bitter crescendos of Hitler rhetoric.
Because the motives of many school shooters remain unknown, Van Sant probably didn't want to irk audiences by injecting disputable conclusions. Rather than spoon-feeding answers to the audience, Van Sant charges them with finding their own meaning.
Moreover, Elephant is a film as unsightly as it is beautiful. Everyone in the baby echo generation - the children of the baby boomers - should see it. Just as my generation has a vague grasp of Vietnam, Elephant won't speak to the next generation in the same way in which it will speak to us.
Gus Van Sant made this for those of us who, every April 20th, noticed that hardly anyone was at school that day, or for those who feared for their lives as they walked onto school grounds. You might be too shocked to cry.
Chris Kark is a reporter for the Web Devil. Reach him at christopher.kark@asu.edu.
