It's been a year and a half since Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" came and went from the theaters, and I cannot believe it hasn't been more of a conversation piece than it has in that span. Perhaps it is because it is taking people like me, who love film and watch as much as they can, a year and a half to actually see it.
There is something hypnotic about the way Van Sant approaches this material. In the hands of another director, filming subjects like a school massacre would have required adding more of an emotional attachment to the characters and a shock value to the violence. Maybe those would be good movies, but in Van Sant's hands we get a movie that, with patience and non-judgment, draws you in and refuses to take part in the story, but merely observe.
Though I haven't read any external reviews of the film, I'm sure they all talk about the amazing and lengthy tracking shots and the intertwining story-lines (if you can call them that). When Scorcese uses tracking shots that are highly choreographed (as Van Sant's have to be in this film), he uses it to stylize and make the shots stand out. When Van Sant does it, he uses them to give a documentarian feel which, when mixed with the near constant movement of the characters, gives us a sort of tunnel vision surrounding each individual character as they walk through their day, heroes in their own film.
(Spoiler ahead)
Van Sant also plays with the way we are trained to watch these films. At one point, as the shooting spree is going on, a young black man, Benny (the title card tells us), appears for the first time. He is tall, with corn rows, a muscle tee-shirt and and a stereotypical gangster swagger. It was the only time in the movie that I worried he might be giving into a cliche, but this was only because I believed that this character would some how play a roll in the story in which he engaged in violence during an already violent situation. Instead, this character's total story arc involves him walking down the halls, towards the sounds, walking up behind one of the shooters, only to be shot instantly. It lasts 2 or 3 minutes, and he speaks no lines. It was my preconceptions about how a character like this must act on film that made me think about Van Sant's intentions. He played on these preconcptions which immediatly makes the viewer part of the society which the characters on screen live in. What is happening to them is happening in the real world where we ourselves live.
What is Van Sant trying to say with this character, or with the scene in which the killers play a violent video game, or when they engage in a homosexual act? He doesn't leave you any clues in this film as to what his intentions are. He simply strives to find a balance between the binary "they did it because their parents didn't raise them right vs. violence in movies and music" argument. In this world, parents not raising their kids correctly doesn't necessarily lead their kids to homicidal sprees and violent movies don't necessarily leave kids unphased and untarnished simply because they are fantasy. The world is more complicated than that, and Van Sant does it without being contrived or encroaching upon his subjects as they inhabit the environment around them.
There is more to the story of Columbine than simply two kids with a bloodlust, and society had many roles to play in it. Any of the atmospheric factors around the kids might not be bad on their own but, in our society, the way they interact with one another might be malevolent. It is a discussion that needs to continue in our country. Taking Van Sant's "Elephant," and combining it with Larry Clark's "Kids" and "Bully," we might just have the launching point from which to have those conversations. What Van Sant and Clark have done is prove that, whatever the problem is, it is something real and it can be documented.
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