Elephant
Gus Van Sant’s startling and brilliant Elephant–a film that follows the activities of several high school students before and during a massacre like the one at Columbine–has its flaws, yet its virtues so outshine them that the years he’s spent lost in the wilderness can be forgiven. His four previous features weren’t exactly dead on arrival, though his 1998 remake of Psycho came alarmingly close. But the filmmaker responsible for such fresh early shorts as The Discipline of DE (1978) and My New Friend (1987) and such exciting early features as Mala Noche (1985), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), and My Own Private Idaho (1990) was almost nowhere in evidence in Good Will Hunting (1997), Psycho, or Finding Forrester (2000) and only faintly discernible in the experimental feature Gerry (2001). (In between were two satirical features, the uneven 1993 Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and the more successful 1995 To Die For.)
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In contrast, two of the major influences on Elephant are plainly visible. From Tarr’s Satantango (1994) comes a complicated overlapping time structure that repeats the same events from a variety of viewpoints, seen mainly in extended takes that follow characters as they walk through adjacent settings. (Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 The Killing also repeats the same events from disparate viewpoints, but with offscreen narration and without all the walking and intersecting trajectories.) From Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) comes the traversal of endless hallways, a sense of impending menace and bloodshed, a black male calmly and methodically coming to the rescue of those in danger until he’s abruptly thwarted, and a food locker used as a place to hide.
To understand how these two propositions play out in the film it’s important to know that Van Sant has no better notion of why the Columbine massacre occurred than anyone else. All he has are a few wild guesses–some more plausible than others, none remotely conclusive–and most of the film’s flaws can be traced back to those guesses, which take up far more of our attention than they deserve. Some of the pointedly yet inadequately suggestive details include a nasty classroom prank, a video game, a documentary about Nazism seen on TV, a kiss and an embrace between the two killers in a shower, and the Moonlight sonata, which is played on-screen and heard offscreen during other sequences.
By design, the stories in Elephant are all far from complete. In some cases death ends them abruptly. In other cases we follow the lives of characters over at most a few hours. We’re also catching the trajectories of all of them piecemeal, in installments, which occasionally leaves continuity gaps that are never filled. Moreover, most of the incidents are relatively banal, though some of them gain resonance retroactively.
In both cases I had missed basic facts, which were kept from my view because they didn’t fit the ruling narratives of the time. In Elephant I missed facts–admittedly elusive and likely to shift from one viewing of the film to the next–largely because of the film’s formal structure, though that structure implies a great deal about how ruling narratives are created. Van Sant’s way of telling and not telling his story helps explain how a problem as obvious as an elephant in a bedroom can’t be recognized if we’re so blinded by agendas that we can size up the animal only one piece at a time.
