On 20th April 1999, two students in Littleton, Colarado, marched into their high-school equipped with multiple firearms and opened-fire, killing thirteen, before turning the guns on themselves. What has become known as the Columbine Massacre has attracted a significant amount of coverage and increasing speculation on the state of US youth, US gun laws, and elements of popular culture most likely to infiltrate and influence such a population. Michael Moore�s Oscar winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine, didn�t so much fuel the fire as put a fireworks factory on top and then drive a gas tanker into it. His film bunched together various fingers of blame to make a fist directed at the United States� gun control laws. Rightly so some might claim, others might say that his work clutched at straws, stated the obvious and added nothing to our understanding of such events and in doing so lost sight of the real tragedy.
Whatever the view, there can be no denying that Gus van Sant�s Palme d�Or winning Elephant is a master-stroke, eschewing aesthetic pleasure for succinct and subversive artistry. After the indulgent art-house film Gerry, it seems van Sant is back to the kind of filmmaking that made Drugstore Cowboy and Good Will Hunting such cinematic treats. Elephant is not a dramatised account of the Columbine shootings but a similar, fictionalised event set in an unidentified American small town. It follows a number of high-school students: the two perpetrators and various others. Using a team of hitherto unknown actors, van Sant�s method is to film as if the camera, and therefore the audience, were a passive observer in such an environment, and as such we get long uneventful shots of crossed conversations in which we are not directed to any particular strand, and tracking shots of people walking long empty corridors or playing fields, going about their everyday business. Occasionally we get retreads of action as we follow it from a different character�s perspective. This method highlights the banal of the everyday, furthers our empathy with the victims, and throws into contrast the chilling climax, one that is unsettlingly anticipated all the way through.
What makes Elephant a great and controversial piece of work is that it is completely devoid of scapegoat-seeking, unnecessary dramatisation, or demonising. The psychology of the two killers is left for us to explore ourselves, just picking up the fragments of the jigsaw which can never be completed, because the vital and most important pieces are missing, the minds involved. The only completed picture is one of a terrifyingly and easily-executed act of devastating nihilism. All the other pieces, the violent videogames, the school bullying, the ease of access to weaponry, the apathetic parents, the neo-Nazism, are all there but are hard to tear apart, here they are equally as likely to be trivial as they are harmful or misleading influences. Blame can be thrown in many directions and yet it would achieve nothing; tragedy cannot be averted by post-hoc guessing games.
They say that an elephant never forgets. Neither should we, and with this film we never will. |
