Elephant (2003)

I've seen Elephant many times and I will probably watch it again. It is one of those films that haunts my mind in a way that I am quite unable to explain;  I simply come to think of it in the most various situations - it is an emotionally complex, striking film. The film, as you all know, is a meditation on school shootings, but it deals with this theme with no pretensions of giving a psychological explanation to what happened. One might even say that the film is not driven by an attempt to depict "what led up to" these gruesome events. Van Sant's sense of time is different, less dependent on ideas about causality, reasons, what-happened-afterwards. This is evident in the film's loose structure. There are lacunas, discrepancies, overlappings.

Elephant follows a bunch of kids in their school surroundings. The camera tracks kids walking, mostly in school surroundings, a snippet of conversation is heard, we rarely know the context. The film is structured so that we follow one character for a while, then we see the events (which in most of the film remain completely unremarkable and everyday) from another character's point of view. The point is not, I think, to gradually reveal new information. Van Sant is more interested in subjectivity than storytelling. The sense of repetition creates an eerie, foreboding atmosphere. Rather than opting for social analysis of the traditional sort, van Sant puts his ear close to the clichés and colloqial patterns of everyday language. The kids in the movie are not walking social symptoms (there are a few problematic scenes, as for example one scene in which a gang of girls walk into a toilet to perform a synchronized vomiting act). The camera is often stationed behind a kid who is walking down a corridor. This particular type of scene is repeated often, to great effect. Ambient sounds and noise is used in a way that makes me remember how overwhelming social life of high school really was. Places could be completely empty but still packed with meaning. The use of music in the film could have been sentimental - Beethoven's best known work! - but here van Sant rather approaches the continuum between sadness and sentimentality. Some have considered the film as too dispassionate, too distant, the characters too insignificant. I don't agree with this. What makes Elephant a good film is that it doesn't move away from the everyday into a strange dimension of Evil. Van Sant doesn't make the killers look interesting or cool. They are kids who play music, eat their mum's pancakes and chuckle ironically. Victims are not portrayed as victims but rather as people whose life end in a sudden, violent way. The film, instead of taking on the perspective of sensationalism, is or seems to be intelligible as an account of mourning, and that it is precisely important that mourning the dead is about looking at people as real human beings rather than social stereotypes.

Some of the scenes in Elephant are on the verge of the overwrought and the simplistic, but then I realize that a particular scene is not as cheap as I initially felt. One example of this is when John and Alex sit in the livingroom waiting for the delivery man. The telly is on and a man talks about the Nazi era in a flat voice while images of cheering Germans are shown. One of the boys nonchalantly asks whether it is possible to buy a Nazi flag. Only if you're crazy, replies the other. The point is of course not to show these kids as small extremists. This is what happens to be on TV, and hapless words are uttered. The dry voice in the tv program makes the scene almost comical.