What is it with American school kids shooting each other to bits every so often? Perhaps director Gus Van Sant, responsible for such diverting indie masterpieces as My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy has some answers. Or perhaps director Gus Van Sant, responsible for sentimental, mainstream dogshit like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, has sired another turkey. Elephant, it turns out, is actually the work of the interestingly experimental but less than entirely successful director Gus Van Sant, the one who did a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho and who produced the quirky but unsatisfying Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Elephant is certainly unique, memorable and disturbing, but in its rush not to moralise, interpret or judge, it ends up repeating clichés and doing little more than throwing up its hands in confusion at the tragic waste of it all. Or was that all that was required, given the ground already covered in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine?
A movie without a script, filmed using actual high school kids in an actual (disused) high school, this is an interesting but flawed meditation on a Columbine-style massacre in all its baffling brutality. For two thirds of the film, we follow various characters around the school as they wander down the endless corridors (floppy-haired kid with alcoholic father; affable photography enthusiast; geeky librarian girl) until two boys show up with duffle bags full of weaponry and start shooting. And all we’ve seen of these two by this stage is one playing Beethoven on the piano, before the two go off to play violent video games, unwrap their latest consignment of mail order artillery, gawp at a documentary about Hitler, and have a snog in the shower (poignant touch this, admittedly).
The film is structured around a meeting between two characters in the corridor while a third runs past, which we get to see at different points from each of the characters’ perspectives. As with the endless tracking shots (down corridors, along the canteen counter, etc) this is cinematically intriguing – and produces a cumulative sense of the everyday languid boredom of an unremarkable school day (even if these kids seem to have exceptionally loose timetables) while the viewer grimly awaits (with growing impatience, it must be said) the bloody final reel. Plenty, then, for film students to pick over (see also the use of steady-cam rather than the shaky handheld that’s now compulsory for gritty realism; a TV-proportioned frame rather than widescreen; etc) though in the absence of any dialogue to speak of, we’re given way longer to contemplate these aspects than we’d probably like.
Summing up, it would seem that some high school kids are nice, some are weird and lonely, some have things pretty tough. Little separates the murderers from the murderees other than that most of the latter seem to have healthy hobbies, like photography or bulimia, that keep them away from the dead end of Nazophilia, armaments and homicide/suicide. If the filmic tricks mentioned above deepen or sophisticate this uninspiring thesis in any way, I’d be enthralled to hear how.
WhoreCull reckons an opportunity was missed, though the alternative may have involved actually having to write a script (a drag, we know). But we think that a really interesting (van) slant would have been if – just for the sake of argument – we’d seen some kids make a film about a massacre in the school, say two years before actually carrying it out (plenty of scope for intertextual foreshadowing etc etc). And let’s say that one of the video’s producers happened to be the son of the FBI’s lead agent who would then investigate the actual massacre (while his other son would be an eye witness to the shootings). As for quirky temporal framing in the film, why not attempt to show how the shootings would carry on for three and a half hours (while 200 cops and four SWAT teams, and presumably at least a handful of concerned parents, wait patiently outside), though it would officially only have lasted for 45 minutes in all later reports. For further inexplicable elements to include, why not have suggestions of five or six other gunmen being involved (but then have these brushed out of all subsequent coverage) – or maybe just one other who is captured alive by police, but never heard of again. Finally, somehow depict one of the gunmen villains shoot himself in the left side of the head despite being right handed.
Fanciful, we know, but compare and contrast the above with David McGowan’s piece on Columbine in Disinformation's You Are Being Lied To (the entire book available here as a pdf – jump to the section entitled Official Versions), and then let’s talk about elephants. [NB. The pdf is over 2MB, but if that's a problem for you, a helpful blogger has transcribed McGowan's piece here]
Further Reading
The Konformist's Columbine directory
McGowan’s website, The Centre for an Informed America
Disinformation
The Daily Express sought to reassure its retarded readership on Thursday with the strident headline: “Gypsies you can’t come in”. Apparently the Sun-Mail hybrid claimed a victory as UK PM Tony Blair promised to review ‘benefit tourism’ and limit the influx of immigrant workers, particularly when eastern European states accede to the UN on 1 May. Related to the moves are all sorts of flaunting of EC rulings and our criminal justice system, which Blunkett has been raping for some time now.
The Express has been rabidly beating its chest ever since the eastern accession was announced. Opposition to the draft EU constitution (which enshrines the rights of the 10 new EU member states) generally tends to mask this sort of xenophobic fear of poor ex-commies/Roma coming to the UK to corrupt our pristine commercial activities with their bad shirts and excessive smoking.
Bottom line is we need loads more skilled workers than we have here at the moment and we need higher immigration to cover that. As long, as the Blair logic would seem to go, as they are not foreign. So, excellent news that higher education is being pushed toward more private provision and the imposition of a marketplace at the same time. These are just the policies to produce generations of skilled and educated workers. Joined-up government at its best then, not reactionary bigot juggling and sordid power maintenance? Not at all. Do you want lies with that?
It’s good to know that Blair can make it easier for aspiring press barons to secure ownership of national newspapers, as he has with Richard ‘the spunky drummer’ Desmond and that fascist rag. Incidentally, the Express was a pro-New Labour paper before the, er, New Labour government allowed Desmond to buy it and turn it back into the execrable hybrid of the Mail and the Sun that it has traditionally been. Tactical brilliance, Tony, to be outmanoeuvred by a sweat drinking fiscal fiend with the hands of a deflated clown, who now wants to remove his ££££ and support for you anyway. Even greater is the complete racist-pandering shit Blair spewed out yesterday which lent handily to Excess minds, leading to its triumphalist/Kristallnacht piss headline).
