Saw Gus van Sant's Elephant and was surpised to see that it was listening to that satanic Beethoven music that made the kids go crazy and shoot up the school. Who knew?
Details inside.
Finally Elephant came to St. Louis. I saw it at the Chase, a small theater in the lobby of a hotel. The auditorium seats 40 or so people and the screen is maybe 8 feet tall. Murals depicting St. Louis icons like anti-semite Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis line the walls, illuminated with blue lights which only dim once the movie begins.
Documentary style - No strong stories, the piece just follows a bunch of kids on their day at school. The following is quite literal - the camera mostly saunters along behind these kids as they walk around the school, occasionally saying "hey" to their friends. The only real storyline is that of a cute blonde boy who warns others away from the school and reunites with his drunk dad at the end.
The film is edited to tell its stories non-linearly. That is, each character has their own timeline, shot independently, and the order of events is established by showing the same scenes at different points of the movie from different characters' perspectives. So we see a conversation between a photographer and the Cutie Pie three times: Once during a long tracking shot of Hot Stuff, a second during a long tracking shot of the photographer, and a third during a long tracking shot of a nerdy girl running past the two.
This is one of the nice things about the movie, and it does force the film out of a documentary sense because you can see scenes from different angles. Unlike a normal hollywood film, these shots are not intercut. You would see one scene from several different angles, all spliced together within the timeframe of one event. In Elephant, you get the different angles, but at different times. That makes for a fresh take on shooting a scene from different vantage points and a pleasant mental exercise of piecing together when everything is happening.
Unfortunately, though, not much happens until the kids start shooting up the school. More than once during the film I wanted to shoot some of the characters myself, simply because I was so fucking bored with watching them spend 10 minutes developing film or walking down a hallway. There are many, many shots of people walking around doing nothing other than walking around. They are nicely shot, and they build tension, but they are overkill. The film could easily go down to the 60 minute mark and gain quite a bit in terms of dramatic impact.
Even better, some of that time could have been spent developing the characters, as these long walking shots preclude dialogue or any action (other than strolling) that could give meaning to the characters. When the film does decide to spend some time on the kids non-perambulatory activities, it too often paints the characters as annoying stereotypes. Three soon-to-be-dead girls ogle a soon-to-be-dead hunk, then have mindless chatter about shopping over lunch, followed by a cutesy scene of them vomiting up their lunch in synch with each other. The scene evoked a laugh from my audience, and it's not hard to see why, as the shot is played as comedy. You feel nothing for these one joke Heathers characters when they are subsequently shot. Off screen, I might add. Otherwise a jock makes a date with his fine bitch, a photographer asks to take some pictures, and so on. These dialogues are, at least, short and quotidian, if less snickeringly pat than the bulimia comedy.
For a film that is attempting to take on the subject of school shootings intelligently, one would have hoped for better characterization of the shooters, as well. There is hope early on, when we see one of them playing Beethoven, first Fur Elise, which he plays nicely enough, then the Moonlight Sonata, which gives him a little, though no major trouble. What trouble he has angers him to the point of flipping off the score, capping a nice scene.
Which reminds me, the Moonlight Sonata is played as incidental music in the film much earlier, during a scene showing gym class outside on a field. By this point in the film, we have not seen the shooters. One dorky girl stops on the track, as if she hears the music being played. My initial reaction to this shot was annoyance. In terms of expressiveness, the Moonlight Sonata is pretty much an atom bomb. It has an undeniable, strong emotional impact on the listener. While the film up to that point had established some vague sense of dread and tension through its soon-to-be-excruciating tracking shots, the film had not yet earned the right to play that piece of music, and used Beethoven as a shortcut to gloom.
Later in the film, when we see one of the shooters playing the piece, it's an expression of the kid's soul or emotional state in that circumstance. There I can accept the use of the piece, but there's another, different problem with the music. The kid plays the piece the day before the shooting, yet the piece is played as incidental music on the day of the shooting. While Gus can certainly just decide to play the incidental music whenever he damn well pleases, the film in other circumstances uses small cues like this, often short snatches of dialogue, to establish concurrent events in the narrative's timeline. This use of the Moonlight Sonata violates the rule and the inconsistency grates.
Though, we can at least be grateful that the shooters weren't listening to Marilyn Manson. This is one of the few times that the film doesn't paint the shooters with broad stereotypes. Of course one of the kids has to play what's commonly called a first-person shooter, that is a game shown through the eyes of a fellow with a gun who goes around shooting other people. The game that the Columbine kids supposedly played, Doom, has a marine walking around a gothic industrial complex dispatching snarling demons that approach the player, often lobbing shots of their own at the marine. The shooter played by the kid in Elephant has a nameless person walking around a beach shooting normal human beings who are just walking around.
As a sidenote, I can think of no reason that anyone would play the game in the film. It looked absolutely horrible. There was no environment to speak of, the opponent's AI seems to consist of "walk around," the character models are extremely primitive, their polygon counts about equal to that Dire Straits I Want My MTV video, ugly textures, and the death animation's absurd.
The game is in no way a realistic example of a first-person shooter. Rather, it depicts the random slaughter of innocents. One shot during the later school shooting sequence is features the barrel of a gun at the bottom of the screen and is meant to mirror this game, which is also shown full-screen on film. This use of the game is tacky and heavy-handed, no better than if Gus had come on screen to shake his finger at the audience and deeply intone, "Video games like these teach kids that it's fun to shoot random passers by. For shame."
And of course once one kid's done playing this, the other hops on the internet to buy himself a gun to be delivered the next day. How cute. One guy on the imdb's comments board notes that this is illegal except for those holding some special license. I don't know if that's true, I do know that we've crossed another item off the checklist. Let's see... played Doom, check; teased, check; liked camo gear, check; internet guns, check; Hitler, check. It's not so annoying, but there's precious little time in the film spent on anything other than walking, and it would have been nice had the rest been a little more in depth and complex than a Newsweek article.
But then the killers hop in the shower together and make out. That wasn't part of the Dylan/Klebold wrap up. Maybe Gus just wanted to see that one cute kid (not the Cute cute kid, but the cute shooter kid) make out with the other, Eminem-looking one. Though through a shower door, it's not that hot. It's also a little suspicious, since one of the other few snatches of dialogue in the movie records a class talking about gay issues. As much as Gus denies it, one very valid reading of the movie is that the kids are gay, that this doesn't fit in the high school mold, and this is one of the motivating factors of the shooting. Gus has said that this isn't what he's saying, but when a movie which gives you maybe 5 minutes of dialogue in total spends 3 of those minutes talking about social stigmas concerning homosexuality, then has its two shooter characters hook up in the shower, what the fuck else can it mean?
From there, we get a scene of the kids planning their attack, Seven Samurai-style. You begin to feel some excitement - something's actually going to happen. Of course, the plan is foiled once their explosives don't go off, so they just walk around and shoot a dozen or so students. Thank god we had that planning sequence there. Of course, once the shooting starts, the camera no longer follows the two shooters, and the resulting bloodshed is shown in a very detached, unexciting manner. I am sure that had it been otherwise, had he shown explicit violence and filmed what remained either as an action sequence or as a test for the audience's endurance of grisly horror, he would have been called exploitative. But I find it a failure of the film, especially one that prides itself on eschewing heightened drama in favor of gritty, often dull reality, to refuse to depict the climax of the film in the same way. Or to take any stance on the violence, other than the one second shot sneering at first person shooters. There can be beauty in enigma and ambivalence, but Gus refuses to engage his subject, and that's something else entirely.
One oddity during the bloodshed concerns a student who is shot in the chest outside a classroom. He falls to the ground and is pulled into the room by a teacher. While he's being pulled, blood pools underneath his body. His chest, though, shows no sign of entry wound. Which is an odd inconsistency.
There is another scene of a student being shot which shows blood spatter a bookcase behind her. In fact, this is one of the first shots in the rampage, and it again gets one's hopes for a fine bloody rampage up. Of course, that rampage doesn't follow. The killings that follow are not shown graphically, just blurry figures falling in the background. Contrast this with even still frames from the security camera footage of Columbine. The latter are so much more shocking. As I was saying the other day in talking about movie violence, these are images and stories which have entered the audience's awareness. How can you refuse to address them? Once you refuse, how can the audience take your work seriously? This is a fundamental failure of the film.
By the end of the spree, the cute killer shoots his Eminemish pal is a nice touch, and the movie's end of the sole survivor taunting two kids caught in a meat locker is scary. It would have been nice if that scene had ended before the movie itself ended, but alas it did not. Until it cops out by not showing the conclusion of the scene and refusing to depict the shooting, even though the victims were off screen, the scene is quite engaging and dramatically depicts the real taunting of the student victims that Dylan and Klebold did.
Also interesting to see that the school had a meat locker stacked with great sides of beef. Weren't the kids talking about gay cows or some such nonsense? At any rate, I doubt that there is a single school in the nation with a meat locker, but I could be wrong.
So we have a very slowly paced film about Columbine. The very pretty tracking shots are nice and do build tension, but they crowd out any affecting drama. It's an interesting little film with some nice touches, but it never reaches the point of enigmatic, remaining irredeemably shallow. One wishes Gus had actually become engaged in the story. This is a man who once showed a junkie's needle piercing a vein, who once showed a dead OD'd body. Where did his fucking balls go?
Posted by mattb at December 05, 2003 07:27 PM