Elephant

I first watched this short film about a month ago and it’s packed such a sly, hard, pervasive punch that I feel I can only organise my head around it now. Filmed on digital video and Steadicam by Gus Van Sant, and loosely based on the horrific massacre which happened in 1999 at Columbine High School, Elephant is a visually poetic, and poetically banal, look at such an… event, if you can call it that.

Columbine, if you’ll forgive the bad choice of words, happened as quickly and shockingly as an explosion or a gunshot and left very little explanation of the question everyone asked at the time: Why?. When this film was released in theatres, a minority of critics panned it. They wanted a film which would explain, which would tie everything up in a neat little package that was easy to swallow and leave you with a warm, complete feeling of understanding.

But maybe a couple of self–sufficient, psychologically alone, monumentally detached teenagers walking into their school and quite coolly and deliberately killing a teacher and more than ten fellow teens, without panic or remorse, is something that you just can’t understand or explain.

Elephant’s camera follows a few identified students around their anonymous, sprawling, concrete–and–linoleum suburban highschool. A few play football; a gaggle of bulimic girls argue in the cafeteria after catching a glimpse of a desirable jock who already has a girlfriend — and who is exclusively followed by the camera, on exactly the same path through the school, in another part of the film. Michelle turns up at the library for her first stint as a student librarian. John arrives late and emotional due to his alcoholic father. Alex and Eric arrive later, in a sickeningly ordinary way, carrying large duffelbags and wearing military fatigues.

So, as I say, it’s all normality. And as I hinted, the camera switches deliberately from one person’s little 10–minute slice of existence to another’s. We follow John for a while; he bumps into Elias and we get back to following John. We follow Michelle for a while, and she hears the exchange between Elias and John... and so on. Some might find this intolerable, but let me point something out.

We know what this film is ‘about’. We know what will happen (and happen it does, dumped flatly and grotesquely, without effects, on the screen) and we know, right up until it does, that these kids are going to die. Or maybe they’ll die. Maybe they’ll be lucky. Certainly, loads survive. But who, dammit?? Because we follow, and understand, their endearingly ordinary lives, we care, and it is like seeing something horrible happening in excruciatingly slow motion, so slow that the true horror itself is not yet visible but everything you see seems part of it. Going over the same encounters a few times just seems to make it more vivid.

And how does it end? As ordinarily and quietly as it started. No explanations here: that’s why it’s called Elephant. To be able to explain would belittle the massive difficulty of the problems out there in a teenager’s America, and Van Sant deliberately avoids any explanation at all. He sets out to show the proverbial ‘Elephant in the room’ which nobody could ignore and everybody pretends isn’t really there. And he leaves it to you to tell yourself how it might have got in, and what it really is.

On the more nuts–and–bolts side of things, the filming is gorgeously done, understated, and the temporarily disused school which acts as the set is a triumph of anonymity. There are three wellknown adult actors (Bottoms, Malloy, and Williams) who appear for a few seconds, and a host of real schoolkids who have never stepped in front of a camera before – and that includes the kids we deliberately follow.

Watch it. Love it. Hate it. And by all means read the many pages out there, both about the film and about Columbine, and argue with yourself, and be a litlte fascinated. An event like Columbine, and a film like this, grab us not because they are cultish things. They grab us because we were teenagers, because we are teenagers… because we are human.