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Be extra nice to everyone you
meet. This is the smiling nugget of wisdom that I learned
by watching Elephant, the new meditation on high-school
shootings written and directed by Gus Van Sant. It’s
not enough for you to greet every person with a Coke and a
smile. You need to buy them things. Soft drinks. Flowers.
Vespa Scooters-- whatever. You have to do this, because you
can never be sure which one of them is going to turn into
a psychotic mass murderer, dressed in camouflage, toting a
Tech-9 and a poorly produced video of target practice on defenseless
squirrels.
Elephant is Gus Van Sant’s attempt to explain,
or at least illuminate, the causes of the Columbine School
tragedy. Or, at least that’s what the press notes says.
The real film is actually about as illuminating as a typical
day in a high school physics class, and is really just muddled
and pretentious. Oh, sure, it won the Palme D’Or at the
Cannes Film Festival, but that's probably just because it
presented the typical American teenager as a spiritually dead
latent homosexual. I hate the fucking French.
Elephant shows a typical day in the life of a selected
half-dozen or so Portland, OR teenagers. They’re late
to school. They make out with their girlfriends. They’re
made fun of by the popular kids. They throw up in toilets.
They make out with their girlfriends. They’re late to
school. They’re made fun of by the popular kids. They
throw up in toilets. They throw up in toilets.
Then a pair of Nazi-fetishizing, video-game playing, gun-toting,
latent homosexuals shoot up the school. We're talking deep
stuff here.
I only wrote the above to give you an idea of what watching
the first half of Elephant was like. Gus Van Sant arranged
the film so we see three or four incidents over and over again,
from the point of view of a few of the same characters. And
while this might be an interesting technique if there was
actually a PLOT, in Van Sant’s film it just drags. What
was an exhilarating device in such films as Pulp Fiction
or Jackie Brown but here he comes across as a lazy
director who just couldn’t find things for his characters
to do.
Don’t even get me started on the critics who preferred
Van Sant’s “dignified” violence to Tarantino’s
“glorified” violence. Yeah, sure, Van Sant didn’t
have body parts flying all over the place. But Tarantino did
NOT introduce an African-American character in the final reel,
only to kill him off 5 minutes later while he was trying to
save someone else. I thought that Van Sant was above putting
a sacrificial black man in his pictures. In Star Trek, it's
expected. It's almost funny. But here?
I understood what the director was going for. I’m not
that much of a boob. He was trying to take on high school
violence, a subject CNN and Fox News are most fond of talking
about in high moralistic tones, and take it back from those
talking heads. He wanted to present a complex study about
high school violence and violence in general. He didn’t
want to judge his characters, be they the perpetrators or
the victims of said violence. However, he did none of this.
Instead, he created one of the most fetishistic films I’ve
seen in a long time. Gus Van Sant must have locked himself
indoors with a bunch of Larry Clark DVD’s the weekend
before he started shooting Elephant. That is the only
possible explanation for how Van Sant decided to shoot these
teenagers. He just can’t get enough of their sinewy,
skinny bodies. Hell, even the “geek” is a looker.
A looker with a lisp, sure, but hell, creepy pedophile directors
can’t be choosy.
Still, if that were the extent of the problems with the film,
Elephant would just be an interesting failure. An admirable
one, even. But Van Sant commits what I think is an unpardonable
sin. He shows the two school shooters, who barely register
as characters before they decide to matriculate themselves
with extreme prejudice, enjoying one last tender moment before
the killing spree. The two pretty, skinny boys take a shower
together, and just as they start to kiss, nakedly fondling
each other’s bodies, the camera fades out.
IF ANY OTHER DIRECTOR WORKING IN HOLLYWOOD DID THAT, HIS CAREER
WOULD BE OVER. Can you imagine the uproar if, say, Oliver
Stone or Brian De Palma tried to present the sociopathic mass
murderers as homosexual mass murderers? They would have Act
Up and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis all over their ass
quicker than a drag queen can tuck away his genitalia on a
Saturday night. But since Van Sant is a “queer”
director, he can get away with putting such an exploitative
moment in his film.
Much as been said about the fact that Van Sant cast non-actors
in his film, and had them improvise most of the scenes. I
have no problem with most of the actors. They looked like
real teenagers, and filled up the school hallways well enough.
That’s all that Van Sant needed them to do. But I’m
sick of films where the director thinks he doesn’t need
to hire a screenwriter (the films of Christopher Guest are
excluded from this rant).
As an aspiring writer, I have one thing to say to all the
directors who believe they can build their films in the editing
studio. Fuck you. You need us. You couldn’t write your
Cannes acceptance speech without a one of us. You need us
to write, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
You need us to write, “I coulda been a contenda.”
Hell, you need us to write, “Hasta la vista, baby.”
Without us, you get a movie that ends with two characters
saying, “Put the gun down. Come on man, put the gun down.”
Over and over again.
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Above:
A teenager in Elephant pondering life. as teenagers
tend to do. Below: Can someone say "sexual identity crisis?"
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