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Article Excerpt
Viewing Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) once is to enter into a beautiful mystery. Unraveling it begins with the title, an allusion to Alan Clarke's 1989 BBC film Elephant, itself named after writer Bernard MacLaverty's statement about problems in Northern Ireland resembling an elephant in your living room that is impossible to avoid but is begrudgingly tolerated. The non-narrative and episodic structure of Clarke's documentary style film, as well as the use of handheld camera and the absence of dialogue, provides further inspiration for Elephant. But another allusion is to an Indian fable recounted by John Godfrey Saxe in his poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant": each blind man describes the animal in a different way according to the part of it he feels. But the conviction of their partly correct perception is overshadowed by their ignorance in not understanding their varied perspectives that make up the entire creature. The misunderstandings of these learned blind men serve as a lesson in achieving a balanced and more complex perception. These references move Elephant toward the maturity of its own vision.
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With inspiration from a politically aware yet distanced view to the sly wisdom of a fable, Elephant approaches its dark subject matter in the most poetic of ways. Using a nonprofessional cast and working with improvisation the film follows one day in an American high school that ends in violence, drawing on the tragic events at Columbine High School in 1999. A wandering camera captures events in the school, sometimes repeatedly, while following a number of its students. The long take, the preoccupation with the details of everyday life, the classical music score, and the large absence of "reaction shots" in the creation of an offscreen world are just some elements that the film adopts which heighten its poetic resonance. This is juxtaposed with the mundane realities of teenage life. The film's heightened use of long takes contributes to realism in the film's passage of time yet it also uses slow motion and repeats events from different perspectives, even privileging certain characters with flashbacks. The overall effect of this approach builds on the mysterious beauty of the everyday counterbalanced by the horrors of inexplicable violence: and while the film shows many possible reasons for the violent climax, it offers no explanation of or answers to the dilemma it addresses. It remains a subdued mystery.
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In an effort to see Elephant, the most balanced understanding may be achieved in attempting what the fabled blind men once tried: to define it by feeling out its presence. But recognizing the failure of those fabled blind men and attempting to accept the diversity of perspectives needed to see the elephant in its complexity, without discovering truths or answers, may be the only way we can ever see--the film, the world, and the limits of our understanding. Mirroring the six blind men in Saxe's poem, different approaches and aspects of the film will be investigated in six different sections: "Reality Television," Style and Tone, Structure, John & Alex, Dream, and Meaning and Responsibility ... and the Mask of Indifference. Each avenue to explore the film offers distinct advantages to understanding the film's various aspects.
But what is the overall result of these varied perspectives? One of the strengths of the film lies in its ability to engage in a multiplicity of meanings of, and causes for, the tragic events yet never allowing any set of agents the power to dictate a definitive meaning. Do video games contribute toward teen violence? Yes. But they alone are not responsible. One conclusion gained from seeing Elephant, for there are many, is in the tragedy of not hearing the voices of the silent. In the film, this appears in the voices of youth with the many individual and private conflicts each student faces. These private dilemmas, from family to self-image problems, are given a horrifically public voice in the massacre orchestrated by two students. Their violence gives a voice to their disenfranchisement, previously unheard by their peers, school, and parents. This type of oppression gleaned through the multiple perspectives, even if only internalized, finds a correlative in the tragic silences of those oppressed socially and politically. Perhaps, the effect of witnessing the collage of interrelated high school students' stories is not toward the result of understanding exactly why such an event takes place. Instead, such a cinematic experience can show the importance of being present and attentive to society's youth, specifically, while also the power of increased socio-cultural awareness, more generally. The increasing of perspective offers a more thorough understanding. However, part of that understanding lies in the ambiguity of ever truly knowing anything. What takes precedence over an attempt to know an event, like the reasons behind a high school massacre, is an appreciation of the moment: cherishing those moments, beautiful or innocuous, that comprise life. The film engages in a distanced almost documentary-style observation while frequently privileging seemingly random moments, through repetition or slow motion techniques. This erects a division between searching for the causes of teen violence and witnessing the experience of the life of those affected by the tragedy. The moments that perpetually create the present are elevated and emphasized by Elephant's approach to its subject. It is in this narrowing of its focus on these moments that the film retains an elusive poetic beauty surpassing the sum of its parts.
"REALITY TELEVISION"
Of the various ways to approach Elephant, seeing its relation to "reality television" is perhaps most eccentric. Several factors prompted the present discussion. Specifically, the film's aspect ratio and largely adopted documentary-style realism lead to a consideration of other cultural products with similar attributes. Also, potentially locating formal and thematic influences on Elephant, even if they appear somewhat removed in the finished film, provides a way into understanding its peculiar narrative approach. Finally, in a film that concerns itself with...
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