I really can't find the right words to describe how I felt after seeing Gus Van Sant's Elephant. "Violated" isn't quite right, nor is "manipulated," which I think has a negative connotation. It's a disturbing film, which has left many of its viewers feeling violated and/or manipulated but those adjectives are much too superficial to explain how it made me feel. Without a doubt, this anatomy of a school shooting, loosely based on the Columbine tragedy, is one of the most bold and brilliant American films made this decade. But I can't say that I liked it. I think it's well-made and I recommend it highly. It's just wrong to say that you like a film like this.
The title of the film itself is as much a topic of discussion as its content. The official answer is that Elephant was the title of a short about killings in Ireland and Van Sant named his film after that. That original short took its name from the adage, "the elephant in the room," something so big and horrible that everyone's too polite to talk about it. And finally, my favorite, there is the Buddhist story about old blind men who were trying to learn about elephants from only touching its tusk. Which is to say that one can learn about the reason behind school shootings simply by examining some aspects of one. With a title like that, the film has a lot to live up to; frighteningly, it does.
Elephant runs on a fractured timeline but it's less of a gimmick than a necessity to show events that happen simultaneously. We are introduced to many characters as they make their way to school in the morning. To name them all now would be unnecessary, as their individual characters are not important. Their personalities don't really stand out, nor are they supposed to; they're just regular American kids. One boy has a father who is either an alcoholic or mentally ill (the ambiguity of which contributes to the surreal poetic tone of the film); another is a photographer looking to improve his portfolio; another is having problems with his girlfriend; a girl in gym class is uncomfortable with showing her legs and is hounded by the gym teacher to wear shorts. These are kids we all knew or were in high school.
And then there's Eric and Alex, two friends who decide to take revenge on the kids who harass them in school by shooting them. The single most disturbing thing about this film is the lucidity with which they put their plan into action. There is a scene late in the film where we see Eric and Alex going over a map of the school, detailing where they will do what. "Most importantly, have fun," Alex says to Eric before they drive to the school.
The shooting only takes up the last 20 minutes of the film. The hour before it is comprised mainly of students walking from place to place in the school, very long takes following them as they go about their daily lives. This refusal to look away from even the most mundane activities (we watch as one boy develops a roll of film he shot, which if you've ever developed film yourself, you know it's not interesting in the least) punctuates the fact that we're watching the final moments in these kids' lives. If anything bad can be said about Elephant, it is that it assumes you know what the film is about ahead of time; otherwise, most viewers would ask themselves, "What the hell am I watching these kids walk around a school all day for?"
*SPOILER ALERT - YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP PAST THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS*
Van Sant is guilty of a little manipulation but only slightly and for good reason. Late in the film, the character of Benny, one of the presumably few black kids in the school, is introduced. Benny is tall, strong, with cornrows and a slow, confident gait. In short, you think this big black man is about to kick some scrawny white-boy ass. Wrong. Benny dies trying to get the drop on Eric, who has the principal in his crosshairs.
Van Sant has two statements to make here, one about his art and one about his subject. Benny is meant to conjure up images of the black hero, particularly of films like George Romero's Dead series (the shootings have already begun when we meet Benny, so Elephant has essentially become a horror film at this point). Benny silently helps Acadia, a girl we meet briefly in the beginning, out the window before continuing his trip through the school, presumably to find the killers. The audience is meant to think that Benny is going to stop this reign of terror but once Eric guns him down without so much as a second thought, it becomes clear that the point of having Benny in the movie at all was to set the audience up for that letdown. Because in reality, the likelihood of an easy end to a situation like that is very low. Like I said, it's manipulative, but Van Sant has enough of a reputation that he deserves a second thought for anything that doesn't sit right initially.
*END SPOILERS*
I was so shaken by this film (and you will NEVER hear Fur Elise or Moonlight Sonata without the hairs standing up on the back of your neck after seeing this film) that I had to run right to IMDb and check out how other people felt about it. For the 7.2/10 user rating that it has, there sure are a lot of people that hated the film, or said that they did. And I can understand it completely. A film that leaves you so emotionally bruised is hard to enjoy, impossible even. But whether or not it strikes a chord with you, you will not forget this film.
But this is the point of Elephant. Violence is not something that should be easily dismissable. Incidents like this don't resolve themselves easily and cleanly, as anyone who was present at Columbine High School in 1999 or Santana High School in 2001 (or even so much as watched CNN coverage of these) can attest to. As a matter of fact, by ending the film where he does - unresolved on screen but with a grim certainty of the trajectory of future events - Van Sant lets us off the hook; it's such an abrupt ending that the only explanation for it is mercy.