| Why are there no cell phones in Gus
van Sant's new film, Elephant, which won the Golden
Palm and Best Directing Award at Cannes in May? The film is
set in a modern high school and was inspired by events that
occurred in 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado. Even
though many US schools banned cell phones in the 80s as part
of the War on Drugs, there were cell phones at Columbine,
where students and staff used them to alert the community
that two armed students had just walked in and started shooting
everyone in sight. But in Van Sant's film, which takes us
inside a Portland, Oregon, high school in the minutes leading
up to a Columbine style disaster, there isn't a cell phone
to be seen, even when the shooting starts.
Charges that the filmmaker has distorted reality would be
comically inappropriate for a film as stylized as Elephant.
Rather, the systematic absence of a gadget possessed by at
least 50 percent of American teens is part of the stylization
which lifts the film out of the docudrama category, even though
it was produced by Time Warner's cable service, HBO. Closing
one's eyes while watching it and imagining a cinema verité
film on the same subject -- the jiggly five second shots,
the sound and fury of a noise track recorded on the spot,
the familiar images of halls crowded with shrieking kids --
is like trying to imagine Vermeer's Woman with a Pitcher
with blemishes and blackened teeth, and the cacophony of a
city street coming in the same window that admits that famous
golden light.
There is more than a little Vermeer in the way Van Sant paints
the corridors of his unnamed school, where late morning light
burnishes the floors and the silence is broken by vague far
off sounds that are impossible to identify, while ravishing
cloudscapes and trees turning red and gold frame an autumnal
Arcadia, with death waiting just outside the frame. The events
leading up to the shooting take place while most students
are in class, (never shown), so the few youngsters we end
up following stroll through the deserted halls with no company
but the camera and occasional friends intercepted chatting
in small groups or passing through in the opposite direction.
Their peaceful solitude would be shattered by a glimpse of
even one kid yacking on a cell phone, so Principal Van Sant
has banished those distracting devices, along with any close
encounters that would offer too much insight into the souls
of these angelic wanderers before their final encounter with
an absurd destiny.
While Gus Van Sant is known to some as the man who remade
Psycho, the unconventional techniques he uses in
Elephant to generate suspense about a foregone conclusion
crossbreed Hitchcock with a considerable number of recent
films, from Tarantino onward, that fracture linear storytelling
with odd time loops, repetitions and multiple perspectives.
Hitchcock built The Birds around the fact that audiences
already knew that the birds were coming, and Van Sant does
the same here. From the first images of the film we are on
the lookout for signs that will tell us who will turn out
to be a shooter. Will it be blond haired John (John Robinson),
who has to take the wheel of the car because his father (Timothy
Bottoms, who played a despairing teen in The Last Picture
Show) has had too much to drink? Or will it be the shutterbug
Elias (Elias McConnell), who "shoots" a punk couple
in the park for his portfolio?
As we puzzle over this, the members of the school's "Gay
and Straight Club" are concluding in their weekly meeting
that you can't judge a book by its cover -- that is, until
we suddenly see the shooters, armed to the teeth and wearing
combat fatigues and determined expressions, marching into
the school past John as he leaves to look for his father.
After that the film keeps looping back and showing the approach
of doom from the perspective of one student after another,
while accumulating time markers (starting with John's exit
from the school, which is replayed several times) remind us
that each character we follow is drifting or racing to the
location where he or she will be when the two junior Terminators
who are even now entering the building unleash their apocalypse.
Soon the dark corridors of the school begin to remind us of
the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
-- fans of that film will recognize in the ninth hour appearance
of Benny (Bennie Dixon), the only black student we see, something
of the thwarted deus ex machine played in Kubrick's
film by Scatman Crothers.
But the film that exerted the most powerful influence on Van
Sant is Robert Redford's Ordinary People, in which
a teenager attempts suicide after his family is devastated
by the accidental death of his older brother. Van Sant has
said that there are pieces of Ordinary People in
every film he has made, and quite apart from the obvious thematic
similarities, Elephant is the one that most resembles
Redford's film. What Pachabelle did for Ordinary People,
the Moonlight Sonata does for Elephant, in a breath
taking sequence at the beginning where characters wander in
and out of a lingering shot of a touch football game, and
one gawky girl (Kristen Hicks) pauses in the frame, spell
bound for a second as if she were hearing Beethoven's music.
"Some movies you watch, others you feel," said the
ads for Ordinary People, and that's a good description
of Elephant, which doesn't explain its bloody, fiery
climax, but makes us to feel it through the magic of cinema,
that almost forgotten enchantment that is reinvented in every
frame of this remarkable film.
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© Copyright Bill Krohn 2005. No part of this article
may be reprinted without permission of the author.
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