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October 31, 2003

By D.K. Holm

Shooting an Elephant

ELEPHANT
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]

Why does Benny walk right into the killers' path?

That's one of the questions that plague you when you exit the theater after seeing Gus Van Sant's already-award-winning HBO film ELEPHANT. It has won the Golden Palm and the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System at the last Cannes Film Festival, and Van Sant himself was laurelled with the best director crown.

But frankly I don't take this lauding too seriously. BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, which explored the same events from a different angle, also won big at Cannes, and that's because these days the French, once rabid American cinephiles, tend to reward arty American movies that they perceive as attacks on the bloated aggressive empire that tries to dominate their film industry.

ELEPHANT is an arty but not artistic variation on an internet theory about the events that culminated in the Columbine High School shootings in April of 1999. Set during what appears to be one October day, ELEPHANT is divided roughly into two parts, with the first half following a bunch of students during their lunch hour, and the second half focusing on the two killers' prep work and their subsequent invasion of the school.

In the course of their bloody attack, the camera singles out Benny (Bennie Dixon), one of the few black kids we see in the film (the other bumps into one of the killers early in the film, hinting at a racism that may be one of many causes that inspired their rampage). Like most of the other kids in the film Benny is introduced from behind, as the camera follows him walking down a hall, and his name is flashed on the screen with white letters on a black background. He sees kids running, sees a fire in the hallway, helps a girl out a window, and then, instead of also running away, sees one of the murderers himself, standing over the school principal. When Benny stalks up behind the kid to attack, the killer hears him, turns, and without hesitation shoots and kills him. Benny never says anything. I assume that we are meant to find poignancy in his lone effort to bring down the killers. This odd digression in the film is probably based on some incident Van Sant heard about in the Columbine case.

Foreshadowings of death are sprinkled throughout the film's first half. One of the first lines of dialogue in ELEPHANT is "Mom's gonna kill you," said by a young kid named John (John Robinson) to his drunk driving dad (Timothy Bottoms) as the father is taking his son back to school after the lunch break. Later, other kids use the construction "kill you" in off-handed and haphazard ways, little knowing that they are fated to face real death. This is a banal idea, but also an overdone notion. Haven't there been, like, twelve Gwyneth Paltrow movies based on this idea? When John arrives at school his first action is to try and secure help for his dad by calling his brother to come and get him. At that point, the school's disciplinarian principal comes out and busts him for being late and assigns him detention. Thus the unfairness of the school environment, the injustices of the system, are put forward almost immediately as a potential explanation for what the killers did (Van Sant, who is credited with the screenplay, went to an elite private high school for rich kids, and has little direct knowledge of the oppressiveness of public high schools; the screenplay itself, we later learn, was improvised by the cast from notes or an outline, like an early Godard film, so Van Sant didn't "write" it in the conventional sense).

Later, the killers are shown playing violent video games and later there is a quick shot of the actual rampage as the camera replicates the perspective shown in the game's screen, offering yet another reason for the kids' violence. Actually, the fact that there are so few slayings by the millions of young "video game addicts" challenges the notion that playing these games leads to violence.

These not-so-subtle causal explanations belie what the film's press kit tries to put forward, wherein Van Sant is quoted as saying, "We didn't want to explain anything … There was also the issue of finding an explanation for something that doesn't necessarily have an explanation." What a bogus stance to take, a cop-out — of course, there is an "explanation" for the Columbine slayings — but for some reason Van Sant wants to take a public position that his film does not aim to explain or understand the events it chronicles. Well, then why, one wonders, make the film?

ELEPHANT isn't the first film to speculate about school rage. THE BASKETBALL DIARIES is often cited as a source of inspiration for real high school spree killers, and Lindsay Anderson was there first with IF … way back in the '60s. TAPS was a high school rage film in its way, and ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL did the same in a comical vein. HEATHERS was one of the first teen films to explore the social hierarchies in a way that exploited their murderous potentiality.

In ELEPHANT, the two killers are presented as close friends, practically living in each other's house. They are prone to staying over, and on the day of the events, have breakfast together (there is a lot of fuss about food in this movie). Just before they ritualistically dress for battle, they are shown showering together and kissing. The camera discreetly cuts away before we learn more of what they might do in that wet orgone box, perhaps because if they find sexual expression with each other they might not then feel the need to go on a murderous rampage. But then the point may be less that they are gay than that they are disciples of the kind of bizarre Nazism that found nothing untoward about same-sex affection. In any case, we also see in the film a roundtable of students talking about gayness, which is, I suppose, meant to convey that not all gays are murderous Hitler-worshipping hoodlums.

Speaking of food, amid all the horror, there is actually a visual gag in ELEPHANT. Three doomed teen girls go into a bathroom after their meager, barely touched lunch and vomit into the toilets. The movie suggests that they are squandering the horn of plenty that is the American high school cafeteria with their actions, and talking trivialities while death awaits them just a few seconds later. Like much else about ELEPHANT, this is pretty obvious stuff, if not a middle-brow mentality, lurking just below the austere surface of the film.

For another example, just before the two boys attack ominous clouds gather in the sky in time-lapsed photography. In literary guides, this is called the affective fallacy, but never has the affective fallacy been less effective or grossly literal. It was a dark and stormy day, indeed.

Where does Van Sant get these banal ideas? What does he actually believe? It is tempting to judge the dirty old man minded Van Sant as merely the Emperor of vice screens, and that intellectually speaking there really is no there there.

Van Sant is currently living in Portland, Oregon, and within certain groups of Portland film fanatics there was a small measure of amusement at the news that Van Sant had won the Cannes awards for ELEPHANT.

I use the word amusement, because among these lowly film denizens in the languid city where Van Sant makes his home there is a general feeling that this cinematic emperor has no clothes. Indeed, the Cannes win is viewed as yet another example of Van Sant's incredible luck, a remarkable good fortune that defies the odds of chance, logic, and talent.

Throughout Van Sant's career, a network of mutually enabling tangents have conspired to promote him as an indie filmmaker of high repute, yet this unfolds despite the impression he often gives of not wanting to be a filmmaker at all, as shown in frequent forays into photography (a photo book of ordinary snapshots), novel writing (PINK), and rock music (Destroy All Blondes). Now he has been given that highest accolade, French deification as an "artist." It's all very laughable, darkly paradoxical, and sad. "And Dr. Homais has just been awarded the Legion d'Honneur."

Unfortunately, box office results often suggest that the rest of the country tends not to share the same high opinion of Van Sant as do ambitious writers for serious film journals.

Critically, Van Sant's films are usually a source of division among garden-variety movie reviewers. Except for a few critics, list makers and festival judging panels, Van Sant's movies are viewed skeptically. Nor does the public flock to his films. GOOD WILL HUNTING was mainstream enough to make $138 million dollars off of its $10 million dollars, and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO made $6 million off of a $2 million dollar movie. But for the most part, Van Sant doesn't have the public recognition of a director such as Oliver Stone. He's in a double bind. When his films aren't hobbled by having an agenda so narrow that the majority of filmgoers won't get anything out of them, they are simply under the radar (one must always bear in mind that Americans don't read). GOOD WILL HUNTING — verbose, woman hating, poorly structured (several false endings), derivative (ORDINARY PEOPLE), with crowd-pleasing contempt for intellectuals — defied the odds by being popular.

Now why do highbrow critics like Van Sant so much? He is often considered, pro forma, a visual stylist by arts writers. In truth, Van Sant doesn't appear to have much patient for craft, and if there is one thing you have to have patience for in moviemaking it's craft. Van Sant's lack of interest in the visual aspect of film is apparent in the fact that his movies lack a consistent visual style across a series of cinematographers, unlike the films of Hitchcock, whose PSYCHO Van Sant recreated and "gay-ified" on rather flimsy grounds because he was viewed as a visual stylist. But by showing the Norman Bates character masturbating voyeuristically, Van Sant nullified the psychological motivation for the murders in the first place as carefully laid out in the first film. Maybe that's why he also pulls away from the shower scene in ELEPHANT.

You can always tell a John Ford film, a Scorsese film, a DePalma film; Van Sant's movies look like everyone else's, when they don't look like TV movies. In fact, FINDING FORESTER is so poorly photographed that often characters are presented standing in front of windows where the backlighting prevents you from recognizing them, or seeing their presumably all-important facial expressions.

How did Van Sant get a rep as a visual stylist? Aside from being known as a Rhode Island School of Design graduate, it's probably due to the fact that in his early films, Van Sant had cinematographers who did have patience for craft. The stunning tracking shots, lighting effects, and compositions of his first two or three films were born of DPs to whom he must have ceded the visual decisions.

Perhaps Van Sant left these decisions in their hands because he was distracted by other matters. It is well know that Van Sant has always been interested in creating his own Warholian traveling circus of aspiring models, artists, and actors who all hang out at his place during his projects and either contribute or just relax. And like Warhol, he speaks in cryptic inarticulate utterances (I know; I was assigned once the dire task of interviewing him. What was supposed to be a straight Q&A ended up a text profile with three or four meager quotes). He is famously vague and inarticulate on the set, throwing the actors onto their own devices. The most famous example is River Phoenix, who improvised the whole campfire scene in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO. A similar effort at campfire oration in GERRY falls flat due to incoherence.

Well, historically speaking moviemaking, like live theater, does serve the purpose of expanding one's social life. The photos of Van Sant in Cannes surrounded by a quartet of teen actors probably spoke more loudly than the film itself about just what he finds so appealing in the movie making process. Even the rather appalled VARIETY review of ELEPHANT noted that the high school students in the film seemed impossibly model-like, in distracting contrast to the presumed import of the piece.

The other running joke against Van Sant in Portland film enclaves is the wish that the director would be banned from seeing movies at the Northwest Film Study Center, the non-profit film society attached to the local art museum.

Every time Van Sant sees a screening at this institution, cinematic disaster ensues. His viewing many years ago of Welles's CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT led to a rethinking of his then current project, IDAHO, with the now well-known disastrous results, i.e., the inclusion of Shakespeare dialogue and a borrowing of plot elements from the HENRY cycle of plays.

A few years ago, Van Sant made another pilgrimage to the NWFC where he saw some films by Bela Tarr, the 48-year old Hungarian director (SATAN TANGO) whose films are notable for their distinctive approach to moviemaking. Interested in ordinary life, Tarr (like Chantal Ackerman, among other European directors) enjoys, to put it reductively, turning on his camera and recording behavior in real-time, with lots of roving, if not aimless, camerawork.

Van Sant's exposure to Tarr led to a soporific experiment with similar techniques in GERRY. This is a film comprising a succession of long takes of Matt Damon and Casey Affleck walking through the desert. Occasionally they mutter to each other, but for the most part they just walk. And walk. And walk. Never has one major international film director so misunderstood another.

Perhaps Van Sant confused Tarr with Andy Warhol. One imagines that the attraction that Tarr's "style" held for Van Sant was that with it he could avoid style and craft. He can claim for himself the "simplicity" of Warhol, but with the cachet of Eastern European art house cinema instead of the lazy and exploitative world Warhol created, even though Van Sant's styles is virtually the same as Warhol's.

To give Van Sant the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he was feeling the urge to "cleanse" himself of built-up aesthetic plaque, a state of mind that artists who think about art a lot find themselves in. Perhaps that's why he made PSYCHO, to get back to basics and relearn how movies were made by doing a shot-by-shot remake of a masterpiece. Perhaps that is the reason behind his desire to replicate the austere purity of Tarr, a "getting back to basics" that resembles Guy Maddin's interest in faded imagery, and the tendency toward "in camera" effects found in Coppola's DRACULA and George Clooney's CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND. Perhaps Van Sant learned some lessons in improv and simplicity from GERRY.

Curiously, even though the real story on which GERRY is based has a gay component, Van Sant masks it with obscurity, and in the meandering improvisations of the two stars. In ELEPHANT Van Sant adopts the disputed gay interpretation of the Columbine massacre — that the boys were lovers whose exclusion from the snooty social fabric of the high school drove them to an interest in Hitler and mass murder. Such explicitness is unusually overt for Van Sant.

Van Sant is expressing something akin to sympathy for his Nazi-loving kid killers. There's nothing wrong with trying to understand the psychology of evil. Most Americans of a certain age and economic class share bad memories of high school, and it was common in the wake of Columbine to hear friends who hated their high school experience say that if they had had guns back in their day they might have been tempted to do some shooting too. But Van Sant's subtle identification with his high school killers, masked by Tarr-style distanciation, is disturbing. Van Sant is also drawing upon the work of British television director Alan Clarke, whose last film, a 30-minute short about sectarian violence in Northern Ireland committed by teens, is also called ELEPHANT (Portland's Northwest Film Center also showed a retrospective of Clarke's films, as well). But tony credentials derived from European cinema don't disguise the weird fixations that ELEPHANT irresponsibly represents.

Mainstream reviewers have shown a tendency to wrap themselves into pretzels trying to like ELEPHANT, an unlikable film. Richard Corliss, in the June 9, 2003 issue of TIME wrote that the Cannes jury honored "a film critical of the American addiction to gun violence," just as it had the year before with Michael Moore's BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE. But while praising the idea of the film, Corliss concludes that ELEPHANT "isn't a terrific film; it's a murmuring, meandering study with an apocalyptic punch line. But the corpses strewing the school corridors don't make the movie anti-American, any more than Hamlet is anti-Danish. ELEPHANT depicts evil, and the ordinary people who, through bad luck, get in its way." In ELEPHANT Van Sant, with a privileged background of wealth and good schools, wants to break bread with middle class outsiders, just as in IDAHO he wanted to hang out with street hustlers and drug addicts.

I'm curious to know why gay directors such as Greg Araki, Tom Kalin (SWOON), and now Van Sant can get away with celebrations of violent and amoral killers while straight helmers like Sam Peckinpah, Tarantino, and Oliver Stone are castigated for their perceived love of violence. William Friedkin and Paul Verhoeven were plagued with protests for including gay killers in their films. Will a similar protest arise against a film that shows two gay teens massacring scores of their schoolmates? I doubt it. Van Sant's film is only the latest movie to get an inexplicable pass for its weird approval of social violence against youths. Once again, Van Sant's remarkable luck saw him to one of cinema's highest accolades in the face of all reason.

ELEPHANT isn't totally horrible. There are some good production design elements to the film, from the school as a whole itself, to the tiny little scent de-odorizer in the shape of Satan hanging from the killers' car. Van Sant does a fairly good job of his Tarantino-inspired overlapping time line, and the long tracking shots at least have the virtue of laying out the territory for us, which becomes important later. Sound production is excellent for this otherwise cold film. And the various kids are far from anonymous. Van Sant relays a great deal of information about them in a brief amount of time. Take the nerd girl Michelle (Kristen Hicks). She is moved by the piano music that she hears wafting over the football field. She is also very alone, and has an issue with exposing her flesh, as we surmise from the grief a P.E. coach gives her about not wearing a proper gym uniform. We note her solo path into the locker room, and the bashful way she changes into her regular clothes. In fact, most of the teens, such as the Keanu Reeves clone Robinson, are fairly natural actors. Meanwhile most of the adults come off as phony and arch and their "style" clashes with the otherwise realistic affect of the film, as with the terrible Vanna O'Brien, who plays the P.E. teacher. But in the end, I tend to agree with Todd McCarthy's scathing VARIETY review, in which he charges ELEPHANT with being an irresponsible film.

ELEPHANT appears to speak to someone or some social groups, however. Posters to an ELEPHANT-celebrating website were numerous. One wrote, "It was great working on ELEPHANT. I played the Red Hair Kid Roman Ostrovsky. Gus Van Sant is a great dir. to work with and i am so happy that he saw me eating breakfast and asked me if i would be in this movie. and i said ok. This movie is not for the young ones." Another added, "I saw the premiere of ELEPHANT in Portland Org. I was also in the movie (though i got cut out). When i saw the movie I was amazed at how it spoke to teens. I could tell that the adults didn't really get it but anyone under 20 knew exactly what Mr. Van San was saying. The most briliant movie and director."

In his famous essay - memoir "Shooting an Elephant," George Orwell wrote about the act of killing a rampaging elephant in Burma during a time when he was a municipal cop. In his job, he was torn between hatred for the empire above him and loathing of the taunting natives below. When the time came to shoot the elephant, Orwell confessed to responding more to the pressure from the crowd of leering faces surrounding him than to anything the elephant had done. "I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind." Orwell doesn't want to shoot the elephant, but when the clumsy act is done and the animal enters its prolonged death writhings, he leaves, and the hungry crowd descends upon the elephant to carve it up. Far from being upset, the villagers welcomed the incident, as an entertainment. Only Orwell seemed to be troubled by the implications of what he had to do. Indeed, Orwell captures wonderfully and grimly the chaos of feelings, impulses, spoken and unspoken social constraints and self-serving justifications attendant on even the simplest public actions. Would that ELEPHANT were as nuanced, subtle, and insightful as that.

KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume Four

KILL BILL VOL. 1
If you are still interesting in thinking more about KILL BILL than any other movie, as I am, I suggest you go back and read Harry Knowles's multi-part on set piece. Among the revelations that now make sense is his claim that the "Yuki's Revenge" sequence cut from the script was actually shot. He also says that the sushi in Okinawa is terrible, so the in joke in the film is that Sonny Chiba runs a sushi shop because that's the best way to stay hidden.

The new issue of SIGHT AND SOUND to reach America has an interview with Tarantino. He provides a few more annotations, and also talks about being a movie soundtrack record collector, oft-times before he has even seen the movie.

?

Also, I finally caught up with the ROLLING STONE profile of Tarantino, and even better than the story itself are the photos, which show Tarantino in his house, surrounded by nothing but movies, toys, and magazines. It is a fan's delight to scrutinize the top of his coffee table for titles of movies he has been watching lately.

Annotations My friend Ian McCullough writes in to say, "I'll but my 'insight' on the pile — the black and white blur/slo-mo portion of the sword fight looks like an homage to the ending of SWORD OF DOOM. It's not a great film but the end sequence is priceless."

NEXT TIME: THE HUMAN STAIN

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