A Mirror Floating in Water

2003 Dir. Gus van Sant

The first decade of the twentieth century has been a decade of violence. Despite the attacks on 9/11 being the most tragic event, Columbine was the most symbolic as a precursor to a society taken by random violence.

Now Columbine was not the begining of violence in modern society nor was it the end, but it was a symbol of the nihilistic acts of practically ambiguous induviduals, whose purpose has been speculated a hundred times over by almost all groups and political institutions.

Immedietly, the news media went after video games, violent films and goth culture, unable to realize the effects it itself had on its viewers with its daily dose of "blood and bullets".

Filmmaker Michael Moore took a more reasonable approach by going beyond the usual scapgoating and humbly searched out a "reason" behind random violence such as that at Columbine in his documentary Bowling for Columbine. In the end, Moore's explanation was political.

Gus van Sant's film Elephant is an answer to Moore's documentary. Cold, distant and nihilistic, van Sant does not suggest any real reason for the violence, except that it just happens. He pokes fun at superficial explanations by presenting them incompletely and unsatisfyingly. Elephant is not so much a dramatization of Columbine, but rather an essay and at the same time, an embodiment of the event.

It encompasses a typical day at a high school, van Sant's camera-work (composed almost entirely of long tracking shots) is both hypnotic and terrifyingly indifferent. The main "plot" occurs reveals itself through a non-linear narrative that two troubled teenagers plan to massacare the school. The films lack of suspence and music makes it all the more disturbing in its silence. We see and follow multiple students, much of their dialouge improvised and emblimatic to any typical high school teenager. There are absolutley no hints, no foreshadowing, no sign of a plot evolving. The characters go about their everyday life through the endless parralell hallways of the school. When the violence occurs, the change in tone is almost shocking, and yet the camerawork remains balanced and smooth.

What van Sant says here in so little words (in no words at all actually), but rather through the movements of his camera (greatly inspired by the works of Bela Tarr), that violence just happens. There's rarely any meaning to be found in it. Van Sant hardly provides the audience with any real underlying motive for the killers. Both of them are outcasts and suffer from the usual bullying we see in schools, but so are other characters in the film and they don't snap.

The point is that violence is a sociological phenomena. You put a bunch of people together in a society and there's bound to be violence. Religion, morality, politics have all proved irrelevant cures or causes, as every society that has ever existed has suffered from violence. Like a ghost, it lurks beneath the depths of every one of us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRSiA6g1A-4