Perils of Minimalism?

I just watched Elephant and found it both compelling and puzzling. What puzzles me partly is its schizophrenic strategy of following precisely many of the details of the Columbine Harris/Klebold shootings (the attraction to Hitler, the playing of violent videogames, the timeline and strategy of pipe bombs and shootings, the warning to a student outside, the directive to “have fun,” even the realization of the rumor that the spree ended with harris shooting klebold rather than a mutual suicide) while allowing for a very loose improvisational style. Is the film a dramatization, deliberately courting status as a kind of lyrical re-creation of Columbine, or does it mean to suggest itself as a kind of film about Anywhere USA where banality is inexplicably interrupted by violence? What am I missing in the folding together of these two approaches? Why does it deliberately court cliché—the repetition of one of the most well-known pieces of classical music, the repeated images of “storm clouds massing?”

Is the desire to “learn” something about the shootings merely a crass instrumentalism, the other side of prurient interest, or is it a demand that events of this magnitude be faced with something other than deadpan lyricism, made up of endless tracking shots through hallways and long takes? Currently there is a massive amount of information available about the events at columbine, the plans of the killers, their thoughts, their relationships with other students at the school, their psychiatric histories, etc.
See columbine.free2host.net for a comprehensive overview.

Elephant absorbs some of this information so that it can be directly connected to these specific historical events but it drains them of all social context so that the film can establish a kind of cool distance in its depiction of the shootings. Every student in the film is a cipher, so that when they are shot I am not particularly “involved.” Am I to take the banality as a critique of banality? Or am I to take the lyricism of the portrayal of banality as a deliberately restrained counterpoint to the nihilism of the shooters? Or is it a banal approach to a horrific event?

Oddly—as Jeff and Mark have pointed out elsewhere—there is a hint of “explanation” here in two moments: the brief discussion in a classroom of whether or not you can “recognize” gay people on the street, and then the kiss between the two boys in the shower. At this second scene, the greedy demands of common sense kick in: would two such violently repressed personalities show no reluctance at a naked kiss; is this kiss the culmination of other events; does the kiss lead to sex before the shootings, and if so, why is there no hint of its consequences afterward? Is the film, so coy otherwise, making a rather straightforward link between sexual repression and violence, so that homophobia is to a large degree responsible for these two kids acting out their frustration at being unable to realize their sexuality? If so, why is there no other indication of the homophobia that typically saturates a high school (where everything questionable is “gay” and your enemies “suck dick”) Is it just a red herring, for meaning mongers?

So, what gives? Apparently harris and klebold, media savvy and psychotic, debated whether or not spielberg or tarantino would film the story of the columbine events. Imagine their disappointment at the quiet “indie treatment.” Is that renunciation part of the film’s motive?

27 thoughts on “Perils of Minimalism?”

  3. I won’t even try to answer all of your questions, Michael. Though I had some of the same questions as you, I get the feeling they didn’t bother me as much as they bothered you.

    One thing: the cliched piece of classical music. When we first hear it, we see another character – who is later shot – walking to the school building while the music is playing. We find out later the music is being performed by one of the killers. To me, the choice of that music symbolizes the dreary piano lessons that so many of us had to take, and yet oddly, this kid actually plays the piece rather proficiently. Certianly better than we’d expect him to, and certainly better than I could ever play it. And I think that’s what Van Sant was maybe trying to convey: Even the killers are aware of beauty and art; maybe even more aware? More able to transcend the common aspects of an over-played piece of classical music that every piano student has to learn. The other killer is playing a first-person shooter video game while the first guy finishes his piano piece. Message: simple beauty and bland pervasive violence co-exist in our society. We are capable of absorbing all of it. The results though, can sometimes be dire.

    I personally don’t need to know more about the real killers to enjoy this film, and I certainly don’t WANT to know much more about them. I like how Van Sant took a huge cultural event, and made it his own: gave it the quiet indie treatment as you say. It’s for that reason I am interested in his Cobain film. The real event has lost all meaning to me now, though I remember exactly where I was when I heard about it. John Bruns and I were coming back to USC from the LA Public Library downtown, and heard it on KROQ. It was another beautiful SoCal day.

  5. interesting thoughts on the musical piece, Mark–especially since the piano player kills his video-game playing friend, indicating perhaps that the “cultivated” kid is perhaps even more bloodthirsty and disturbed than his friend. I’m not sure though that I agree that Van Sant made the event his own–certainly he made it more abstract, by deleting much of the context. But perhaps I have to stop asking for things from a film with a very different approach–I would, however, like to see the foundational events approached also from an “excessive maximalist” approach–like Oliver Stone’s?–which attempts to put everything in. Not that it would be a necessarily “better” method, simply interesting to see if there’s any difference in trying to capture a historical moment.

    I’m very interested in seeing the Cobain film too, though there also Van Sant says he resists “details” in favor of making up his own account. I’m not sure about Asia Argento as Courtney Love (why not Courtney Love as Courtney Love)–but hubba hubba! I was not particularly stunned by Cobain’s suicide–I was more taken aback by Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone’s untimely deaths, especially since they were helpless to do anything about them. Riddle me this, dynamic dunces, do you remember where you were when Frank Gorshin died?

  6. Where was I when Frank Gorshin died? I think I was at Hank’s at the Stillwell Hotel, reminiscing with Judy Carne about our days on The Kraft Music Hall show. The news came on the TV. Judy was inconsolable. I passed out in the Chinese buffet.

  7. ah, cute little Judy! Sock it to me, indeed. We used to make the scene at The Scarlet Lady in Culver City. But you’re a lying bastard–there’s no chinese buffet at Hank’s, only that damn bologna and white bread sweating under the heat lamp. Are you sure it wasn’t Ruth Buzzi?

  8. Wrong you are, Michael. On occasion, a tray full of fried rice would be available, warmed by the enduring love of canned heat. After a couple of Hank’s gin martinis, that fried rice looks like a California King.

    As the saying goes: if you only got baloney, Hank knew you were a phoney.

  9. Oof. Hank’s.

    I once walked all the way from Hank’s back across the street to my apartment. Almost on my own. When I woke up my tongue was black.

  10. he used to tell me he saved the fried rice for the hollywood schmuckos. but the only food I’d touch in Hank’s would be the olives, and even those were questionable (furry pimentos?). the black tongue told you that you had a good time even if you didn’t know it. took a lot of shaving though.

  11. I’m not sure though that I agree that Van Sant made the event his own–certainly he made it more abstract, by deleting much of the context.

    Yes, I agree. I didn’t mean to state anything otherwise. Still, I admire Van Sant for taking these heavily charged American events and reshaping them to fit his artistic sensibilities. …and perhaps that’s the best explanation for the seemingly out of place gay kiss in the film: It’s just part of Van Sant’s reimagining of the events.

    Watched The Machinist last night. Liked it quite a lot, but haven’t had the time to get down anything interesting about it. The combo of Bale and Nolan might even make me go see Batman.

  12. Michael noted, in the initial post, puzzlement about the “schizophrenic strategy of following precisely many of the details of the Columbine Harris/Klebold shootings … while allowing for a very loose improvisational style.”

    I’m sorry to say I’m only just about to watch “Elephant” (on its way from the library), but it strikes me that the strategy you note could be a question about a great number of Van Sant’s films–starting with Private Idaho and its riff on Henry IV and leading up through his remake (shot for shot) of Psycho. It may be–and, again, I need to check out the film to play around with this–that Van Sant is less interested in some notion of the real and of ways to represent than he is in the obstacle or triumph of repetition.

    I think what I mean is: rather than seeing Elephant or the Cobain movie as new twists, where he (re)discovers the power of art to liberate us from reality, Van Sant instead continues in his films to celebrate how there is nothing but repetition–and repetition, examined closely, doesn’t so much reimagine or revise as recuperate lived experience. We’re not freer, or less bound to context and history and social oppression; we don’t, even as artists, break away from what’s expected. Instead–like Reeves in Idaho, Norman Bates, the teen killers, or the rock star, we are fated to certain ends, slated toward certain behaviors. (And if, like the two wandering vacuums in Gerry, we’re not explicitly repeating a plot, we wander pointlessly.)

    Now–is that a negative thing? A positive thing? Recalling Drugstore Cowboy, what’s the difference? Pleasures will kill us, so will the loss of pleasure; either way you die.

    I’m babbling. I should see the movie then give this half-baked notion another turn over the spit.

  13. I’m not sure I follow your conception of repetition, Mike. It has an almost mystical ring here. Do you have a newsletter? I’m not sure how well it works for Columbine and Elephant–that shooting seems like something of a “new plot” or are the teens merely following an old narrative in a new form?

  14. Given that Columbine wasn’t the first school shooting, just the most technologically efficient, and that it explicitly built on video game methodology, I doubt it was all that new an event.

    (And mad-eyed John Brown led a small band of followers into Kansas and systematically slaughtered a couple of families who represented the violent oppressiveness of mainstream American culture. And he was borrowing from a pretty old text, hacking ’em up “like Midianites,” for the Bible readers in our crowd. There doesn’t seem to be much new about outraged social outsiders imagining and enacting their righteous vengeance on “wrongdoers” … but maybe that’s too neatly broad a category? So inclusive as to account for all kinds of disparate violence? Whatever–it just isn’t that new.)

    Yeah, I get a little lost in repetition. I should sign up for my newsletter, too. But I’m explicitly trying to reject the (quasi-mystical?) view of the artist responding to reality; heck, I think Van Sant is kind of doing that, too. What I saw in the original post and the smart back-and-forth between you and Mauer was a discussion about how/whether Elephant altered our sense of Columbine, or whether it escaped from that historical context. Both answers suggest that the artist or this film or the aesthetic generally has some control over its relation to reality, is separable from reality, can influence the real.

    I’m simply trying to mess with that–’cause Van Sant keeps making movies with some stylistic and cultural repetition at their core. The narratives seem to suggest a collapse of the difference between artistic representations, as the stories (in Psycho’s case literally) repeat one another; further, the difference between artistic representations and reality collapse. The repeat–reiterate, (ahem–this is for the newsletter) reify–certan stories, experiences, feelings.

    That’s a much more hopeless view of Columbine. But I don’t see Van Sant as necessarily that hopeless–again, as with Drugstore or Idaho, there’s almost a commitment to recognizing that (hopeless) repetition and then reveling in what remains possible. (With Psycho–trying to imagine that a shot-for-shot remake will still affect, move, scare audiences… but in the same ways? new ways?)

  15. once any story is reduced to its most essential narrative parts it appears to be merely a repetition of a basic structure–but I’m not sure of what justifies the initial reduction. The reduction is a useful strategy but perhaps it reduces too much of an event to myth and I’m not sure of why the strategy would be indiscriminately applied by Van Sant to the school shootings and to Kurt Cobain. What is the nature of what remains to “revel in” (will this be addressed in the newsletter?). I’m not sure even Vladimir and Estragon have such a strict sense of repetition but I may not be fully grasping your ideas here. I will seek out Gerry in the near future, as well as the Cobain film as soon as it becomes available. and the Psycho re-make–did you see it, Mike? if so, what thoughts? why the purity of a shot-for-shot remake but with different actors, different aesthetics (color not black and white?)

  16. I’m mostly just fucking around here, trying to say something that would spark a conversation. Done.

    I did see Psycho, in a power-skim. And its repetition is what compels me to try to see ‘repetition’ as part of Van Sant’s focus elsewhere, too. You’re right; is it the same thing, if the film repeats narrative right down to the composition of shots–but still looks different?

    Or–what purpose such small differences, or such (at least to this viewer) dull repetitiveness? Beats me, and I’m not sure my newsletter will help.

    But I pulled back and thought–what about the repetitions in other films? How are these formal repetitions (event, plot, character type, even bits of dialogue in Idaho–and full-scale recreations of shots in Psycho) tied to thematic or ideological repetitions? (The heteronormativity in Idaho equated — not reduced to, but also not merely different from — with Hal’s rejection of Falstaffian pleasures for the disciplined power of the throne. The boys who ‘repeat’ video game and fascist and other violent plots/methods/beliefs/ideologies in ‘real life,’ repeated as you note so “precisely” in the film’s repetition of their lives.)

    So what to make of this? Is it grim pointless repetition–there is no art, let’s remake Psycho? I don’t think so. Nor is it the easy detachment–art isn’t ‘real,’ so my Elephant boys are NOT (merely) repetitions of Columbine but something new, other, politically more astute. I don’t think so.

    I haven’t a clear answer; I was trying to say something just pointed and opaque enough to get someone like you to say something smarter…. I mentioned ‘reveling’ because (again, mostly drawing from Cowboy and Idaho–or even from the sly restrained glee in Van Sant’s interviews about Psycho) there seems to be something prankish about his use of these repetitions–disruptive of both the pessimistic and utopic scenarios about art’s relation to earlier art or to real life history.

    Oh: yeah, sure, it is cheap easy structuralism to reduce narratives to certain key details which erase difference. And I would be cautious about asserting ‘mere’ repetition, but I don’t think I’m suggesting that Columbine is mythic or archetypal or Jungian or even Proppian. Screw that–I just don’t think there’s all that much “new” about boys reading/seeing accounts of righteous violence and re-enacting them. The purpose of reducing to this repetitive story is to clarify something about the limits of reading their motives. I hope.

  17. I always thought van Sant’s Psycho was this huge joke on Hollywood–a comment on the vapidity of the process–the idea that a frame for frame remake (flying bovine notwithstanding) of the original would some how find a broader audience either too young to remember the original or too stupid to simply go to the original. I’ve always felt there was something subversive about that project and often imagine the pitch to have been something of a performance piece and the idea that the studio wanted to do it, the cruelest punchline. I also like to imagine a set pulsing with a sort of film school solemnity where everyone is working so damn diligently to “honor the source.” Still, I think your meditations on repetition as a formal aesthetic to be more thoughtful and less wish-fulfillment.

  18. That’s a great interpretation, Jeff–who wouldn’t happily do a shot-for-shot remake of a great film, as a profound fuck-you to Hollywood? I’d like to do Grand Illusion with George Clooney. Or La Dolce Vita with Pauly Shore. perhaps there was also some affinity for the great Borges story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” in which the title character goes through hundreds of drafts trying unsuccessfuly to duplicate the Cervantes’ book word for word. but in that story nothing remains, and unfortunately in Van Sant’s case, something does.

    regarding violence and repitition, I find intriguing and illuminating Mike’s ideas regarding the attempt to confound both utopian and pessimistic readings (I imagine any filmmaker confronting inherently “meaningful” events must want very much to avoid this easy evaluation of “good/uplifting” or “bad/depressing.” hence, the same strategy applied to the cult figure of Kurt Cobain who is easily condemned or sanctified). but I’m not so happy with the idea of “nothing new”–I think violence, like technology to which it is inseparably connected, has quietly ratcheted up its forms and consequences, almost without anyone noticing, partly because we assume that its development is a result of its inevitable self-unfolding rather than a phenomenon over which we can maintain control. what it retains as a quality of previous forms allows people to overlook what it originates as newly horrifiying.

  19. in the last post I fell unthinkingly into that snotty pit that awaits the–ahem, “cultural critic”—judging films that I haven’t seen but know “from reputation” as being bad, condemning films because I have an axe to grind. I haven’t seen Psycho by Van Sant. for all I know, it’s highly interesting. my apologies. I should have learned my lesson when I enjoyed very much Hudson Hawk and Ishtar–not to mention my real admiration for Heaven’s Gate.

  20. I finally watched E–and very much liked it. I’m tempted to go on and on, but a few scattered notes:

    I think Michael’s point about “meaning mongers” is spot-on. We know SO much going in, and this leads to some contradictory uses of our knowingness – on the one hand, the awareness of repetition (the event is coming, the event is coming) leads to a pervasive dread. The film exploits this sense of impending doom–the long long tracking shots are like marches to the grave, and I continuously expect something to occur. (I know it will.) And you can’t escape a tracking shot–you watch (the back of a head! can’t even see often what the person is looking at) but vision is locked in, unable to glissade (the surrounds are often shifting in and out of focus)–visual information is limited, and we end up supplementing with what we already know. (We’re gonna die, man, we’re gonna die!)
    On the other hand, the film keeps cutting back in time, repeating characters’ dialogue as they intercut the stories–and this formally sets up a sense that things might change. (I tried to catch shifts, alterations–but it would take more viewings.)

    Then there’s my own attempt to label, foretell–this one (I’m savvy) must be one of the killers, this one surely will die. And I’m wrong.

    Then again, rather than allowing me a sense of liberation from fatedness (we can’t really know, not whether someone’s gay nor whether they’ll bring a bag of guns to school), I instead feel like everyone is bound up in the problem–it’s not that I got the real killers wrong, it’s that ANY of these kids could have done it. (These kids… not me? Which one is most like I was….)

    So, to return to Michael’s point, the film is an attempt (like Psycho?) to produce art which resists the tremendous weight of cultural narratives which explain (away) the violence, to by repetitive sleight of hand substitute a central not-knowing. Maybe.

    Put another way, Colombine suggests the presence of an elephant in the room–some big reason for what happened must exist. (Drunk dads, bad parents, distant and derisive authority figures? Clique culture? Media? Repressed homosexuality in a virulently homophobic country, at a virulently homophobic age?) But contrary to public opinion, we can’t really name or define or know that elephant. (Is it really there?)

    –I was also struck by the institutional setting. Could have been a prison, could have been an airport, could have been the Overlook Hotel (that music, those tracking shots, recalling Kubrick the whole way through for me). And now–great leap–is that tied to the formal/thematic repetitions in Van Sant’s work? My (crude) dyad of pessimistic closure (we’re trapped in ideology and history) and utopic liberation (our art allows us to break away from such limits)… what if, instead, Van Sant sinks into the institutions, doesn’t struggle to define escapes (successful or failed) but tries instead to keep our attention focused on what happens in the halls, inside the institutional constraints, within the locked doors of form and ideology.

    Okay, that’s for the newsletter. It’s kind of dull and obvious.

    –I’m sidestepping beauty. Or fascination–maybe that’s a better word; I’m not so much stunned by the lyricism as compelled to watch… the motion of the camera, the gloriously vivid colors and compositions, the flatness of the humans inside those images, the dread, the hope that things might make sense or change…or, better yet, that they won’t. (We do like to watch.)

    –Hmmm. Your point about newness is well-taken. I guess I’m responding less to that good point than to the jeremiads about the ‘new’ decline of morals and values that Colombine ostensibly epitimozes. But there’s nothing “mere” about the efficiency and techno-/media-savvy of these two boys.

    –I liked “Heaven’s Gate,” too. “Psycho”…. not so much; I’m glad it exists, like restaurants that serve fugu, but I don’t care too much about actually consuming the stuff.

    “Gerry” is a really interesting companion to “Elephant”–check that out.

  21. the stuff about confounding expectations by an aesthetic that combines tracking shots, generating anticipation and dread, with a shuffled time scheme, confounding the expected unfolding of the event, is really interesting and illuminating—This elaborate scheme for undercutting meaning had not occured to me at all on the first viewing. but, without belaboring the point too much, I am not sure I am ready to allow an event like this to be consigned to such a realm of mystery–perhaps there is a critique possible somewhere between fatuous sociology and van sant’s enigma. in any case I am putting Gerry on my cue, and when I get a chance I’ll see if I can think of the two films together.

    mmm, fugu…..

  22. Last night I was talking with a friend who I just turned on to “Freaks and Geeks.” We were trading favorite details from a couple episodes, and…. it struck me how annoying, pretentious, and dangerous the ‘existential’ angst take on “Elephant” could be. If, as I said, “ANY” of these kids could have done it, I’m wrong. Fuck that, in fact; the number of kids who could–let alone who do–coldbloodedly murder their peers is vanishingly small. To bemoan the rise of violent culture is a conservative reductivism; to lament the omnipresent anomie of adolescence (as a root cause for violence) is equally cheap liberal reductivism. “Freaks/Geeks” is far closer to home, far closer to the complexity of living through high school.

    I still find E compelling, but I think I’m with you, Michael: I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with that “mystery,” close as it is to so much cultural energy spent pathologizing and othering and desiring adolescents.

  23. I like Elephant as an exercise in cinematic formalism. I’ve commented on that film before in another forum on this site, but I do have an issue with the way in which American youth in the past ten years or so have been rendered as dangerously other—sexy, eroticized, hyper-aggressive subject positions whose presence threatens the social order. Youth in representation, far from being an accurate measure of authenticity, is, more often than not, celebrated for its willingness to embrace pathological violence, moral indifference and fascistic desire. Such representations revel in a vision of America as a depleted, empty, consumer wasteland where there is no future and no hope—the characters and the audience hyped up by the adrenaline of nihilistic abandon. While notions of authenticity and the politics of representation make for a highly contentious relationship, representations of youth in American cultural production are even more problematic for youth rarely narrates or constructs is own subjectivity in the public sphere but is shaped by and/or filtered through adult fears, pleasures and desires. Now one might argue that Van Sant gave his actors broad license to improvise on his set (this is the only way I can make sense out of the kiss—it seemed daring and unconventional and ultimate something the authority figure in the room would appreciate) but he still operates as something of a Falstafian figure in his films; his Prince Hals, however, rarely turn away from him . . . but I digress.

    The series of horrific school shootings in America during the latter half of the 1990s, culminating in the Littleton, Colorado massacre at Columbine High School; illuminated a reality that many American youth felt disconnected from adults, alienated from their peers, and filled with an inproportionate amount of loneliness and rage. While a complete analysis of the Columbine murders and the moral panic these killings instigated for frightened adults throughout the nation is beyond me at the moment, it is my contention that the ways in which these horrific acts of brutality were mediated and disseminated in the public sphere contributed to further alienating the young from adult forms of authority. Edgy, malevolent representations of childhood on the margins of society are celebrated by an interpretive community of young audiences looking to elevate such fictions—whether sincerely or ironically—as potent markers of a culture in decline. Such a dark romance with risky business (I’ll limit myself to one Tom Cruise reference–he’s the new Michael Jackson, right) is not only an indicator of youthful rebellion (both healthy and self-destructive), but a palpable desire which shapes the way audiences are drawn to transgressive representations of angry, sexually confused, and violent kids. Just as wearing black trench coats to school worked to flaunt some kids’ indifference to the ruling cliques in an increasingly complex web of tribal alliances, watching dangerous teens on the screen embodies the fears and frustrations of those youthful, privileged, educated audience members (us?) whose cultural ambivalence is made visible by the exhibition of profound neglect and indifference. Making a consumer spectacle out of disaffected, amoral teens can be read as an empowering, albeit contradictory response to an American consumer culture shaped by baby-boomer desires and authority.

    The attraction to such fictions does not constitute an investment in the pursuit of authenticity but simply interrogates the very idea that authenticity can ever be captured by film. Elephant is appealing to some (the French?) not because it offers a vision of unmediated reality, but because it provides an edgy, apolitical escape from the real, representing teen life as if it existed outside the boundaries of history and public policy. From this point of view, the illusion of the authentic makes invisible the social and cultural forces that shape our mythological notions of America as a land of freedom and plenty. Any possibility of subaltern agency is contained by the very act of representation. Rather than offering insight and analysis into the material conditions that produce teenage alienation and despair, Elephant ultimately makes invisible its characters’ inchoate rage and disconnection.

    All of the characters/actors in Elephant (is there a difference) are little more than empty signifiers (just watch John Robinson play Stacy Peralta in Catherine Hardwick’s girl-gaze take on the origins of sk8 culture, Lords of Dogtown—he continues to play a very beautiful cipher and I’d cast him to play me if given the chance). Anyway these characters are highly constructed subject positions consumed by the intense gaze of adult desire.

  25. always timely, i watched elephant on hbo ondemand tonight. i thought it was extremely compelling, for many of the reasons discussed above (though i haven’t read everything carefully). it seemed to me that the film, despite the lyricism, and the dreamy, bravura camera-work, worked to achieve a flatness of mood, a flattening of narrative (we fill it in with what we know,) mirroring finally the mind-states of its two “protagonists”; who we see later going about their own business in similar connected/disconnected ways (play your piano, eat your pancake, tease your friend’s mother, test an automatic weapon, shower naked with your friend, go to school, kill everyone you see) and also walking down the same corridors that the camera tracked emptily earlier. i disagree in other words that the film “ultimately makes invisible its characters’ inchoate rage and disconnection”, as jeff puts it. i think what it dispenses with is representing their disconnection melodramatically; instead it reproduces it in its own form.

    i’m also not sure i agree that the film is disinterested in meaning. i agree that it isn’t interested in “explaining” what happened but i think what it partly does is return normalcy to the site of the killings. whatever the killers’ motivation is, the school is not represented as some soul-crushing nightmare; it is a zone as much of free-play as of repression. we don’t know why the boys do what they do (and they certainly kill without discrimination–the losers, the freaks, the artists, the jocks, the unremarkable are all mowed down without identification/recognition for the most part) but the film doesn’t allow us to settle into predictable attitudes to such violence (where inside each event lies an apocalyptic theory of everything); and i think finally the film is predicated on the proliferation of “knowledge” and “information” about columbine (without that event this is another goodbye dragon inn): it relies on it yet strains to escape being drawn into its circuit. so, i don’t think the film tries to avoid or deny the explicitly social, it supplements it. perhaps this borders on mysticism, as michael fears; but then again maybe it is like an attempt to hit the reset button on this event and start thinking about it again without all the hysterical narratives that have completely submerged it.

    michael, i would think this film would work very well in that class that you were looking for recommendations for last month.

  26. I’m seriously considering using Elephant…along with some exploitation film about schools like The Substitute or 187…I just don’t want the students to get any ideas.

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