by Flack » Thu Apr 21, 2022 8:54 am
pinback wrote: Sat Apr 16, 2022 8:42 am
It offers no motive for the shooting, no lessons to be learned from it, no message to preach. Here ya go, a bunch of kids walking around a school and then they get shot. The end. I love the audacity of these movies he's brave enough to make that he has to know nobody is going to like. I enjoy the mesmerizing, often hypnotic effect of the long tracking shots where nothing happens. Please, nobody watch any of these movies. Four stars.
The style of Gus Van Sant's films make them easy for people to read different things into them and get different things out of them. It's probably intentional, and it's probably genius.
Hobby Lobby is filled with little wooden signs demanding people live each day is if it were their last, but very few people actually do. It's not a very practical way to live. If given one hour to live I suspect few people would spend it at work or at school, but that's one of life's funny jokes. We don't always know when the reaper will knock, which sucks for anyone who walks out of a dentist's office after getting a root canal only to get struck by a car in the crosswalk. None of the students in
Elephant know what's about to happen, which is kind of the point. If you had one hour left to live, would you spend it working in the school's library after worrying about how fat your legs were in gym class? Probably not.
Amongst my friends, the prevailing opinion is that high school was a terrible, miserable experience. When presented with the hypothetical option of returning to high school knowing what they know now, it's a resounding "no" from all of them. But at a high school reunion, I ran into an old classmate with a differing opinion; she stated that high school was unequivocally the best time of her life. (In all fairness, she most likely peaked there.) She said if given the chance she would immediately return to that period of time and, if she had her druthers, stay there. It's an interesting reminder that everyone's high school experience was different, and I can't think of a film that captures that truth in a better way than
Elephant. Even without the overlapping footage showing the same scenes from different points of view, a dozen viewpoints are exposed, and all of them are experiencing high school (and life) from their own unique points of view. The kid dealing with an alcoholic dad. The popular skinny girls who regurgitate their lunches. The photographer who sees everybody, and nobody.
The kid who gets spitballs thrown at him in class and discovers you can order assault rifles and have them delivered to your door.
The film is heavily influenced by the Columbine school shooting, which took place only a couple of years before
Elephant was released. There are many similarities, from the influence of video games, the pre-planning, the intended bombs that didn't go off, the shooting locations (library and cafeteria), the physical appearance of the two shooters, and even an interaction with a classmate in the parking before the shooting, telling him to "walk away." Where the story diverges is with the fate of the shooters. In real life, the two shooters took their own lives. In
Elephant, one of the shooters shoots the other in cold blood before doubling back in search of more targets. The death of innocent students is disturbing, but the shooting of his own partner is troubling on a different level. Was one the mastermind and the other brainwashed into joining him? Did he not want any witnesses, or anyone to leak information? As with every school shooting, ultimately there are more questions than answers.
The term "senseless" doesn't just mean that you or I can't make sense out of something, but that perhaps there is no sense to be found. The anger inside the shooters in
Elephant exploded past the people who had wronged them to the point where their target was society itself. Nobody condones murder, but getting revenge against those who have wronged us is something that, even if we don't condone it, we understand it. In the most primal of responses, a cornered animal may attack even those attempting to help it. The response is not logical -- as illogical as a couple of lost souls firing bullets into human beings -- some of who had directly wrong them, some who represented those who wronged them, and some who were just in the wrong place in the wrong time. The timing, the motivation, the long scenes of high school life captured here aren't pointless. Ultimately, they're senseless.
When we let anger overtake us we tend to assume the targets of our anger are as consumed with us as we are with them. That's rarely the case, and certainly isn't in
Elephant. As the shooters sit at home brewing, ordering weapons and making plans to slaughter their classmates, no one else in the school even mentions them. Maybe that's the most important message of all. Maybe, somewhere, someone you've never thought about is planning to kill you in about an hour.
Live every day is if it were your last.
[quote=pinback post_id=128196 time=1650123722 user_id=5]
It offers no motive for the shooting, no lessons to be learned from it, no message to preach. Here ya go, a bunch of kids walking around a school and then they get shot. The end. I love the audacity of these movies he's brave enough to make that he has to know nobody is going to like. I enjoy the mesmerizing, often hypnotic effect of the long tracking shots where nothing happens. Please, nobody watch any of these movies. Four stars.
[/quote]
The style of Gus Van Sant's films make them easy for people to read different things into them and get different things out of them. It's probably intentional, and it's probably genius.
Hobby Lobby is filled with little wooden signs demanding people live each day is if it were their last, but very few people actually do. It's not a very practical way to live. If given one hour to live I suspect few people would spend it at work or at school, but that's one of life's funny jokes. We don't always know when the reaper will knock, which sucks for anyone who walks out of a dentist's office after getting a root canal only to get struck by a car in the crosswalk. None of the students in [i]Elephant[/i] know what's about to happen, which is kind of the point. If you had one hour left to live, would you spend it working in the school's library after worrying about how fat your legs were in gym class? Probably not.
Amongst my friends, the prevailing opinion is that high school was a terrible, miserable experience. When presented with the hypothetical option of returning to high school knowing what they know now, it's a resounding "no" from all of them. But at a high school reunion, I ran into an old classmate with a differing opinion; she stated that high school was unequivocally the best time of her life. (In all fairness, she most likely peaked there.) She said if given the chance she would immediately return to that period of time and, if she had her druthers, stay there. It's an interesting reminder that everyone's high school experience was different, and I can't think of a film that captures that truth in a better way than [i]Elephant[/i]. Even without the overlapping footage showing the same scenes from different points of view, a dozen viewpoints are exposed, and all of them are experiencing high school (and life) from their own unique points of view. The kid dealing with an alcoholic dad. The popular skinny girls who regurgitate their lunches. The photographer who sees everybody, and nobody.
The kid who gets spitballs thrown at him in class and discovers you can order assault rifles and have them delivered to your door.
The film is heavily influenced by the Columbine school shooting, which took place only a couple of years before [i]Elephant[/i] was released. There are many similarities, from the influence of video games, the pre-planning, the intended bombs that didn't go off, the shooting locations (library and cafeteria), the physical appearance of the two shooters, and even an interaction with a classmate in the parking before the shooting, telling him to "walk away." Where the story diverges is with the fate of the shooters. In real life, the two shooters took their own lives. In [i]Elephant[/i], one of the shooters shoots the other in cold blood before doubling back in search of more targets. The death of innocent students is disturbing, but the shooting of his own partner is troubling on a different level. Was one the mastermind and the other brainwashed into joining him? Did he not want any witnesses, or anyone to leak information? As with every school shooting, ultimately there are more questions than answers.
The term "senseless" doesn't just mean that you or I can't make sense out of something, but that perhaps there is no sense to be found. The anger inside the shooters in [i]Elephant[/i] exploded past the people who had wronged them to the point where their target was society itself. Nobody condones murder, but getting revenge against those who have wronged us is something that, even if we don't condone it, we understand it. In the most primal of responses, a cornered animal may attack even those attempting to help it. The response is not logical -- as illogical as a couple of lost souls firing bullets into human beings -- some of who had directly wrong them, some who represented those who wronged them, and some who were just in the wrong place in the wrong time. The timing, the motivation, the long scenes of high school life captured here aren't pointless. Ultimately, they're senseless.
When we let anger overtake us we tend to assume the targets of our anger are as consumed with us as we are with them. That's rarely the case, and certainly isn't in [i]Elephant[/i]. As the shooters sit at home brewing, ordering weapons and making plans to slaughter their classmates, no one else in the school even mentions them. Maybe that's the most important message of all. Maybe, somewhere, someone you've never thought about is planning to kill you in about an hour.
Live every day is if it were your last.