Jolt Country

"I'm old enough to remember simpler, more innocent times, when the worst you'd hear about on the news was hijacked jetliners flying into buildings." - Gilbert Gottfried

Before those simpler, more innocent times were even more innocent times, when the worst you'd hear about was two kids shooting up their school. I can imagine "Elephant", Gus Van Sant's meditation on dickheads blowing up their school, being even more impactful back in 2003, when school shootings were still a big deal, and didn't have their own news segment wedged in between the sports and weather every night.

Gus Van Sant had a big hit with "Good Will Hunting", which allowed him to make movies he wanted to make, and that virtually nobody would want to see. Out of that newfound freedom came "Gerry", which is one of my favorite movies, and I would never, ever, ever recommend anyone watch it, because it is indefensibly weird and slow and pointless.

"Elephant" makes "Gerry" look like an action film, and is similarly indefensible.

This review contains spoilers, and I don't even mean the part where the kids shoot up the school at the end, because you know that going in.

In one of the first scenes, a handsome jock walks off the football field, and then walks to the principal's office to request an early dismissal. The school is a long way from the field, and the walk to the principal's office from where he enters the building is a long way through the building. And you are with him every step. The scene is at least 5-6 minutes long, and is a single tracking shot of him walking from the field to the office. The movie is only 80 minutes long, so that's a big chunk of it.

Then we switch to a different character, and watch them do something mundane and uninteresting for ten more minutes made mostly up of similarly long tracking shots of them walking, or in some cases, sitting.

Eventually you meet all the characters, and notice that in their scenes where we learn what they're doing for these ten minutes, they're passing other characters who are doing what we saw them doing in their scene, and it dawns on the viewer that these are the same 5-10 minutes, just shown from the differing perspectives of the different students. In almost all of their cases, these are the last ten minutes of their lives.

If you didn't know what the movie was about, I doubt anyone would get through the first hour. But you do, so there is a brooding dread throughout all of the banality. Gerry was a movie in which two people walked for an hour and a half and nothing happened. That's essentially the first 60 of Elephant's 80 minute runtime. I would never, ever recommend this movie to anyone, but I thought it was great.

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.

(Thanks to Flack for lending me his copy!)

The scene is at least 5-6 minutes long, and is a single tracking shot of him walking from the field to the office. The movie is only 80 minutes long, so that's a big chunk of it.

I was going to ask why he does this stuff, but you explained it. Hmm.

pinback wrote: Sat Apr 16, 2022 8:42 am (Thanks to Flack for lending me his copy!)

What does that even mean in 2022? Are you saying he mailed you a DVD? There's currently 11 seeders on TPB for this movie. Are you saying that you weren't just being an inssuferable asshole in the Dune thread but you are actually morally against stealing of media? Did Pinback somewhere between binges suddently get onboard with the motion picture academy's warning that has always played at the start of videotapes?

Anyway, I'll check both of these out as it seems right down my alley as a miserable cynical fuck.

No, I'm saying you are dumb and never understand anything that's going on here.

I guess I am an idiot because I absolutely don't know what "lent me a copy" even means in 2022.

Tdarcos thinks you read things too literally.

Hey pinner, can you lend me a copy of Elephant so I don't have to torrent it? I could give you my post office box number and you could mail me the dvd to watch then I'll mail it back. Oh wait, you borrowed it from Flack.

Flack, could I borrow your copy of Elephant? I could re-imburse for the shipping.

This is not going as well for you as you think it is.

Can I borrow your copy of Jaws?

Weren't we all being nice to each other?

The post office is the problem. Flack mailed his copy right when the movie came out.

Also, I paid $1.53 to send it by elephant.

He mailed me his copy of Java in 1998

Hey, buddy, can you spare a dvd of Elephant?

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.

Very well put. I'll mail your copy back to you tomorrow.

Was there any intrinsic reason why the film was called Elephant?

Shooting elephants, perhaps? I have a vision of an angry Teddy Roosevelt blasting away in deepest Africa

THE
BAD WILL HUNTING
AARDVARK

I believe it referred to the "elephant in the room" which were these two kids who were obviously disturbed and yet not on anyone's radar.

That makes more sense. I originally thought it was a reference to large and gray and plodding along

The movie is in black and white?