Through a Glass Darkly

 

You going to the concert tonight?

No, I can't, my parents are being bitches this week.

Aw, that's retarded. It happens. [waves and walks off]

Van Sant appears to be fascinated by adolescents, their being the protagonists of the majority of his films, yet of those that I've seen there is very little sense of what it feels like to be a teenager. He seems more interested in the clothes and callow faces of Matt Dillon or River Phoenix than in expressing their inner lives. I would categorize the Van Santian teenager as more of a model than a character. Thus in Elephant (2003), his highly divisive reflection on the Columbine High School massacre, our vantage point into a group of ordinary students' lives is comprised of flat School Movie stereotypes John Hughes would pinch his nose at (the jock, the geek, the popular girls) and such scurrilous dialogue as that above, which may indeed be "real" but is best left to echo in school hallways and not be captured on film.

The film's controversy is twofold: its premise, the quotidian moments of a typical American high school the day it is shot up by two malcontent students; and its visual style, which is made up of many lengthy rear tracking shots that make the film resemble a third-person video game. 

I believe the intended effect of this combination (the artistic harmony of which I am not convinced, I often found the visual style arbitrary and cloistered) is one of haunting – to show us, in long takes, the innocuous moments of these youths' lives, walking through school corridors, chatting with their friends, planning their weekends, before their lives are either cut short or forever changed. The way Van Sant's camera remains trapped within the perspective of each character it follows is to represent just that, the immense self-absorption of every teenager that has ever lived – the point being their innocent ignorance of what is about to happen. The common complaint by the film's critics is that this lambs-to-the-slaughter premise is exploitative and cruel; my problem is more that, due to the two-dimensional portrait Van Sant paints of this environment, the sentiment comes off as rather cheap and corny, like one of those grimy PSAs that shows a group of happy teenagers in a car before they suddenly crash and die because their friend was texting while driving.

That said, there are certainly parts of the film that I like or find interesting. The film's most interesting aspect is its portrait of the bullied school shooter character, Alex, and how the way he may have fallen to this point is left ambiguous, yet details are subtly suffused: the unnerving emptiness and quietude of his heirloom-adorned home, his predilection for Germanic music and Nazi history, his sole friend and shooting partner, Eric, whom we first see in silhouette, flitting past the lace curtains of Alex's basement windows to come inside like a phantom...how did they influence eachother to reach this point? Before embarking on their rampage, they shower together and kiss, wanting to try it with someone before they die, and we can't tell for certain if they are repressed homosexuals (perhaps a factor in their discontent) or if they are straight and kissing out of desperation.

There is also that brief moment of quietude just as the main avatar, John, steps out of the school to see Alex and Eric, and is told to get lost before they begin shooting. The confusion and shock of the encounter glimpsed on his face after a normal day of school, before his realization of the situation and urgent run through the school's pleasant autumnal lawn to warn others that something terrible is about to happen, terrible far beyond what he could probably imagine in that moment, with every subsequent school shooting a piece of its legacy. These are two points of interest to save from the film.

Score: 2.5/5