A TALE OF TWO ELEPHANTS: THE TROUBLES, COLUMBINE AND THE PORTRAYAL OF VIOLENCE
Alan Clarke’s Elephant is a 39-minute short first broadcast on BBC2 on 25 January 1989, and arguably the starkest, most disturbing made-for-television production since Mick Jackson’s Threads five years earlier. Elephant is set during the Troubles, though no attempt is made to provide political or ideological context for anything shown on screen. It depicts eighteen shootings.
That’s it. That’s all Elephant is. A litany of people getting shot. Or people doing the shooting. Depending on the POV in any given vignette. Not that Clarke’s restless, prowling but blandly dispassionate camera allows for much in the way of POV. It’s more a matter of who walks into shot first, the victim or the gunman.
Eighteen shootings. 39 minutes. Allowing for the minimalist credits (unaccompanied by music: there isn’t a note of music, even diegetic, in the whole thing), that’s an average of one shooting every two minutes. Sometimes they come quicker than that, some vignettes over and done with in little more than a minute. Others take longer. There’s a three-minute sequence centred around a game of football in which the film’s only dialogue (three lines, all of them inconsequential) are spoken. The last scene taps out at a gruelling four minutes, mostly consisting of two men walking through a glaringly overlit industrial premises, and doesn’t pan out the way you might expect.
The milieu of Elephant ranges from soulless factories and warehouses to petrol station forecourts; from the posh houses of moneyed families to anonymous semis and grim terraces; from a deserted swimming pool to a low-end restaurant. Some of the gunmen are young, some middle-aged; some athletic, some portly. Some despatch their victim with one shot, others empty the whole clip. Some use pistols, some favour shotguns. All give the impression that what they’re doing is just a job. None of them are particularly memorable.
The victims are given no identity, no backstory, nothing that might spark an emotional engagement on the audience’s part. Their only requiem is when, their executioner having made good his departure, Clarke cuts back to their sprawled corpses and holds on the shot for between fifteen and twenty seconds. Cumulatively they account for about five of Elephant’s 39 minutes. That’s roughly 15% of the running time spent gazing at the ruined bodies of shooting victims. No wonder that a film that doesn’t even scrape three quarters of an hour feels longer than Lawrence of Arabia.
There are two exceptions: one is a cut away to the open door of a house the shooting has taken place in; the other provides a horrible full stop to the final killing, lingering for just as long on a wall smeared with blood and brain matter.
That’s it. That’s all Elephant is. Except that what it’s really about is the effect it has on the viewer. Director David Leland, in an interview for Richard Kelly’s book on Alan Clarke (Faber & Faber, 1998), said: “I remember lying in bed, watching it, thinking, ‘Stop, Alan, you can’t keep doing this.’ And the cumulative effect is that you say, ‘It’s got to stop. The killing has got to stop.’ Instinctively, without an intellectual process, it becomes a gut reaction.”
The first time I watched it – or tried to watch it, rather – I didn’t get further than ten minutes. A couple of nights later I tried again and managed it in one sitting. It left me feeling bludgeoned, brutalised, overwhelmed by its unhurried, inexorable intensity. It also made me feel a little bit worse about life in a way that very other few films – Cannibal Holocaust, A Serbian Film, Grave of the Fireflies – have.
Elephant takes its title, of course, from Bernard MacLaverty’s description of the Troubles as “the elephant in our living room”, an application of Ivan Krylov’s maxim that probably constitutes its most effective use outside of Krylov’s original fable. The elephant in America’s living room is undeniably school shootings, each new incidence eliciting the thoughts and prayers of politicians and pundits but nothing as pragmatic as gun control. It is entirely apposite, then, that Gus Van Sant borrowed Clarke’s title for his 2003 film made in response to the Columbine massacre.
It has been suggested that Van Sant also aped Clarke’s aesthetic, and while this is true inasmuch as both films generate energy and tension via incessant roving camerawork, following characters as they walk through specific environments for minutes at a time, the differences are palpable and far more significant than these obvious but limited points of comparison.
Whereas Clarke’s film achieves documentary-style realism, Van Sant’s is stylised and full of directorial flourishes and nods to other filmmakers. Structurally, the timeline forms a kind of loop, with characters diverging at certain moments, the camera following one person or group, only to pick the peripheral characters up again later, the mise-en-scene now viewed from another angle or perspective. Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty and Kurosawa’s Rashomon are the immediate reference points, but Van Sant is also beholden – sometimes specifically, sometimes peripherally – to Dario Argento, Sam Peckinpah and Bela Tarr. All these influences are filtered through a mumblecore aesthetic that often, ironically enough, emphasises the work’s artifice even as it strives for realism.
Van Sant drops the ball not just with his incorporation of slo-mo, isolating a quotidian moment of normality a split second before the shooters make their entrance (a device that could have been effective but here just comes across as hokey), but in his wholesale embrace of stereotypes (the vapid trio of valley girls, the strutting football jock, the socially awkward girl volunteering in the school library) and his reliance on what are evidently movie tropes rather than realistic depictions. The darkroom scene is a case in point, demonstrating absolutely zero understanding of how film is developed and prints produced under darkroom conditions.
Where he is very good, though, is in using his characters’ peregrinations to map out a geography of the American high school that functions as both a physical space and a mindscape. The hazy contrast as pupils emerge from corridors illuminated by strip lighting into the natural light outside works well, though I suspect it was more the result of the budget not allowing for brightness correction in post-production than a proactive aesthetic decision. Nonetheless, a sense of high school as purgatory emerges early on and builds incrementally as Elephant progresses. A case could easily be made that the shooting has already happened and the film sites its characters in the afterlife, endlessly reliving that hellish day.
Had Van Sant leaned harder into this idea, a stronger and more emotionally devastating film might have emerged. Still, for a solid hour, Elephant exerts such a grip on the viewer that none of its faults are entirely insurmountable. Until, that is, Van Sant decides to spend the last thirty minutes trying to fashion An Important Statement on school shootings. And it’s precisely when he goes digging into the killers’ psychopathology that the film goes to pieces.
I say “digging”, but that’s the wrong word. His shuffling and turning up of cards from the deck marked “why some kids are wrong ‘uns” is staggeringly superficial. A single scene shows one of the shooters being bullied; there is no development of the theme. A single scene has the two of them watching a documentary about Hitler; there is no investigation as to whether there is a larger, more ongoing fixation with Nazism in their lives. They look at gun sites on the internet, order weapons online; there is no further interrogation of the easy availability of imagery and product. Finally, Van Sant throws in repressed sexual urges, the resulting scene so crass in its concept and staging as to be embarrassing.
Ultimately, Clarke’s Elephant succeeds because it offers no reason, no polemic, no opinion. It doesn’t try to justify, criticise, intellectualise or mediate: it merely observes. Van Sant deploys an entire bag of directorial tricks and wants to find something – some scrap of dialogue or imagery or behavioural tendency from which an explanation might slowly be unravelled. And the harder he strives, the further his film drifts from the simple truths that permeate every frame of Clarke’s punishing masterpiece: that violence happens; that it is abject in its finality; that it is utterly banal.
Neil Fulwood
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