I recently watched Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and respected it very much. Inevitably, I wound up comparing it to the other auteur school shooting movie based on an actual shooting, Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique, which in my eyes is the best thing Villeneuve has ever done. The two movies are on par in terms of craft; my gut reaction is that Polytechnique is a wiser movie. So I wanted to think about why I reacted that way.
This post has spoilers, to the degree that you can spoil two movies based on historical events, and more importantly discusses sensitive subjects. I also don’t use names, because there are ample reason to deny school shooters publicity.
The movies have different purposes. Van Sant’s title is a reference to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. He deliberately avoids settling on a motivation for the shooters, choosing to show events without trying to know the unknowable. This is consistent with reality. The bullying theory of the Columbine shooters has been disproved. The neo-Nazi theories, while attractive to me instinctually, are inconclusive: yes, one of the shooters was fascinated with Hitler, but Nazi ideology appears to have been part of his general attraction to edgelord aesthetics rather than a fundamental belief. (It’s no wonder Columbine has become such a foundational event for nihilistic accelerationist culture.) The theories regarding psychopathy and depression as developed by Dwayne Fuselier and publicized by Dave Cullen seem accurate. They don’t say much about how those psychological traits resulted in Columbine.
And so Van Sant doesn’t either. There’s a nod to one shooter’s Nazi fascination; there are no scenes of the pair being bullied. In fact, as I note in my review, Van Sant makes it fairly clear that the social network of the school was open to the shooters — they simply elected not to enter into the kind of casual social interactions that every other kid in the movie participates in. It’s an interesting choice which results in a powerful movie. However, it leaves an emotional hole behind. We expect to get answers by the end of a movie like this. Van Sant leaves us with nothing but questions, right down to the final sequence which ends without finding out who the final victim is.
Meanwhile, Villeneuve knows why his shooter committed his atrocities and he’s not shy about showing us. That shooter was a misogynist, as is obvious from his decision to kill only woman students and from other evidence. Villeneuve chooses his scenes and composition to highlight this. Making the motivations clear was, in part, the point: it’s useful to remember that in the days immediately after the shooting, politicians and journalists downplayed the role misogyny played.
Villeneuve also concludes his movie with the words of one of the women present during the attack, who has also been a viewpoint character. They’re optimistic. While the emotional arc of Polytechnique is brutal, it is complete. Van Sant is opening the door to questions; Villeneuve is answering them.
The other difference is more cinematic. Villeneuve filmed in black and white, specifically because he didn’t want the movie to be bloody. He can show the violence without being overly sensationalist. Van Sant takes a different approach with Elephant. It’s not exploitative. It is graphic; we see bullets hitting flesh, blood spraying library shelves, and bodies jerking back from impact.
In fact, the entire arc of tension in Elephant builds to the first shots fired. The movie spends an hour watching kids walk around school, excepting the very early introduction of the shooters. That introduction is en passant: it’s obvious who they are and what they’ll be doing, and they’re only on screen for a minute or so before we return to hanging out with everyone else. The tension just builds and builds until we return to the shooters and then it builds some more while we watch them hanging out together. It’s one of the tensest experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater.
Which is at the core of my unease. Lacking any other point at which the tension is released, and lacking any kind of answer to the question of motivations, the killings become the focus of the story. And that, in turn, feeds into the Columbine effect.
I don’t particularly buy that Elephant itself, on its own, was the sole cause of any of the several school shootings that have been blamed on Elephant. In each case, the perpetrators were clearly steeped in Columbine culture (what a terrible pair of words). There’s no shortage of ways kids could learn about Columbine these days. It’s nonetheless painful to acknowledge that Van Sant’s brilliant, intelligent movie is one of them.
Villeneuve condemns his perpetrator. Van Sant simply depicts his. The blind men can read whatever they want into the elephant; you and I see the beast as horrific. Nihilistic teenagers can see it as a role model.