Over and over we read, hear, and talk about yet another school shooting. In less than one month, two different high school students slaughtered their peers. A handful of films have been made to bring to light the horror of living through such an event often focusing on the psychological disturbance of the assassin. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) chronicles the events surrounding the massacre of students at a high school by two other students to capture the atrocity of the act and the trauma of the victims and shooters themselves. Though Van Sant provides a backstory for the motivation of the disturbed individuals responsible for the shootings, the film is not devoted to the psychological profile of the murderers. Rather, Van Sant uses cinematography, sound design, and editing to make horrifically real the experiences of the individuals victimized in such a tragedy.
Van Sant loosely based Elephant on the events that occurred during the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Elephant recounts the story of how two high school students plan the massacre of members of their school due to the fact that they have been bullied by other students and disenfranchised by the school administration. The film chronicles the events in a linear fashion by glimpsing at the perspectives of several students as they struggle within the school system. Throughout the film, Van Sant uses repetition not only to emphasize the different manner in which each character in the film interacts with his/her surroundings, but also to create suspense and a sense of chaos. One particular scene that Van Sant repeats again and again shows individual characters walking down a hallway. At first glance these individual hall scenes appear unconnected and do not seem to have any particular point. However, towards the end of the film Van Sant makes clear his intent for the repetition. The audience realizes that all of the characters filmed in the hallway are interconnected and have something in common, namely, they are all victimized by the shooters the film. Van Sant also uses unsettling long takes of the shots that are part of this sequence to accentuate the awkward insecurities of high school and to create an ominous feeling.
Elephant also utilizes an intriguing sound design. The majority of the film is mostly minimalistic diegetic sound that is eerily quiet. This state of “low sound” creates an unsettling mood, but also sets the tone for the banal and muted lifestyle of high school students trying to finish up their day. A few times throughout the film, Van Sant does use music, but not necessarily in a context one would expect. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which is a morose almost funereal lamentation, is heard during the introduction of one of the less prominent characters; however, the piece is muddied with traditional school setting sounds. The sonata lingers as Van Sant draws out an exceptionally long behind-the-shoulder take of this character until he begins interacting with other students. This same sonata makes a re-appearance, but this time one of the shooters is actually playing the piece on a piano. The music is not competing with any other sound; however, the shooter makes frequent mistakes while playing. Van Sant’s choice of music creates conflict within the audience as the sonata does not remind us of high school, nor does it seem coherent that a student who is planning the assassination of his peers should be delicately playing the piano. Furthermore, the mistakes that the shooter makes while playing are not random errors from misplaced fingers. Instead, the errors themselves end up creating new chords that result in the piece being played in a completely different key, adding now auditory unease to the already visual tension that builds up in the film.
Van Sant ends Elephant in a particularly hair raising manner. The main shooter discovers two students hiding in a meat freezer in the cafeteria. One of the students is none other than the student was first associated with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. At that moment it becomes clear that Van Sant’s musical choice served as a premonitory tool. In this final sequence, the frame is almost entirely filled by the placid face of the shooter, who is taunting his victims with a game to determine who he will shoot and is surrounded by hanging meats and carcasses. The audience does not see the two students cornered in this nightmare scenario, but solely hears their voices. The framing of the elements in the freezer creates a very claustrophobic feel that is, however, at once intimate and almost unrealistic. Elephant is brought to a close with Van Sant cutting from this last scene of the shooter in the freezer to the same shot that was utilized in the opening of the film: a neutral sky and benign power lines, a metaphor perhaps for the fact that the horror of gun violence has become almost ordinary in today’s society. Van Sant also does not show us who the shooter chose to kill. He prefers to leave the audience with the horror faced by the victim rather than to glorify the final act of the assassin.
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