"Elephant"

It may be that he shows us a scene of one of the killers being bullied, or shows them playing violent video games and ordering guns from the Internet, or assembles them in front of a TV documentary on Hitler, for the express purpose of discounting those "reasons" as convenient excuses. But with no emphasis put on anything, with every scene given the same listless weight -- which is to say, no weight at all -- those scenes appear as warning flags. How else are we to interpret a point-of-view shot from one of the teenage killers mowing down characters on a computer screen, and then an exact repeat of the shot when he turns his gun on his fellow students? There is no other way to interpret it except as the character's inability to distinguish reality from video games.

"Elephant" is in a line of descent from "troubled teen" movies like "River's Edge" and "Kids," pictures that are designed to appeal to both the hipsters in the art house audience and Op-Ed writers who never miss a chance to bloviate on a pressing social problem. But there are moments where Van Sant goes well beyond alarmism and straight into a sort of mindless bigotry. If a straight filmmaker had shown us the two killers kissing in the shower before they embark on their killing spree, he would have been accused of using the old homophobic idea of gays as suppressed killers.

There should be plenty of ways to read the scene: as the two wanting some human contact before dying, as simple teenage experimentation. The kiss between the two boys in "Y Tu Mamá También" proved that two males kissing on-screen could denote something other than homosexuality. (What Alfonso Cuarón intended to say in that scene was that in the heat of the moment, sex is sex.) It's pretty clear that the only reason the kiss exists in "Elephant" is that Van Sant couldn't resist watching two teenage boys make out. The voyeuristic way the scene is shot -- through a fogged shower door -- emphasizes that. Again, because he stays so rigorously outside the characters, Van Sant has eliminated all potential meanings except the most obvious.

A straight filmmaker without Van Sant's indie cred (however much diminished by the likes of "Good Will Hunting" and "Finding Forrester") also wouldn't get away with the misogyny of a scene where we see three catty, popular girls pick at their lunch and then -- punch-line alert! -- go into the bathroom, where they make themselves vomit.

Such a director surely wouldn't get away with the treatment of the movie's sole black character. This tall, silent young man appears late in the movie to help kids scrambling out of a classroom window to escape the shootings. Then, for no discernible reason, he is drawn back toward the sounds of gunfire. Nothing in his face registers why he's going back; there's no indication of a determination to help, of morbid curiosity, of anything. He simply walks toward the sounds and, about a minute after he's been introduced, is shot dead. Van Sant may have intended a comment here on the expendability of black characters in movies, but he simply apes the conventions of the sacrificial black -- and with considerably less distinction than black supporting characters are allowed even in Hollywood junk. (Watching the scene, it's also hard not to think that school shootings didn't become a hot topic until it was white kids killing other white kids.)

There's a big difference between a filmmaker who sets out to resist easy judgments and one who simply reproduces events without putting any thought into them. When the killings eventually come they are shown to us in as blasé a fashion as everything else. Van Sant's defenders may claim that he's trying to show us the affectlessness of the teen killers. But depicting the attitudes of even the worst characters does not prevent a filmmaker from taking his own attitude toward them. It may look as if Van Sant is exercising discretion when two characters who have taken refuge in a meat locker back out of the frame and we see two hanging sides of beef while the kids are gunned down. But in Van Sant's scheme, the beef has as much distinction as the kids. This, I think, is what finally marks "Elephant" as a true exploitation movie. It's not that Van Sant is getting off on the killings or asking us to get off on them, but that he is simply using a real-life tragedy as fodder for his little art movie, and that he hasn't even done the thinking that would allow him to say there are no answers for these killings.

The moment that most sticks in my craw comes right after the first killing in the school library. We've watched one of the characters, an aspiring photographer, wandering the halls and grounds taking pictures of his classmates. Right after the first head goes splat, Van Sant cuts to this boy raising his camera and snapping a picture of the corpse.

Since no psychology is supplied for any of the characters or events here, the boy's sudden cynicism makes as much sense as anything else in "Elephant." But how did Van Sant have the stones to include it? When a director who has been trying to regain the art-house cachet he lost with a string of commercial projects makes use of the murder of high school students and then has the nerve to criticize a character for opportunism -- when he distances himself from actual violence and suffering and substitutes aesthetics for exploration -- it's not the characters on-screen who are divorced from reality.

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