What the hell is up with kids today? If they're not getting all possessed and screaming "your mother sucks cocks in hell" and being a burden on all involved in the child-care industry, then they're ordering rifles the size of Texas and shooting the place up.
Whatever happened to arguing over Pogs, and discussing Thundercats? What happened to sleepovers that don't involve penetration of some nature?
Weren't nobody ever killed over a Pog, far as I know.
Praise Be, then, that Gus Van Sant, what did the Will Hunting and the Psycho In The Modern Times has attempted to unravel this riddle for us all, by way of granting us a short-cut down puberty way.
Elephant concerns itself with a day in the life of an average, every-day high-school. There are girls discussing the boys, and boys discussing the photography and so on, and some folks playing football out on the pitch. There are a few discussing homosexuality, and yet more attempting to deal with alcoholic parents. It's a microcosm of society at large, where everyone has their own dilemmas, and yet each deal with their own hang-ups in significantly varied manners.
Columbine is still fresh in the memory so far as Popular Culture is concerned. Eminem raps about it on MTV, Michael Moore makes documentaries concerning it, and the structure of secondary-education establishments has been unalterably changed. Words like frisking and full-body-search, terms once banded around by sniggering teens as they inhaled nicotine before class, are now mandatory procedure.
It's not going to bring back anyone killed as they sat down to lunch in the canteen that day, but it might make their relatives and friends feel a little more secure.
Gus Van Sant has no pretensions so far as understanding why the hell those two (at least) teenagers decided to kill and maim as many of their peers as possible. He has plenty of other pretensions, some of which are on show here, but so far as the big W-H-Y-?, he pretty much admits he hasn't a fucking notion.
This is just one of many, many reasons why Elephant is a fantastic piece of work.
The film seeks to dispel any number of misguided assumptions concerning Columbine and other such incidents, but crucially, invites some new ones to the parade. Marilyn Manson and his kooky masturbation songs, Leonardo Di Vinci and his Baseball Journals, Keanu Reeves with his funky trenchcoat, none of these things were responsible.
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