On Elephant And The Rejection Of Satisfaction

Gus Van Sant's Elephant aims to subvert traditional narrative conventions of pleasure and satisfaction by continually rejecting predictable or expected results. The film establishes what initially appears to be a typical feature fiction narrative built around a Columbine-like school shooting, but all recognizable tropes are deconstructed in a way which makes the actual action considerably more disconcerting.

Our good pal The Watcher describes Van Sant's technical peculiarities—namely lengthy tracking shots and visual repetition—as giving Elephant a "documentary-like feel", with its long takes "serv[ing] to give the audience a sense of space". I don't find Van Sant's employment of these extended travel sequences space-establishing as much as a device designed to deliberately disrupt any kind of sensible narrative flow, in that at such moments the focus or attention of the film itself seems to wander. In Hollywood cinematic terms, meandering means disinterest, which is unacceptable. Van Sant rejects the traditional economy of space and time in order to detach his audience from the narrative, but where the French New Wave convention of detachment had Brechtian fourth-wall-breaking intentions, Elephant's distancing effect targets our emotional involvement in the narrative instead.

Consider that the implicit primary goal of narrative fiction, even fiction which aims to "challenge" its audience in some abstract way, is to engage and entertain; films are constructed in such a way that our personal investment in them pays off, that by the end of the running time we are in some way emotionally or psychologically satisfied. This all goes back to the Aristotlian notion of dramatic fiction's fundamental appeal, but it manifests itself in both overarching (well-structured three-act narratives with proper closure) and minute (all minor tropes established must serve some utility, etc) ways. With Elephant, though, we have a constant and often frustrating rejection of all the ways in which the film might satisfy our demands of it. Characters are introduced and remain ambiguous or mysterious (our introduction to and implied investment in John, for example, eventually goes nowhere as he is neither hero nor villain and has a generally pedestrian role in the events which take place—this runs counter to the traditional convention of making your narrative's protagonist or primary character somehow more important than his peers), events unfold at an uneven and seemingly arbitrary rate and pace (long stretches of nothing, like the tracking shots of students walking through campus, seem to have unnecessary weight in comparison to the dramatic shooting sequence by virtue of their length and focus alone), and, most obviously, we're left with no resolution. The final shot isn't even as surprising or frustratingly unfinished as it might have been, though, because by this point in the film we are so accustomed to finding expectations quashed that we don't seriously expect anything exciting to occur; Van Sant's continual subversion of narrative conventions prevents us from investing the final scene with the kinds of thoughts and feelings we would have typically invested in a standard Hollywood film—just imagine how bizarre and disappointing such a final scene would have been were it tagged on the end of a movie like Terminator Salvation or Star Trek, where we necessarily demand closure and satisfaction.

My favorite example of Van Sant's trope-rejection is the lengthy sequence focusing on Benny, who we understand after decades of enjoying typical narratives is being implicitly established as a disruptive and perhaps heroic force. The sheer time and attention dedicated to his passing through the school allows us to project our desire for heroic action onto his progression toward the shooters, and thus his immediate death is both surprising and deflating. Of course, a real school shooting so rarely conforms to the traditions of narrative fiction, so our expectations for Benny's potential role are illusory and, Van Sant appears to be suggesting, pretty damn unfair.