Gus Van Sant’s disturbing look at teenage murderers, “Elephant”, is less a concentrated sermon on gun control or reaching out to disaffected youth and more an attempt to re-sensitize his audience to violence. The unavoidable parallel between the film and the Columbine massacre is made not to explain the horrific killings but to orient the audience to a specific event, as if underlining the difference between understanding Columbine and experiencing it. After an hour of building suspense as affecting as anything in Hitchcock, when the shootings start, the victims are all too real, the guns all too deadly. It’s a lesson in why we need first-rate artists examining important events in our society, that the explanations of crimes as terrible as Columbine not be left to the blandness of TV specials and “official” reports.

“Elephant” never attempts a plot. In fact, the film is almost an avant-garde feature. The lack of theatricality gives the narrative its strength, which is the truth of one morning in an Oregon high school. Not once does he or any of his actors sound a false note (probably because many of them are not trained actors but real high school students improvising lines). There are recognizable types, such as the nerd, the jock, the gossipy girls, and the artist, but they are not caricatures. Van Sant’s expert use of synechdoche to sketch the various students in the school gives the shootings a much more visceral impact. What happens seems so real that the term ‘realism’ seems totally inadequate. The shootings are a punch in the guts. It stings. It hurts to watch. They’re not on screen long enough to become familiar or even lovable, but the lives that are cut short feel like full lives.

The lack of plot also confronts us with the way we react to horrific events like Columbine. Perhaps the worst damage done to a society drenched in TV and movies is not the callousness to violence, but more so the conditioning to dramatic narrative they foster. Nothing makes sense, but then again, everything makes sense thanks to a received paradigm. In our minds we require villains, heroes, motives, and a beginning, middle, and end. There are none of these in “Elephant”. To drive home this point, Benny, one of the few black students we see, is briefly set up to play the hero. His fate illustrates how the incomprehensibility of the crimes adds to our incapacity to prevent them. To confront the tragedy is the only way to prevent it from happening again, true, but perhaps more importantly we must confront the idea that our seeing it as a dramatic form—a ‘tragedy’—may hinder or block our understanding entirely.

By not addressing our mistakes empirically, we are doomed to repeat our errors. In this way “Elephant” can be seen as a metaphor for almost any crime which breaks the heart and beggars the mind’s understanding. Although he relies on a more impressionistic treatment of the shootings, Van Sant does present—almost incidentally—a few of the concrete causes that might explain Alex and Eric’s killing spree. Some are the usual shibboleths. The usual high school cliquishness exists in his film, the boys enjoy playing senseless first-person shooter video games, they’re Nazi sympathizers, and the principal, it is hinted, is an insensitive authority figure. Others are more unsettling. Most shocking of all is Alex’s point-and-click ordering of an AK-47 from a web site. Not only does he receive the gun, but it’s delivered the next day with a smile from a delivery man who has no idea what he’s dropping off. The ease of this gun purchase is the closest “Elephant” gets to making a statement in favor of gun control.

All of this runs alongside Van Sant’s primary commentary, which works by skillful suggestion. There’s a phrase familiar to moviegoers—“parental guidance suggested”—and that came across my mind a few times in watching “Elephant”, because the adults in the school and community are either not shown or depicted as almost immaterial, ghostlike entities. The point of view is entirely those of students, making the adults a series of dull ciphers of the headless “Peanuts” variety. These missing adults are really the audience for “Elephant”. The eponymous beast is the axiomatic problem in front of everyone’s eyes that no one acknowledges; Van Sant took the name of his film from a line in a Scottish TV documentary on the same subject: “School violence is as impossible to ignore as an elephant in your living room.” Something terrible is lurking under the placid surfaces of this school, but never confronted by those who should have done—not just the parents of Alex and Eric, but all of the parents.

For the killings reflect truths that move far beyond the halls of our schools. In the words of the killer in “Heathers”, a film which uses decidedly different tactics to analyze contemporary high school students, “Now there’s a school that self destructed, not because society didn’t care, but because the school was society”. Michael Moore said much the same thing in “Bowling For Columbine”. But none of this comes across as a ‘message’ as such. What sticks in the mind about “Elephant”, what lingers and haunts, is Van Sant’s artistry in evoking the mystery at the center of the killings. The Beethoven pieces on the soundtrack become the inscape of Alex, the student who masterminds the school shootings and recruits an accomplice in Eric. These moody instrumentals establish states of mind over against mere plot dynamics and character motivation. Van Sant avoids a single explanation for the massacre and instead presents several possibilities, all of which linger around the opaque inscrutability of Alex’s sublimated desires. “Elephant” stops at the limit of what we can know. Alex’s mind cannot be opened and read like a book. All we know is that, in the end, his are the dark melodies to which his classmates are subject.