‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen...’
This might just be my rose tinted view, but one of the reasons why so many of us look back on the 90s now with a mixture of longing and powerful nostalgia is that the world genuinely was a totally different place. Before 9/11. Before the war on terror. Before the Manchester Arena bombing and the Bataclan Massacre. In retrospect, it could be argued that the first event to truly shatter the innocence of the decade was the Columbine High School Massacre. On April 20th 1999, two days after my 12th birthday, Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold strolled into their high school and killed 13 students and faculty members, injuring many others. It’s a tragic truism that these kind of school shootings became much more common in the years that followed, but Columbine was the first time I remember hearing about something as terrible as this.
Barely four years after the events of Columbine, and a year after Michael Moore’s landmark documentary Bowling for Columbine, Gus Van Sant gathered a cast of unknown teenagers and recreated the events of that dark day. Not for sensationalism. And not for notoriety. But more so that we as a society could try to better understand this heinous act.
Elephant presents a normal day in a normal school… until it isn’t. By juxtaposing the every day trials and tribulations of high school kids with the murderous rampage of the two gunmen (played with assurance here by Elias McConnell and Alex Frost), Van Sant rams home the absurd mundanity of the killers and the unforgettable killing spree upon which they embarked.
Van Sant has made his fair share of bad films (nobody should ever speak of his frame-for-frame Psycho remake ever again), but when he is good (Good Will Hunting, To Die For, Milk), he is a true auteur with something of substance to say. Elephant remains as visceral and as shocking today as the day that it was released. Even if the halcyon days of the 90s have never felt further away.