Elephant

“But I thought that maybe drama could do something the journalists couldn’t necessarily get at, right? Get someplace that journalists wanted to but it was difficult for them to get at.” - Gus Van Sant in an interview with Charlie Rose   I genuinely don’t understand how anyone can watch this film and come to the conclusion that it’s “pointless” or “boring” or “cheap” and therefore is a bad movie. I think that it does exactly what it was trying to do by evoking those feelings. That day was supposed to be just like any other day. To complain that characters weren’t fleshed out or developed enough is such a tone deaf take. School shootings are tragedies of meaningless violence that can happen to anyone at anytime and Van Sant clearly expresses that through the every day conversations between the characters as they discuss plans for the upcoming afternoon and end every interaction with ‘see you later.’ The quiet nature of the long follow shots perfectly encapsulates the unpredictability of these devastating acts of gun violence.  While journalists and true crime fanatics may spend their time digging for a motivation behind each of these senseless mass killings, finding ‘explanations’ for these tragedies isn’t enough, they need to be witnessed and felt, it needs to be understood that these are real people, young people with their whole lives ahead of them stripped away within seconds because some edgelord idiot was allowed easy access to firearms and the laws aren’t changing.