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layered narrative environments
Last week I watched a DVD of Gus Van Sant's film Elephant. Steven Shaviro eloquently articulates what's working in this film:
"Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) is a beautiful film, so languidly quotidian, and yet so dreamily gorgeous, that its utter naturalism verges on the surreal ... The camera floats from student to student, with long tracking shots following one or another kid down the hallways or across the grass, looping backwards and forwards in time so that the same events are captured several times from several viewpoints."
The end result of this technique is that Van Sant creates a vivid evocation of a school as a rich narrative space: densely layered with multiple stories running in simultaneous sequence. Although the students are the film's focus we also glimpse the administrators, teachers, office staff, and cafeteria workers often enough (and vividly enough) to get a sense that they too have their own narratives directing them through the environment of the school. The film opts not to "follow" these particular branches but we're aware of their existence.
This design helps the Columbine-Littleton-style shootings of the film to carry more weight, to feel more palpable as tragedy: one of the reasons that violence feels shocking in lived experience is precisely because of its disruptive potential, its capacity to radically reroute (or terminate) the narrative "direction" of a life. Most filmic, televisual, or videogame violence, by contrast, fails to shock because the narrative context that we would need to feel that sense of disruption is not provided, or is only provided as a perfunctory sketch or a selection from the circulating set of readymade cliches. When the film's violence cuts through all the film's stories simultaneously, we feel the disruptive sense of that act in that space: this is the most (possibly the only) valuable contribution that Van Sant makes to the cultural discourse around these kinds of shootings.
Another nice Shaviro passage:
"The film is about teenage awkwardness and grace (which coexist in all the characters, in different proportions), and it is wonderfully attentive to the life of the body, to bodies in motion, with their microscopic habits and routines and glitches and disruptions, their momentary tropisms and encounters."
I almost wish that the film had not even had the shootings in it: by including them, the film inevitably becomes "about" the shootings, and I feel that Van Sant has considerably more to say on the life of teenagers in their "momentary tropisms" (what a film like My Own Private Idaho is really all about) than he does on the topic of school shootings. A full exploration of the former would render an exploration of the latter wholly unnecessary. Labels: media commentary, narrative |
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
12:54 PM
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