One afternoon, two teenage boys go to school and murder twelve classmates and a teacher before shooting themselves in the head. Who and what should we hold responsible? Grand Theft Auto? Marilyn Manson? The Iraq War? High School Bullies? While Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine earnestly tries to explain the unexplainable—the horrific 1999 Columbine shootings—Director Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) does no such thing. Elephant— which won Van Sant both the Cannes Palme d’Or and Best Director Award in 2003— follows four characters in an average high school day (take a look at Van Sant's newest film). The events of the day are shot from various points-of-view before it ends with the two students, Eric (Eric Duelen) and Alex (Alex Frost). In the moments leading up to the shootings, everything we see in the film seems normal: a science teacher lectures students on the nature of electrons and atoms; a kid raises his hand to ask a question before pelting a paper ball at another student when the teacher has turned his back; a girl sits alone in the locker room day-dreaming while she changes her shirt; students greet each other in hall ways; they wait in lunch lines; they disappear occasionally into an empty hall, a gymnasium, a bathroom.

And yet these moments are subtly accompanied by layered sounds: Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, the blips and bleeps of video games, the hazy buzz of students’ chatter, interludes of silence tinged with clicks and ticks of boredom and purposelessness. While these moments in the film cannot offer us “answers”— much like the impermeable moods and unspoken spaces that envelop each of the characters in Sophia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides (inspired perhaps by Van Sant?)—they are ghostly presences pointing us to something. The title of Van Sant’s film refers to the expression about the elephant in the room (the problem) you can’t ignore. What is haunting and troubling about Van Sants “elephant” is that we can feel its presence, we can see its effects, and yet it remains largely invisible to us. Elephant caused quite a stir not only for its ambiguous interpretation of the Columbine shootings, but also because Van Sant stayed true to his independent roots. Elephant was shot in only twenty days on a small budget; it is filmed in a documentary-style using the TV-screen dimensions of an after-school special, and the cast consists of new and non-professional actors who improvise in many of the scenes.