Gus Van Sant’s 2003 drama Elephant, which details the events surrounding a school massacre, is unlike many other anti-violence films. It offers no placating answers, no explanation for the reasons of tragedy, no study of the minds of the killers, and no theories about the fault of parents, teachers, and society. Diane Keaton, an executive producer of Elephant, said,

What's interesting to me about Gus' movie is that he's not trying to say, "It's because of this!" He forces you to sit there and watch it unfold before you in this amazing way, and you have the responsibility of your own thoughts. You have to sit there with your own fucking thoughts and think about it.

The film title is a tribute to Alan Clarke’s 1989 shocking short film Elephant, which consists of 18 scenes of sectarian killings and contains almost no dialogue, characters, or context. Clarke’s short film references a metaphorical idiom for an important topic that everyone knows about but chooses to ignore, the 'elephant in the room.' An ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland, the Troubles, had become such an elephant in the room for society that Alan Clarke needed to talk about. Gus Van Sant described another elephant in the room with his film Elephant: violence in a typical American high school. With recent mass school shootings like the Uvalde massacre in the news, it's high time to talk about the elephant in the room.

Elephant - "An ordinary high school day. Except that it's not."

Gus Van Sant's film about school shooting
HBO Films

Gus Van Sant’s drama tells the painful story of a fictional school shooting by two students, Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen), a direct parallel to the Columbine High School massacre that occurred on April 20, 1999, four years before Elephant was released for the public to see and won the Palme d'Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. Its tagline, "An ordinay high school day. Except that it's not," perfectly describes how horrific violence can erupt with seeming spontaneity, especially if societies don't pay attention to the warning signs and the elephants in the room.

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Elephant follows a number of high school students, the victims, and the killers, and shows what appears to be an ordinary day from different points of view. John is taken to school by a drunken dad. A young photographer, Elias, snaps portraits of other students. Bulimic girls, Brittany, Jordan, and Nicole, complain about their parents. A nerdy girl, Michelle, is ashamed of her body. Elephant leads us through each of these characters' day and captures typical teenager problems, their awkwardness and insecurities. But above all, their loneliness, because none of the heroes seem to have any real connection with one another. Everyone suffers alone. Even if all events didn't lead up to a school shooting, Elephant still would be one of the most honest and affecting movies about being a teenager.

Gus Van Sant's 2003 film Elephant about a school shooting
HBO Films

Throughout the film, the camera focuses on many unimportant events, minutiae of everyday life; it always seems that a major plot point is missing. The kids don’t see the elephant in the room and avoid difficult and uncomfortable discussions. Even when one of the characters of the film notices how Alex writes the plan in his red notebook (and the question of why this plan is needed is answered with "You will see"), she passes by instead of asking the next question – because the answer can be unbearable.

Van Sant sets the tone of the film with long tracking shots, not using traditional Hollywood lighting and editing, frequently 'shooting' the cast from behind and tracking the back of their heads, and filming documentary style. Almost all the high school students in Elephant are non-actors. Because of this, Elephant turned out to be realistic, honest, and heartbreaking.

School Shooters Alex and Eric

the killers in Elephant
HBO Films

In the violent climax of Elephant, Van Sant finally tells us more about the killers. Alex is an outsider who is bullied at school. While Eric kills the characters in a computer game, he plays Ludwig van Beethoven’s sonata on the piano. Stanley Kubrick used classical music in his ultra-violence masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange, too. In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick used Beethoven's music to penetrate the depth of the main character’s emotion.

Van Sant’s hero is a frustrated pianist (and Van Sant has said that Kubrick was a big influence). So, music doesn’t punctuate the heights of his experience. It is rather one more generalization, like when Alex and Eric are ordering guns over the internet, watching a TV documentary movie on Hitler, kissing while taking a shower, and saying that the goal of everything is just to "have fun."

Related: The Best Serial Killer Documentaries, Ranked

Is Van Sant making a connection between bullying, violent computer games, homosexuality, Nazi propaganda videos, and school shooting? No, he is vehemently refusing interpretation and meaning-making here, and isn't speculating on reasons or blame. Elephant is not a movie about what turns school students into killers.

After Uvalde, Elephant is Still Relevant

The school shooter walks through the hallways in Elephant
HBO Films

In an essay on Van Sant’s Death Trilogy, Holly Myers wrote that, like in the two other films of his trilogy (Gerry, a devastatingly true story about the death of David Coughlin, who was killed by a best friend in the desert, and Last Days, a drama about the suicide of Kurt Cobain), Elephant has "a plot distilled to a single, profound arc: the slow, strange transition of a body from being alive to not being alive. Taking the silence, the mystery, the essential unknowability of death as a given, Van Sant makes no attempt to interrogate or explain. He simply enacts this transition and encourages his viewers to watch."

Despite this, the filmmaker believes that Elephant can contribute to the discussion which needs to be had, telling IGN, "I think it can contribute to the discussion. I think within the discussion you can find answers. Hopefully it will help find answers, I mean, that's sort of the purpose." Unfortunately, with mass school shootings like Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde taking place after Elephant, it seems like politicians and the powerful systems in society simply don't want to find the answers.