The Elephant in the Room

Ok, so I just watched the film for the first time. I’m not sure what to say, I sort of expected a little more explication, someone to tell me what pushed these two kids, not over thee deep end because that implies some sudden action, but to the extremes of maticulously planning their “revenge” on the school. I understand that there is probably an artistic explanation about how this is meant to replicate the suddenness and lack of explication in the real life situation. That all being understood logically, emotionally I needed something a little more. I think I felt a need for more empathy to build with either the perpetrators or the victims, I felt more detached than I would have liked, not invested enough.

Now that I got all the initial reaction business out of the way, let’s talk narratice for a bit. It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that each story was running concurrently. The difficulty with that for me was the shortness of each students’ personal narrative. I started seeing this film as a series of concurrently running narratives smooshed together. Each student has overlap with others, but their lives do not really effect one another. There’s the boy who’s more responsible than his drunken dad, the girls that want to spend every waking moment together and cannot deal with seperation and share bulimic tendancies. there’s the young couple and the photographer. The sheer number of little narratives is impressive. Each character can at least be recognized as an archetype from teenage films. The problem that I discussed with relating to characters probably has a lot to do with this excessive number of characters. The more baby narratives and character names to be remebered and processed over the course of the film the harder it becomes to grow attached to one of them and the less details and understanding we can gain from one of them. I started to respond to the very first student we meet, and then we don’t see him in any significant capacity until the end. They named a character we only meet for seconds and rarely repeat any names at all. It becomes frustrating and the smooshed together narratives start to feel like they’re not narratives at all. Until the last scenes NOTHING HAPPENS. Nothing prompts those ending scenes and therefore the mini narratives might not be narratives at all. Afterall, didn’t the Ryan article suggest that the main character had to change something in the plot or setting to make this truely a narrative? I suppose this film, according to that definition, these little stories are not actually little narratives, they have narratology, but can’t be narratives. What are they then? Are the only real characters those characters that killed? What does that make Benny, the student we only meet at the end who escorts another girl out the window? He changes something, but is given no back story, not even a little bit. This film does not just comment on the subject matter, it makes you really think about how narrative works.

Long takes gave me some trouble. There were a few reallu interesting and inventive ones that impressed me. For instance, when the three girls go through the lunch line, eat lunch, walk to the bathroom (as the camera takes a short cut through the kitchen) and then all vomit together in the toilet. This take was breathtakingly long and interesting. On the same note though, following a character walking across a field and down halls from behind felt more tedious and like an extension onto the necessary length of the film. I thought maybe they could have been more selective on which of these takes to keep for filmic value and which might have been superfluous. The directors and editors may have had good reason to keep them all, but I ended up finding that less can sometimes be more.