| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
As usual, director Gus VAN SANT queries the nature of cinema, itself, by questioning what actually constitutes a film in this impressionistic account of a high-school tragedy.
Told from multiple and inevitably-repeating viewpoints (as in Rashomon), we witness the emptiness of a Western culture apparently unable to offer a raison d'être to its young other than the relentless pursuit of materialism.
The style is cold-blooded because the acts depicted are; making this an excellent marriage of form and content - although not in terms of character motivation. The long, interleaving takes and general lack of plot-advancing dialogue helps convey a sense of pure film, as each person moves slowly and inexorably toward a rendezvous with a common fate.
Affluent Whites who, despite possessing the privileges of living in cultures based on positive-discrimination for Whites, choose to throw it all away in a spree of wanton mayhem. Whites are almost always the ones who commit such crimes, and the movie’s very existence proves that when Whites engage in such behavior it is considered unusual enough (even though 89% of mass murderers & serial killers are White) to warrant cinematic attention, since the reasons appear non-obvious. Yet, on the rare occasions Blacks do the same, the reasons are assumed the result of genetic and cultural inferiority - so that the ritualized hand-wringing and self-questioning never then takes place among Whites. This lack of creative self-reflection among Whites is a serious flaw in an otherwise good film seeking to explore a pressing contemporary issue.
There is no reference to the fact that Whites are taught to view the world as their oyster (without an ethical underpinning of accompanying duties & responsibilities along with the rights & privileges). This, for example, explains why the Earth has become so polluted by those who believe they can take without giving anything back. When Whites find they possess no automatic birthrights, they tend to openly-express violent outrage - at their own kind - by killing them; and also at non-Whites by claiming the latter are a threat to White civilization. That the vast majority of motiveless murderers are White would have been a more informative, profound and interesting avenue of dramatic exploration. We are left, instead, with our own pre-existing thoughts on the subject, since the film itself falls into the trap of automatic assumptions about the nature of White culture and its endemic unwillingness to see the elephant in its own room; notwithstanding the movie’s title.
There is no real explanation for the events depicted here apart from tokenistic references to effects (but not causes) such as violent computer games, alcoholism, bullying, Nazism and the easy availability of firearms in the US. Yet many teenagers are exposed to just these things and never go on a mass-murder spree.
One of the most horrifying movies you will ever see both for what it contains as well as for what it crucially leaves out.
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