Van Sant has stated that his reasoning behind the shower scene in Elephant had to do with two, outcast teenage virgins knowing that they’re about to die and wanting some form of sexual experience before that happens, even if it is homosexual. It wasn’t his intention for the characters to actually be gay.
You also seem to forget the long sequences of a Gay Straight Alliance meeting presented in the film. As far as Elephant’s actual depiction of teenage homosexuality, that would be the prime, and positive, example.
I always saw the two boy’s relationship as ‘outsides’ and they found solace only in each other, I never really saw it as a sexual thing. I mean to go into this deeper but I’m sick at the moment, I’ll perhaps go more in depth after a nap. x
Leo you forgot Even Cowgirls Get the Blues which dealt with the lesbians on a ranch. Yo-de Yum Feminine Hygiene Spray Ranch I believe is what it was called. It’s out of print, or either semi-hard to find right now on DVD. I love this one. I think it goes well with MOPI (boys) ECGB (girls). If you haven’t seen it, you should. Uma is fantastic and John Hurt as the Countess is priceless.
I like basically everything Van Sant has done. I didn’t really understand the shower scene in Elephant. It seemed to come out of nowhere and then afterwards, had no connection to anything. I just remember it not as a homoerotic moment, but as an odd moment in general. That’s really all I have to say about that.
Elephant is about the teenage libido run amok. And teenage sensitivity. If you’ll notice, there’s only one brief scene in the film where we see students actually in class, and that scene is meant to highlight the bullying of Alex. Everyone’s pursuing independent studies, talking with girlfriends and boyfriends, leaving school in the middle of the day, arriving in the middle of the day, making themselves throw up, holding gay student group meetings. The whole world of the film turns on libidinal energies. That’s one of the fascinating aspects of Elephant. The massacre is where the libidinal energies of two students run amok. But we’ve also had the simpering principal leering at the long-haired blond boy in his office; the cafeteria workers ducking into the kitchen to take a hit of crack; the library girl’s anxiety over showing her bare legs in gym class — everyone’s story in this film is one of struggling with adolescent sexuality to some degree. I agree with Brandon, that the killers just want to experience some kind of tenderness (although the blond guy doesn’t exactly know he’s going to die at the end), and the scene of their tentative kiss is far more innocent and ingenuous than the creepy posturing of the heterosexual couple. I think in a way the killers do love each other, perhaps because they feel no one else will, and whatever the circumstances of their situation, they funnel that love into revenge and destructiveness.
Van Sant doesn’t have to always create gay characters who are inspiring and who can serve as “role models.” He’s too tough and subtle an artist for that.
You also forget that in the wake of the Columbine massacre a meme began to make the rounds that the killers were gay. By shooting them kissing in the shower Gus is saying “So what if they were?”
boys in showers is to van sant what calves and ankles were to truffaut, a recurring visual motif that functions more as an image of a director’s particular fetish than as anything necessarily serviceable to the plot of their films.
it’s become such a cliche in van sant’s films, in fact, that rainn wilson even spoofed it for the independent spirit awards.
Maybe I’m losing it, but I can’t think of another van Sant film that shows boys in the shower. Unless Anne Heche counts as a boy.
dang justin, now you are going to make me go through the whole oevre again(not a bad thing)…i know it occurs in paranoid park, which admittedly happened after elephant. i will check my facts and get back to you…cheers
as for anne heche…your call, i’m not going there
Gus is into twinks. Big whoop.
Paranoid Park, okay. It just seems a wee bit homophobic to say “He’s an obsessed fetishist” on the basis of 2 scenes when we don’t tend to overreact to heterosexual directors that way.
True. Also the shower scenes in “Elephant” and “Paranoid Park” are entirely different in style and purpose. In the latter we just see the hero’s head under the shower nozzle and the scene is entirely about his emotional distress over the incident leading to the railroad security guard’s death.
not homophobic in the least…and before this rumor starts, i don’t think truffaut is a misogynist for being interested in women’s legs. why do people look at the word fetish with such a negative connotation? i mean, everybody has them and i never said that anyone obsesses over them.
as for van sant, he is one of my favorites, and if he wants to film boys in showers that is a.o.k. with me…just so long as he continues to weave these scenes into the incredible types of films that he usually makes. there was never any offense meant to anyone in any walk of life…that’s just not how i roll.
i truly thought that by comparing him to truffaut that this would turn to a discussion about recurring visual motifs, which in their own way help to distinguish a “true auteur” from a “quasi-chimpanzee”
Well, the boys say they’ve never even kissed someone before. They know they’re gonna die, so they want to get that feeling.
But the movie is purposely very ambiguous just like the Columbine Massacre itself. No one knows why they did it, but everyone wants to know. Maybe they did it because they were gay and felt they would never be accepted? Or maybe they didn’t? There’s not supposed to be any answers.
And also on Paranoid Park. I don’t think anything in that movie is supposed to be homoerotic. Some people say the scene where his friend is driving the car and staring at him is homoerotic but I think that’s just showing his friend knows something is up, not that he wants to do him. Saying the shower scene is homoerotic is just ridiculous.
Thanks for all the intelligent responses, everyone. They are much appreciated.
I agree with the general sentiment that the movie is ambiguous, but there are still these coinciding events: boys kissing, boys being outcasts, boys massacring school.
Truth is, there isn’t enough solid ground in that movie to get to any motives or true feelings. In that way, Elephant is a journey, and a memorable one, but it loses points from me for placing things I think are positive next to negative events.
Maybe Van Sant was just being indulgent, but to the chagrin of that generation.
Leo, I don’t think you and I watched the same movie. No motives? The other students throw stuff at Alex during class. His parents don’t seem to care whether he goes to school or not, or what he does. Every moment counts in a film: it’s like a mathematic equation, every element is there for a reason. Focusing on this canard of whether they’re gay or not is to ignore everything else that is happening right in front of our eyes. And guess what? Students are shooting up schools; Columbine was not some isolated incident. Young people do experiment with bisexuality; it happens. And I don’t hear young people complaining about Van Sant nearly as much as older people. Hopefully, in one or two more generations these kinds of qualms will no longer come up at all.
Justin, sorry I didn’t clarify. “Truth is, there isn’t enough solid ground in that movie to get to any motives or true feelings” in reference to the homoerotic shower scene.
There is plenty of motive in the film. I think that a majority agree that the primary motive for the massacre was the two boys being ostracized, and there is evidence to support this. What I’m interested in is interpretations of the shower scene, which so far range from “they’re about to die and wanting some form of sexual experience,” and “they found solace only in each other, I never really saw it as a sexual thing,” to “Gus is into twinks. Big whoop.” If film is “like a mathematic equation, every element is there for a reason,” my original question was, what part of the equation is the shower scene? Is that scene showing the massacre’s motivation, the boys’ sexuality, a sense of loneliness? I don’t really see any consensus on whether or not it was sexual, related to intimacy, or just indulgence by Van Sant. I think there’s such a mixed reaction because there are no preceeding scenes, actions, or plot points involving only the boys that show their emotional or sexual path to the shower scene.
The most compelling explanation so far has been yours. Most people seem to look at the boys as a seperate entity from the rest of the student body, as did I (Protagonists=Students, Antagonists=The Boys). If you take away that division, then the pattern of teenage libido and sensitivity becomes clear and it adds a whole new layer to the movie. The shower scene contributes to the overall theme and expresses their sensitivity. This explanation doesn’t work for me because I don’t think the kiss is “tentative”, I think it is overtly sexual.
I haven’t watched the whole film in a while, but I did manage to find that scene on YouTube (I can’t find it again, I think it was pulled). In the film, I thought they were kissing passionately. Also, one is showering naked, and the other comes in, undresses and joins him. Take away the issue of gender and the situation of two people naked, sexual organs exposed, in a shower passionately kissing is overtly sexual. There is more sexuality in the scene than the supposed message warrants. If the two boys were hanging out as they were in other scenes, clothed, had a close emotional moment, had physical closeness, maybe a little ackwardness, and then kissed tentatively, I think that would lend itself towards a sensitive expression of their libido and wouldn’t warrant further discussion.
So why naked in the shower? Why so explicitly sexual? The problem is, I don’t know! I don’t like anyone’s theories or Van Sant’s reported explanations, because to me, each one has it’s holes. The only conclusion I can come to soundly is that Van Sant was trying say something with that scene that didn’t work for me.
I don’t have qualms with bisexuality, I have qualms with associating bisexuality with school shootings. The real canard is the emphasis in media that sexuality, video games, goth/metal/alternative culture, the internet, etc. served as influences and motivation for school shootings. The reason I brought this up in the first place is because I didn’t understand the scene’s relevance. I felt like the movie only adds to that canard by connecting non-hetrosexuality and playing video games with school shootings.
In the end, I now think Elephant offers more insight on teenage libido than it does on school shootings. As for the ongoing occurance of school shootings in real life and their motivations, I hope that topic has no reason to be on a site about films.
the funny thing is that if the two columbine killers saw this movie, they would probably be really pissed off about that scene!
Leo,
thanks for your thoughtful response. Elephant is a film I’ve watched many times and spent a lot of time thinking about. I even wrote an essay about it, comparing it with Joy Ride and The Butterfly Effect; but I have since abandoned that piece.
From the very first shot, where the car is out of control and shearing off rearview mirrors, we know we are in a crazy, topsy-turvy world. From this beginning Van Sant is probing us to look for “odd” behavior. And it’s everywhere, of course. The whole school really becomes this vortex of strange energies.
In the shower scene we also see, perhaps, some indication of the hold Alex has on Eric. It’s Alex who gets into the shower first, and it’s Eric who seems more tentative — by tenative I mean the line where he says, “I’ve never kissed anyone before — have you?” It’s actually very heartbreaking in a way, especially compared with the hard-as-nails posturing of the popular heterosexual couple who seem to “own” the school. Alex and Eric have only this isolated, hidden space of a bathroom shower.
It sort of corresponds with the even more startling moment (imo) in Last Days, where two of the grunge musicians flopping at "Cobain"’s mansion go to a guest room and start having gay sex with each other. Certainly Cobain was gay-friendly, if not bi himself. But what does this moment show, beside the fact that a lot of other people live on Cobain’s property and do what they want to do there (a kind of metaphor for the freedom Nirvana promised outsiders in the early 90s, a brief moment of social liberation that some have compared to the 1960s and 1970s). Perhaps Van Sant does have a contract with himself to pepper gay interludes throughout his films in order to expose mainstream audiences to gay realities and say, as David Ehrenstein indicated earlier, “What’s the big deal? So what?”
It’s possible, too, that Van Sant is playing with images of decadence and even moral decay, and using these sexual interludes for that purpose — let’s not forget, these are not healthy, “out” gay men, but furtive, down-low men, ashamed, hiding. The musicians in Last Days — are they the Melvins, the Meat Puppets, Dave Grohl; who is being outed here — are gay in their private lives but probably not in front of their fans, for instance. Even though Van Sant is gay, he might be making these associations in the same way that Pasolini in Salo and Fassbinder in In a Year with 13 Moons depict sexual behavior that goes too far, the dangerous slippery slope of too much freedom. Like the disturbing moment where Elvira the transsexual performs auto-erotic asphyxiation on herself in 13 Moons. Fassbinder wasn’t against gays or transsexuals, but he is showing here how loneliness and isolation lead to some self-destructive behaviors.
I think it’s interesting that people assume the two killers were gay just because of the shower scene. As people have said here, Gus never intended that interpretation. I’ve always felt the scene felt a bit out of place only because it seems so odd that Van Sant would feel the need to say these characters were gay. So it came as no surprise when I heard him say that they were not gay but rather just experiencing an act of intimacy before they die (and I do believe these characters had some inclination that they were going to die – or if not die, go to jail). But I think it says something about our society that we would assume that two kids taking a shower and kissing would automatically be labeled as gay. I’m not saying they are not; only that using such a scene as an example seems kind of shallow to me.
Gus Van Sant is gay? Well that explains why his name crept into my brain whenever I listened to Pete Shelley’s Homosapien. There really is an explanation for everything.
Leo Urbis
Gus Van Sant has undeniable homoeroticism in some of his films, especially in three films on The Auteurs (Mala Noche, My Own Private Idaho, and Elephant) and the recently released Milk.
I have found Van Sant’s work interesting and discussion worthy, if not outright enjoyable. What I don’t understand about Van Sant is his portrayl of the teenage assassins in Elephant; specifically their engagement in homoerotic behavior (showering together and kissing). When the film’s outcome is clear (the school shooting) the audience spends the film analyzing the killers. Van Sant’s inclusion in the film of the students’ homosexual relationship implies that it contributed to their decision to massacre the student population. This implication angers and confuses me.
The boys appear to be closeted, and I don’t believe the move ever implies that they were ostracized for their relationship with each other. If I recall correctly, the High School students that Van Sant portrayed were eerily embracing of each other. Why then would Van Sant include the homoeroticism in the film? How does it serve the film or the boy’s characters?
Van Sant is an openly gay man. Why would he want to potray to young gay men this way? Was this portrayl intentional? With so many film’s exploring homoeroticism in a romantic light, why would he create this portrayl?
I was in High School during the Columbine shooting which this film draws heavily from. I also have gay friends, and play violent video games (another activity the assassins partake in). I was completely engaged in this film up to the point of these revelations. In my opinion, Van Sant created a charicature of what the media said was creating these teens, and smeared homosexuals as well.