Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Key line: ‘You know there’s others like us out there, too.’

  While researching this movie I ran across this one line blurb for Elephant on a website: ‘Several ordinary high school students go through their daily routine as two others prepare for something more malevolent.’ This is so pithily and elegantly put that it almost renders me redundant. The key word isn’t ‘malevolent’. It is ‘routine’.

  Elephant chooses to look at a notorious real-life mass murder by concentrating on the routine in a typical high school full of typical kids. What hits you – what makes a film so formally cold and bereft of the usual cinematic tricks employed to manipulate our emotions – is that, one day, a group of people turned up to a place they felt safe in, and set about their normal tasks, sleepwalking through the killing of time, as all of us do, everyday, unknowing that these were their last moments on Earth.

  Elephant is ‘about’ the Columbine High School Massacre and the senseless killing of children. But it says something simple and profound that can apply to any random killing. In June 2010, a taxi driver called Derrick Bird picked up a shotgun one morning, murdered his twin brother, and then drove around rural West Cumbria in the north of England, killing eleven passers-by. When I heard about the incident I immediately found myself thinking about Elephant, and people, dead, after going about their daily routine in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because in this film, no one is ironically foreshadowing their oblivion with the words, ‘I’ll be right back’ (see Scream, here). They are alive and anonymous and unknowing, and then they are gone.

  Elephant is not a fictionalisation of Columbine. At least, not exactly. It is set in the fictional Watt High School in Portland, Oregon. Its killers are called Alex (Frost) and Eric (Duelen), not Dylan and Eric. It doesn’t attempt to use the facts of the case to present the true story of the crime. But its shots of boys in combat gear toting guns are clearly inspired by the chilling closed-circuit footage of the real thing, and Gus Van Sant made it after originally setting out to make a documentary about Columbine, and then changing his mind.

  It is called Elephant because Van Sant is a fan of a short 1989 TV film of the same name by Brit director Alan Clarke (see Made In Britain, here). Clarke’s Elephant is a depiction of 18 murders committed in Northern Ireland in the name of ‘The Troubles’. There is no explanation or build-up or stories told about the murders. Clarke simply trains a camera on a selection of anonymous killers and follows them with long, uncut tracking shots, watching until they take a life. Then he goes on to the next. And the next, and the next, until you just want it to stop, which is exactly what Clarke (and his producer at BBC Northern Ireland, Danny Boyle) was trying to say.

  Van Sant replicates Clarke’s shooting style but misunderstood the point of the title. Clarke was referring to the phrase, ‘the elephant in the room’, the overriding concern that everyone in Northern Ireland was living with but no one wanted to talk about. Van Sant thought it referred to an ancient Indian parable concerning a group of blind men who try to learn what an elephant looks like by touching it. All of them touch a different part of the elephant’s enormous body, and therefore come away with wildly differing ideas of what an elephant looks like. In short, no one viewpoint amounts to the complete truth. Both interpretations work equally well for Van Sant’s bleakly beautiful film.

  Van Sant shot in an abandoned high school building and used non-professional actors who were encouraged to improvise and co-write scenes based on their own everyday high school experiences. There is therefore very little in way of acting or dialogue in the conventional cinematic sense. There is little music, and what there is so quiet it’s almost subliminal. Many of the actors use their real first names. While the characters behave as if they are in a documentary, Van Sant applies his cinematic skills in the form of looking at the same events from multiple perspectives (those blind men attempting to ‘see’ an elephant), a lighting scheme that adds a dreamlike quality to the school without attracting attention to itself, and those long, elegant tracking shots that follow students through tasks both mundane and malevolent, all of which build up an almost unbearable tension.

  The ‘story’ is also minimal. We meet a boy, John (Robinson), who, with his near-Albino androgyny, is the movie’s most charismatic figure. He has a father, played by The Last Picture Show (see here) star Timothy Bottoms, who is an alcoholic and has obviously made the boy into his carer rather than his responsibility. We meet a nerdy girl, Michelle (Hicks), who is obviously awkward and ashamed of her appearance. We meet Elias (McConnell), a photography student taking pictures of other kids for his portfolio.

  And we get flashbacks of two ordinary-looking boys getting homophobically bullied by jock-types, ordering guns from a website, having breakfast with one set of perfectly normal parents, watching documentaries about Hitler, planning their crime, sharing a kiss in a shower because one of them points out that they’ve never kissed anyone, arriving tooled-up at the school, sparing John’s life by warning him as they approach . . . and then indiscriminately killing the children we’ve met, plus pupils and adults that we haven’t.

  The panic and slaughter feels so much more real and terrifying than any violence in any movie you care to name. The pleasure the two boys are taking is a shock, to the point where you realise that you really have forgotten that they are just boys pretending.

  There is one moment that stands out: a black boy called Benny (Bennie Dixon) who we haven’t met before declines to run away from the carnage. He helps a girl who has frozen with fear to escape out of a window. He then circles round to creep up behind Eric and try and stop him killing the Principal Mr Luce (Malloy), who is lying before Eric, pleading for his life. Benny is handsome, athletic, cool and brave. For a few seconds . . . we are in ‘a movie’. He is the essence of the young action hero and we imagine he is going to approach unheard and karate chop Eric in the head, knocking him cinematically unconscious, saving the day. But Eric has heard him coming, and turns, and shoots him dead. Bang. This isn’t ‘a movie’. We are back in the real world. Heroes exist. But they don’t save a day designed by sick boys with guns.

  Elephant ends when Alex kills Eric, and looks for more trouble, and finds it in a meat locker with two students called Nathan and Carrie. ‘Eeeny meany miny moe,’ he sneers, drunk on power, torturing them. The camera backs out of the meat locker, keeping an eye on the scene in case Alex decides to switch his attentions. We can’t help. Cut to a cloudy blue sky. Van Sant has had enough. And so have you.

  THIRTEEN

  2003

  Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Brady Corbet

  Dir.: Catherine Hardwicke

  Plot: The sneakiest teensploitation movie ever made.

  Key line: ‘Tracy was playing Barbies before she met Evie!’

  One conclusion you may have come to, as you’ve watched the social message hysteria and metaphor madness of the ’50s teen movie gradually mature into one of the most serious and multi-dimensional genres of the 21st century, is that the old-fashioned juvenile delinquent teensploitation flick is dead. But it isn’t. Not one bit. Film-makers still know that adult movie-goers adore being horrified by the prospect of crazed children behaving badly and coming to kill us all in our sleep. But dressing some stage-school brat in a leather jacket and calling him Buzz or Batman isn’t enough to put the fear of God into right-thinking parents in these post-9/11 times. To give us back the fear, one had to extract the kitsch.

  So . . . take the kind of true-life scare story one finds on daytime TV or one of those insane women’s magazines that scream ‘My Toddler Gave Birth To Triplets!!!’ at you and you only find in supermarkets. Take away the portentous opening voiceover and made-up stats about rampaging youth and exchange melodramatic music for cool indie and rap. Add shaky hand-held cameras because that means, ‘This isn’t a movie really. It’s a documentary!’ Get a really top-class, award-winning actress to play Mom, and have her be the sort of character who is both the portal t
hrough which the audience experiences the nightmare of adolescent sex and drug abuse, and the individual we can conveniently blame for everything we see, because she’s a sexually active recovering alcoholic working-class single mother! From . . . The South!!! For shame, yer big trailer-trash slut!

  And, as what teenage boys get up to can’t shock anyone after Columbine (see Elephant, here), make it about girls; very, very bad girls. This has the added value of enabling you to shoot hot jailbait doing rude stuff while insisting that you are only doing it to show us the unpalatable truth, rather than to titillate male viewers, ’cos that would be wrong.

  And how to make sure that no one can accuse your exploitation pic of . . . well . . . exploitation? A female director is a great start. But how about this: one of the barely legal stars of your movie co-wrote it, and assures us that it’s based on the facts of her own life aged 12 and 13! Ker-ching!!! How can anyone accuse you of scaremongering and bad taste when the proof of your good intentions is right there, on set and on screen? I’ve been told I use the term cake-and-eat-it way too much. But, really, there is no other applicable epithet. So here it is, one last time: Thirteen is one of the great cake-and-eat-it teen movies of the last 20 years.

  Meet Tracy, a beautiful blonde 13-year-old Los Angeles schoolgirl (played by 14-year-old Evan Rachel Wood), who is a meek, mild-mannered nerd adrift in a school full of wannabe Tupacs until, after just one afternoon with wildly popular Mean Girl psychopath Evie (co-writer Nikki Reed), she becomes a shop-liftin’, bitch-slappin’, self-harmin’, girl-shaggin’, boy-shaggin’, drug-snortin’, tongue-piercin’, Mom-assaultin’, lip-smackin’ stowaway on the Whore Train To Oblivion. You think the boys from The Cool And The Crazy (see here) were weird for becoming homicidal/suicidal acid casualties after just one pull on a joint? They have nothing on Tracy, who is to independent thought what Lady Gaga is to slipping into something more comfortable. Ms Reed and director/co-writer Hardwicke reckon that the cautionary drama of Thirteen was originally meant as a comedy. Ladies, I have some bad news for you . . .

  The acting is what makes the movie something more than something to laugh at. Brady Corbet, unrecognisable from his role as haunted abuse victim Brian in Mysterious Skin (see here), is very good as Tracy’s big brother Mason, attempting to survive in a house full of poisoned oestrogen. Wood kind of coasts on her looks, as many a 14-year-old would have, but Reed is a great, evil-eyed villain, who also scuppers any possibility of the movie being serious by being someone we’d all have jolly good fun following on a teenage rampage. Hunter actually got a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her reliably committed turn as Melanie Freeland, which was a bit over the top. But she does establish some sort of truth about parents who can’t discipline their children effectively because they’re still children at heart. She chews the scenery wildly in the movie’s hilarious . . . sorry . . . poignant ending, as she and Wood emote all over the kitchen in a domesticated remix of an especially noisy Jerry Springer show. But there’s no other way such a questionable exercise could end. Mommy’s love must eventually conquer all, and the characters must hug and learn and grow, but not before much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, ’cos, you know, women are emotional, and all that.

  Ms Hardwicke obviously captured a kind of teen movie that the legitimate world wanted . . . something that behaved like the real agony at the heart of Mysterious Skin or Precious (see here) or La Haine (see here) but didn’t actually hurt. She got to direct Twilight (see here) and had thankfully cured her most annoying directorial tic, where she puts a wobbly camera on a slightly out-of-focus face, and then SLAMS it violently into focus, as if every facial gesture of her leads is a huge emotional revelation.

  I know it sounds like I don’t like Thirteen. But I really, really do. It is a brilliant juggling of modern tabloid news stereotypes and rollercoaster plot dynamics, and it entertains because you find yourself shouting at the screen, reeling in comical horror and enjoying the fact that a teen tragedy that is playing out in real life, somewhere, everywhere, at the very moment you are watching it, has been made into an irresponsibly thrilling black comedy that has convinced itself that it’s a searing exposé of the perils of peer pressure, urban hardship and liberal parenting. It’s a surprise 21st-century throwback to the innocent and cynical joys of watching The Blackboard Jungle (see here) and I Was A Teenage Werewolf (see here), and laughing at adult hysteria about age-old problems of adolescence while consoling yourself with the fact that the real nightmares are always somebody else’s fault, and never ours.

  MEAN GIRLS

  2004

  Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese, Ana Gasteyer, Lacey Chabert, Jonathan Bennett

  Dir.: Mark Waters

  Plot: Why girls just can’t get along.

  Key line: ‘Evil takes a human form in Regina George. Don’t be fooled, ’cos she may seem like your typical selfish, backstabbing, slut-based ho-bag, but in reality, she is so much more than that.’

  The film that made Saturday Night Live comedian, writer and producer Tina Fey a star is one of the most laugh-out-loud funny of all high school comedies. But beneath the dirty jokes, feelgood final act and bright and breezy filmatism, it’s a movie that is pleading for some genuine social change. Adapted from a 2002 self-help manual for teenage girls and their parents called Queen Bees And Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, And Other Realities Of Adolescence by American educator Rosalind Wiseman, it’s a movie that despairs at the way women treat each other in the modern world, but chooses to spread its sly feminist message through the medium of satire and gags about sex with hot dogs.

  Lindsay Lohan plays Cady Heron, a 16-year-old who has been home-schooled because her parents are zoologists who have raised her in Africa. As Ms Lohan’s narration points out, the world makes odd assumptions about home-schooled kids, before we meet some baby southern rednecks, one of whom has important knowledge to share with us: ‘And on the third day, God created the Remington Bull Action Rifle. So that Man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals.’ I wish I could do justice to this kid’s accent in print. But I truly can’t.

  Photos of Cady’s African experiences give us some nice visual contrast between the pleasures of a childhood in the jungle and the nightmare of a first day in the real jungle that is a high school in Chicago. And then there’s a near-miss with a speeding bus. You should keep that bit in mind.

  Freaked-out Cady bonds with goth-with-attitude Janis Ian (Caplan, whose character is named in tribute to the singer-songwriter who had a folky 1975 coming-of-age hit called ‘At Seventeen’) and ‘so gay he can’t function’ chubster Damian (Franzese), who immediately peer pressure Cady into missing health class. Good move, as it consists of a big meathead in a shell-suit saying, ‘Don’t have sex. ’Cos you will get pregnant – and die! Don’t have sex in the missionary position; don’t have sex standing up . . . just don’t do it. Promise? OK . . . everybody take some rubbers.’

  The smartass outsiders introduce Cady (and us) to The Plastics, the three young, dumb and full of mean girls who rule the school through intimidation, fear and careful accessorising. Their leader is Regina George (McAdams), a blonde hottie who, in true Heathers (see here) style, appears to grow more popular in direct correlation to how stupendously nasty she is (‘One time, she punched me in the face. It was awesome.’).

  Janis goes further, providing Cady with a cafeteria floor plan that sets out the school’s arcane subcultural tribes. ‘Asian Nerds. Cool Asians. Varsity Jocks. Unfriendly Black Hotties. Girls Who Eat Their Feelings. Girls Who Don’t Eat Anything. Desperate Wannabes. Burnouts. Sexually Active Band Geeks . . .’ All human life is here.

  But maybe the outsiders have judged The Plastics too harshly. When some neanderthal attempts to sexually humiliate Cady in the cafeteria for the benefit of his watching mates, she is rescued by the emasculating tongue of Regina. As Janis has already observed, Cady is ‘a r
egulation hottie’ and therefore deemed worthy of Plastic acceptance.

  But being elected a Queen Bee comes with a price. Cady is already being forced to choose between the cruel and superficial Plastics and the witty and decent outsiders. Janis deflects the defeat she fears is inevitable by convincing Cady that she’s hanging with Regina so she can report back, giving the outsiders plenty of juicy gossip to entertain themselves with. But Janis has some kind of Regina-hating agenda that she won’t reveal. If the plot is beginning to remind you of the labyrinthine secrets and lies of Cruel Intentions (see here) it should. Mean Girls even nicks that movie’s scrapbook/diary deus ex machina, as well as elements of Final Destination, Clueless, Heathers, Ghost World, Lucas, Election and absolutely everything by John Hughes. It’s watched a lot of teen movies.

  Anyway, this being Teen World, there has to be a romance. Hunky Aaron (Bennett) hits Cady ‘like a big yellow school bus’ (hope you’re keeping a-hold of these bus references). Trouble is, he’s Regina’s ex. So begins a tale of betrayal, control freakery, subterfuge, double-cross, cat-fighting and the failure of ‘Fetch’ to become a teen buzzword, played out to all-time classic slut-pop tunes by Kelis and Missy Elliott.

  But the plot becomes less relevant with each viewing. Mean Girls is really a series of inspired skits fuelled by Fey’s wry anger at the death of feminism, and the lengths women (because all of these teens are far too articulate and archetypal to be standard schoolgirls) will go to to undermine each other and collude in their own oppression. The way The Plastics force each other to wear pink, criticise tiny details of their own and each other’s bodies, undermine each other’s self-confidence and obsessively conspire against other girls is a bewildering truth to Fey, and one worthy of scabrous liberal satire. But, unlike the makers of But I’m A Cheerleader (see here), Fey doesn’t identify herself as a superior species, or believe it’s all the fault of The Right. Therefore, her comedy is more subversive, more admiring of conventional female beauty, has a lighter touch . . . and is much, much funnier. The feminist subtext is only there if you’re looking out for it. If not, the movie’s a hilarious piss-take of the whole notion of high school stereotypes.