Form and content: Van Sant's ELEPHANT, revisited

One of the first things I thought after I heard what Sueng-hui Cho did on Monday was, "Surprisingly this doesn't happen more often."

Given how society propagates outcasts and the increasing ubiquity of mental illness, you'd think these events would be more commonplace. But, thankfully, they're not—perhaps that, along with the obvious "bleeds/leads" element, is the main reason why it fascinates so many.

Or is it?

The New York Time's Manohla Dargis asked the following in the deck of her 2003 review of Elephant:

"How a country that creates such beautiful children also create such horror?"

I confess that I've read and viewed very little regarding this horrible killing spree because, well, it's just not healthy—intellectually and emotionally. And not to sound insensitive, but it's not news. We, as American society, authorize killings everyday that could be considered tantamount to Cho's actions.

But I digress ...

Gus Van Sant, no doubt a pop-culture savant, probably first saw the school-shooting-spree idea as an avenue to explore myriad taboos, or "elephant in the room" issues that rarely are discussed in the mainstream. But Elephant is too avant-garde, and Van Sant really doesn't have much to offer—like Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in his four-star review, he hints at both horror and social commentary, but that's not his resolution or, as it turns out, his objective.

Instead, Van Sant argues that we ignore our children. We disregard the minutiae and everyday ongoings of their lives. We have no clue. I sure as hell don't.

So his film literally shows us.

Effectively, we're shocked both by their prosaic spirit and, to the extreme, their unimaginably cruel potential. The film is at once ho-hum, beautiful and unsettling.

My favorite thing about Elephant is the lengthy tracking shots, which no doubt will put the average megaplex crowd movie-goer to sleep. But, for me, the effect is opposite: Like Kubrick's The Shining, the tension that builds during these beautiful steadicam moments is not one of fright, but of veneration—nostalgia for innocence.

But it's pure aesthetic because, as we know, nature, the world and humanity is cruel, and life is at its cruelest when society's innocent learn this sad lesson before their time.

This, I think, is the greatest tragedy of Columbine and Virginia Tech—and is why we, ourselves and our media, are drawn to such events: brutal and abrupt loss of innocence is too much ...

... but we can't seem to get enough of it.