It happens...

After watching Elephant, I thought about the multiple explanations of narrative as the human way of making sense of lived experience.  When Marie-Laure Ryan summarizes the various approaches to the phenomenon of narrative in the introduction to Narrative Across Media, she writes that “the existential type (represented by Paul Ricoeur and Peter Brooks) …tells us that the act of narrating enables humans to deal with time, destiny, and mortality; to create and project identities; and to situate ourselves as embodied individuals in a world populated by similarly embodied subjects.  It is in short a way, perhaps the only one, to give meaning to life” (2).  In “Narrative Mechanics”, Caroline Bassett also mentions Ricoeur.  Bassett writes that “reading narrative as a central act of configuration, the way in which human experience is made meaningful, Ricoeur connects narrative with the event and experience” (10). For both Ryan and Bassett, this view considers narrative as the fundamental device by which people can take the chaotic mess that makes up every day lived experience and (re)order it into a logical/understandable cause-and-effect sequence.  Traditional narrative may be the tool for organizing experience into something coherent, but presenting the events in Elephant in a traditional, logical way would undermine the senseless nature of the Columbine-esque tragedy.  Forcing a logical narrative out of these events would oversimplify and overdramatize the senseless nature of the school killing.

In ‘Just because’ stories: on Elephant”, Bassett explores the nontraditional approach used by the film to tell the story of the fictional school shooting.  After posing the many questions left unanswered by the Columbine shooting, as well as the fictional one in Elephant, Bassett explains that “while many possible motivations or triggers are presented in the film, none of them is presented as commensurate with the events they might have provoked, and none of them is presented as likely to be determining” (165).  In other words, the film offers some possible explanations, but does not attempt to provide a specific reason or set of reasons for the shooting.  Bassett continues, “rather, multiple motivations, reasons, and causal factors pile up as so much useless information, or as so much significant information—the point is that we don’t know and are given no clue.  The killings happen …apparently randomly or ‘just because” (165).  Although this may appear to be the lazy man’s way around living up to narrative expectations, this move in Elephant illuminates the inadequacy of the traditional narrative structure and its inability to make sense out of something terrible that “just happened”.  It draws attention to the fact that some times, if not most of the time, things just happen without what we would see as a logical cause.  If the film wanted to present logical motivations for revenge, we would have seen much more bullying of Alex and Eric, and the students/faculty who participated would have been deliberately targeted.  Instead, we see harmless—even sympathetic characters like Michelle and Elias included in the slaughter, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They die even though they’ve done nothing wrong to Alex or Eric, and in spite of appearing as relative outcasts themselves.