What the heck is film for? Most folks see mainstream Hollywood movies as a form of entertainment or escape. For them, seven bucks is a small price to pay for 90 minutes of silly jokes, noisy chase scenes, pumped up action heroes or hot sex.
Others, including a growing number of youth workers and pastors, try to harness film’s power to help them teach or preach. Some culture experts say attempts to use movies in this way leave your audience more excited about the film snippets you show than the theological points you try to make.
“Shock and Challenge”
Some of the independent filmmakers who work outside the Hollywood system are hard-core believers in the idea that film should shock and challenge viewers by forcing them to face up to social realities they’d often rather ignore.
In Elephant, director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting) revisits the horrors of Columbine by examining the deadening boredom and alienating social rituals that are such a big part of the high school experience for so many teens.
The April 20, 1999, school shootings at Columbine left 13 dead and made the Denver-area school a symbol for everything wrong about kids, public education, and suburbia. For many people the events of Sept. 11, 2001, knocked Columbine down a rung or two on their rankings of national tragedies; but the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks haven’t lessened the horrors of high school life for millions of kids, who continue to report to class even though they’re afraid they may get shot, beat up, or harassed in the hallway.
Elephant
Elephant (which won best picture and director awards at Cannes and will be available soon on DVD) was filmed in Portland, Ore., using real-life high school students, most of whom have no previous acting experience. Alex Frost and Eric Deulen play the two killers, who cope with constant taunts at school by becoming lost in their own little world of weapons, violent video games, homosexual longings and neo-Nazi fantasies. The two teens seem sanest and happiest while meticulously assembling and maintaining their extensive arsenal of guns, knives and explosive devices.
There’s been some debate about the meaning of the film’s title. Some say it refers to the kinds of big obvious subjects in the room that nobody wants to address. Others say it’s an allusion to the parable of the three blind men who describe different parts of the same animal. Both meanings make sense, as Elephant tries to force people to think once again about the complex and confusing realities of teen life that the Columbine killings exposed, but which most of us tried to forget about as soon as we could.
Elephant is far from the only pop culture product that attempts to dissect Columbine and ascertain its deeper meanings. Another film called Zero Day covered similar territory; and Michael Moore’s acclaimed documentary, Bowling for Columbine, tried to expose the darkness at the heart of America’s gun culture the same way his Roger and Me looked at uncaring corporate CEOs. There also has been a flood of Columbine-inspired novels about troubled boys, including DBC Pierre’s award-winning Vernon God Little, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin and Jim Shepard’s Project X. Don’t forget Hey, Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland, who drew raves a few years back with books such as Generation X and Life after God.
Thirteen
It’s not just fears of getting gunned down that unsettle teens these days. Young girls have their own problems to face, including persistent worries about whether they’re attractive enough and accommodating enough to please the self-centered, sex-obsessed boys who flit in and out of their lives. The struggles of teen girls are captured with a shocking intensity in Thirteen, which is one of the most powerful and disturbing films of recent years. Many Christians struggle with whether or not they should see R-rated movies featuring sex (straight and gay), drug use, self-inflicted violence and theft; but even though Thirteen contains all this and more, it’s a film that people who work with teens ought to see and discuss.
Tricia MacLeod, a Young Life staffer in San Francisco, described the film as “A Letter to Mom and Dad.” In her review of the film, she described its disturbing power:
Dear Mom and Dad:
I’m shoplifting, stealing wallets, doing drugs, giving blow jobs to guys, kissing girls, piercing stuff, failing school and lying to everyone about everything. Can I tell you? I desperately want you to care about me. I desperately want to be cool. More than anything, I want the pain to go away.
Signed,
Your 13-year-old-daughter
Based on the real-life struggles of co-star Nikki Reed, who wrote the basic script when she was 13, the film features Evan Rachel Wood (from TV’s “Once and Again”) as the good girl whose hunger for love and acceptance leads her down the kinds of dark alleys that most parents would rather not know about, but which are the reality for all too many of today’s teens.
The film also features Holly Hunter as the hippie-esque single mom who is so preoccupied with keeping her own life from spinning out of control that she lacks the focus or emotional energy to address her daughter’s unspoken pleas for help. The real star of Thirteen is first-time director Catherine Hardwicke, who originally suggested that Reed begin writing a script as a way to deal with her own adolescent struggles.
Hardwicke made the film for $1.5 million, which is probably less than Peter Jackson spent on special effects for Gollum.
“Cinematherapy”
When Thirteen was released last year, Hardwicke called it “cinematherapy” and suggested that mothers see it with their daughters. “I wanted something that could connect to kids and moms so they would realize they were not alone,” she said. “I wanted to spark debate.” She succeeded, and the DVD version of the film features a commentary with Hardwicke and her two young actors that tells a story almost as fascinating as the one that’s portrayed on screen.
Stories of fallen females are as old as story itself, and they’ve been the inspiration for classic novels from Zola’s Madame Bovary to Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. More recently there have been truckloads of exploitive girls-gone-bad videos and movies that pretend to pity their characters while using them for sexual titillation.
There’s little sexual seduction in Thirteen. While there’s plenty of flirtation and no shortage of images of exposed adolescent abdomens, the few sexual scenes are more suggestive than they are explicit. The images of adolescent groping that light up the screen are no more inviting than the scenes that show Wood slicing her own wrists. Instead of inspiring lust, the film evokes a sense of rage, sorrow and disgust, which is just what the makers of this powerful film wanted.
