Queer Orientation with Gus Van Sant's Elephant

Abstract

Sexuality, common discourse tells us, constitutes an identity – or an orientation. Unlike the easily reified ‘identity’, however, the latter term can be taken to suggest the intimate enfolding of the erotic within a specific environment, milieu or Umwelt. I explore that possibility in relation to Gus van Sant's Elephant (2003), a film loosely based on the Columbine High School massacre of 20 April 1999. I show that the movie resists the reduction of the American high school to narrative setting. Elephant tells a story that is not about plot, but about place. At two instances in the film, homosexuality is at stake. A student discussion revolves around whether one should presume to be able to recognise sexual orientation from appearances. In another scene, the two murderers-to-be share a fleeting kiss in the shower, prompting one reviewer to conclude, ‘[t]wo boys kiss. And then a school massacre’. While that reading assumes the inevitability of the narrative chronology of post quod erg propter quod, I want to attend to the film's alternative mode of narration, which might be described as immersive, ambient, atmospherical or meteorological. Elephant is so disorienting because it is so queerly orientated to an irreducible ‘timeplace’. Like the weather, Elephant shows us, (homo)sexuality is not one thing. Like the weather, (homo)sexuality is not a thing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹For other pertinent reviews, see Sofair (2006), Amit (2007) and Garry (2004).

²I realise this may sound general and therefore polemical. But the tendency to view temporality as constitutive and space as secondary has a long history in narrative theory. Current approaches often focus on the spaces portrayed in story worlds rather than accept a specific ‘timeplace’ as constitutive for the story as a whole. For a clear overview, see Buchholz and Jahn (2005). Unless one accepts the radically creative power of narrative to produce worlds, narratology risks reverting to, or relying on, a silently enshrined realism.

³For more on the chronotope, see Holquist (2002: 109–116) and Morson and Emerson (1990: 370–374). Morson and Emerson note that the chronotope is what makes narrative possible (1990: 369).

⁴‘Heterotopic’ is frequently used as a simple synonym for ‘marginal’, ‘resistant’, or ‘subversive’. Hetherington soberly defines heterotopias as ‘spaces for alternative ordering’, either for better or worse (Hetherington 1997: xiii). Casarino (2002) catches the ambivalence of the desire that underlies heterotopias: ‘the desire to escape the social while simultaneously representing it, contesting it, inverting it – the desire to exceed the social while simultaneously transforming it’ (28).

⁵Hayles (1990) suggests an affinity between chaos theory and poststructuralism (xiii). For an account of the ‘cultural life’ of chaos theory, see Smith and Higgins (2010). For a searing critique of the uptake of chaos theory in literary and cultural theory, see Matheson and Kirchhoff (1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Murat Aydemir

Murat Aydemir is Associate Professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and the co-editor of Migratory Settings: Transnational Perspectives on Place (Brill/Rodopi, 2008) and Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (Brill/Rodopi, 2011).