6 - Re-enactment, Proxies and the Facing Image

Summary

‘Loosely based’ on the Columbine massacre – almost every text on Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) starts with this. Critics and commentators appear to unanimously share the contention that, despite being inspired by the real massacre, the film also takes a path of its own, or at least allows itself more freedom in the path it takes in narrating the event. But what does it exactly mean to say that a fictional film is loosely based on a real event? What is considered loose in such a description? And what fictionality and reality are at stake when we point out looseness as what characterises the connection? Being based loosely on a real event is less a matter of emphasising the ‘looseness’ of a connection than an indication of the existence and persistence of the connection despite all the looseness. It is not that first there is a connection and only then a loosening takes place as an extension, modification or failure of the connection. On the contrary, the connection is that which is posited by the looseness. It is what persists and is thus reaffirmed despite the originary looseness. In addition, the latter, if taken in a broad sense, fails to add anything meaningful to the fiction–reality connection. It is so true that it fails to make any sense. Even if we accept the suspicious assumption that there exists something called ‘reality’ as an independent, pre-existing entity, a fictional film that is based on real events cannot be identical to the reality it claims to portray. It is a re-presentation and, by extension, a fictionalisation. The question of fiction–reality connection is better formulated as a matter of adequation, rather than identity. Adequation is a making adequate – making stories, images and aesthetic devices and decisions adequate to the reality that the film represents. Adequation is an implicit acknowledgement of a gap, of a looseness that should be bridged, but only through the work of bridging and making-adequate.

Adequation sees its success in an annihilation of looseness, itself a matter of wishful thinking than of factuality. By contrast, being loosely based on a real event, as that which seems to characterise Elephant's cinematic take on the shootings, implies a deliberate failure in making adequate.