The title is a tribute to the
Alan Clarke,
1989 film for
BBC, also called
Elephant, which reflected on sectarian violence in
Northern Ireland. Van Sant similarly portrays school violence as something unfathomable, not unlike many other disturbing things in the lives of teenagers, which invite convenient explanations but ultimately frustrate analysis.
Van Sant has explained the "elephant" idea in several ways, besides the direct reference to Clarke's earlier work. It is an allusion to the proverbial "
elephant in the living room", a large problem that no one talks about but everyone must find their way around as they go about their daily lives. It also invokes the
Indian parable about the
blind wise men who, unable to grasp the whole, interpret the
elephant only in terms of the part they can comprehend: "An elephant is a tree", said the blind man who grasped the leg; "An elephant is a snake", said the one who touched the trunk; etc. Finally, during the press conference at Cannes, Van Sant mentioned that the creative staff had also experimented with allusions to certain policies and attitudes represented by the
Republican Party, whose party symbol is an elephant.
it was just TERRIBLE!
