Official Mass Shooter Thread

[Rev. Rye]

Looking at Biden saying of gun violence “it has to stop,” I am reminded of Alan Clarke’s Elephant.





While it seems to be just a cavalcade of murders, it’s technically about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. There’s a long and complicated history behind what led to all that bloodshed in Belfast, and while most people making a film about the Troubles would have some characters fighting for either side and ultimately finding some way to pick a side, even if it’s just by following a character who’s either Catholic or Protestant and giving more weight to one side of the conflict, Clarke strips all of that cultural context away and shows it for what it ultimately is: a senseless bloodbath. We know nothing about either the killer or the victim in any of these vignettes. There’s almost no dialogue, and most of the scenes end with a long shot of the victim’s bloody corpse. The only real way we’d know what was even causing these murders was that we’re told that these are all based on actual cases from Belfast. 

Clarke had a reputation for making extremely dark and controversial films for TV, and one of his contemporaries said this about the film:
"I remember lying in bed, watching it, thinking, 'Stop, Alan, you can't keep doing this.' And the cumulative effect is that you say, 'It's got to stop. The killing has got to stop.' Instinctively, without an intellectual process, it becomes a gut reaction."

And this becomes more relevant than ever, with an epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings and a major party that sees this and doesn’t seem to get what the problem is.