With Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park hitting the French screens on October 17, here’s a look back at the importance of news in brief and police blotters for this great American filmmaker.

In New Hampshire, an ambitious newscaster charms a high school student so that he will murder her husband, who she feels is holding back her career. A janitor in a Boston university is a mathematical genius. A basketball player in the Bronx is working towards a Pulitzer Prize. A young woman on the run is murdered in a shower in her motel room. Two boys get lost in a California desert and kill each other; two others, who are armed, open fire on their classmates at a Columbine high school. A famous singer with the allure of a lumberjack commits suicide in his backyard shed in a Seattle suburb. A teenager is involved in the accidental death of a security guard whose body is found in two pieces, severed by a train traveling along Paranoid Park, Portland’s skateboard park.
These morbid or bizarre plot summaries taken from Gus Van Sant’s filmography could just as easily pass for police blotters in a newspaper. The American filmmaker has always depended on news items in varying degrees, even if the examples mentioned above come from very different sources: from screenplays written by Buck Henry (To Die For), Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (Good Will Hunting) or Casey Affleck (Gerry), a novel (Blake Nelson’s Paranoid Park), a film (Hitchcock’s Psycho) or real life (the Columbine massacre in Elephant and the death of Kurt Cobain in Last Days).

A manufactured event

A police blotter, in and of itself, does not prejudge the authenticity of an event. It can be corrected, refuted or elucidated; newspapers can relate a lie or completely manufacture a story. Whether it comes from a novel or a newspaper is secondary. News in brief is a category of information, a short story that makes ordinary people captive of an insignificant fate. This little narrative form has sometimes been elevated to a literary level (as in Les Nouvelles en trois lignes, published by the journalist and art critic Félix Fénéon at the turn of the 20th century).

With Van Sant, news in brief is more than a mere source of inspiration; it is a form with which his films share a deep affinity. To Die For, for example, linked the all-consuming ambition of a weather forecaster (Nicole Kidman) and a rumor that first spread among her friends and acquaintances, then to the newspapers, and that eventually led to her conviction, claiming that she had caused the death of her overly possessive, stay-home husband (Matt Dillon). Within the Hollywood system, Gus Van Sant, like Fritz Lang, is interested in the mechanics of media and uses news items to depict a growing rumor, taking shape, and the power of the information that manufactures the event.

An Inexplicable Death

The case of Elephant is different: Gus Van Sant stays away from the media, like Blake’s friends in Last Days, who run from the house before the journalists arrive in order to spread news of the death of the renowned singer Kurt Cobain. Van Sant recounts the Columbine news story from the inside. But by slowing down the movement of the high school students, by showing how impervious they were to the various signs, especially audible ones, that alert us to the massacre, he incorporates the end of the tragedy from the outset: in just two or three sentences, we understand that a guy is racing towards his death. But this calamity has no precise significance and immediately thwarts any search for meaning. Van Sant never tries to explain the causes of the tragedy, but rather dangles them before us to show their inherent absurdity. When he shows the killers playing videos before executing their plan, he is not trying to say that they were subject to a negative influence; he is putting the hallways of the game and those of the high school on the same level, like unreal spaces where the same emotions circulate. Van Sant does not avoid the media per se, but rather the causality that they want to find at all costs to explain the event.

Although it is based on a novel, Paranoid Park follows a similar path. A teenager accidentally commits a crime. In his high school, he speaks to detectives, but with the same mask of incomprehension he dons everywhere else – perhaps he has not yet realized his responsibility in the case. Is it still a misdeed when the death is absurd and involuntary? In any case, for Gus Van Sant, the problem lies elsewhere: instead, it concerns opening up the bubble where most American youth live and exposing them to the outside world. The death is not so much a trigger for guilt feelings as it is an opening to the outside, or rather to all sorts of outsides: the death of the police officer as well as the war in Iraq. It is a way to go beyond the mere news item, and beyond the movies of the 90’s which often made television a vicious machine that propelled people to stardom while also ensnaring anyone who set foot in their spotlight. Away from television, the world created by Gus Van Sant is all the more disturbing because it no longer has any boundaries.

Antoine Thirion