Order me up a large portion of “Freedom Fries” because I finally have a reason to hate the goddamn French. Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s 80-minute Calvin Klein commercial about high school violence, won both the prestigious Palme d’Or and Best Director awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The film, which amounts to little more than a public service announcement for NAMBLA, is the first to garner both prizes since the Coen Brother’s Barton Fink did it in 1987, when the festival still clung to slightly more international significance than the British Monarchy. This leads me to the obvious but somehow overlooked realization that a country known for its fascination with Jerry Lewis films and EuroDisney might not be the best choice to be the global barometer for groundbreaking cinematic experimentation. If Vincent Gallo and Clint Eastwood, Van Sant’s competition at Cannes, made worse movies than Elephant, then I must humbly insist that they each be shot in the same thoughtless, too-mindnumbingly-absurd-to-be-gratuitous fashion that permeates the Portland director’s “experimental and challenging” soft-core teen, gay porn.

Huddled amongst the earth-toned, public broadcasting illuminati at the North American premier of Van Sant’s Benneton snuff film (in his hometown of Portland, Oregon), I got that same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I did when my mom caught me in my room wearing nothing but a pair of turquoise pleather chaps and a fake Indian headdress singing the Eagles’ “Hotel California” at the top of my lungs when I was seven.  The “Warhol in flannel” (as Van Sant has affectionately been donned by David Walker, ass-kissing columnist from the filmmaker’s hometown rag Willamette Week) showed up to the event with his own high school marching band. I’m not kidding. A marching band ushers in your Varsity football team, not a film about one of the most horrific events in recent U.S. history. Ironically, when the lights came up, the marching band had become both the least offensive and most memorable part of the evening.

I will say this. The film avoids the trite, the superficial, the ridiculous in that it does not offer the After School Special version of the problem. Teen violence, epidemic or not, is a complex problem that refuses to bow to the half-baked logic of a simplistically binary American consumerism. It is not simply video games. It is not simply violent films or Rap music or Heavy Metal music or junk food. Elephant avoids the all too common trap of mistaking the symptom for the disease. And I also understand the “reading against the text” notion of postmodern art critics who suggest that space in a work, what is not present, is as responsible for the construction of meaning as what is present. But I found myself searching, grasping for something, anything at all, on which to build some sort of concept of what this film was about.

Elephant is an aesthetically masterful collage of shallow and outdated cliches, shot and edited apparently with more care, more genuine vision, than was apparently put into the concept, the writing. Elephant comes complete with pretty and popular bulimic girls, troubled rocker kids with alcoholic dads, an ugly girl who is afraid to take her pants off in gym class and works in the library, and of course, the token African-American kid who, apparently due to the fact that he is used to people shooting at each other, saunters seemingly unaffected through the hallways as if there weren’t rivers of children’s blood and fragments of the principal’s brain filling the gaps in the tread of his $150 shoes. Add a bit of teen homosexuality, absent parents, and a few violent video games and you get a big bubbling pot of too much shit going on. But in spite of the shiny parade of paper-thin characters and inane dialogue, the film is genuinely dull. This might be the most startling criticism of Elephant; namely that it is an allegory of the Columbine shootings that actually manages to bore you.

The premiere was a benefit for Portland’s Outside In, a non-profit agency whose mission it is to advocate for homeless teenagers. I kept repeating this fact, like some sort of Hindu centering chant, every time I felt like rushing the stage and demanding my money either be returned to me at once or used to construct a time machine out of the nearest Delorean in order to give me my two hours back. As it is, almost a week later, I still can’t quite get the taste of CKOne out of my mouth.  The Portland faithful slouched out of the theater, no doubt en route to someplace, anyplace at all, to help them forget the toothache they just paid forty bucks to have mercilessly administered by an artist whose incompetence is only exceeded by his insignificance with this effort. “Well it was beautifully shot,” a few of the dangerously optimistic ones muttered. A pun surprisingly lost on their glassy-eyed, fashionably philanthropic escorts.

Some critics have suggested that the brilliance of the film rises directly out of the filmmaker’s refusal to “offer any sort of explanation for the murderous outbreak, leaving viewers unsure what the director thinks about the images he’s created.”  But is this really necessary? What exactly are we being asked to judge in Elephant? Whether or not we find teen violence, or even gratuitous images of teen violence, appalling? Didn’t we already know this? In the end, it looks an awful lot like a rich guy getting richer by promoting sexually charged, voyeuristically framed images of teen violence. Something he certainly has a right to do, as much a right as I have to suggest that it is neither art nor social commentary. I think Mr. Van Sant along with anyone tempted to defend the merits of his non-statement should take a look at Spike Lee’s Bamboozled to see an example of how a complex and institutionalized problem can be handled in a way that is both challenging and entertaining, all the while refusing to give the audience an easy out. And Spike had pretty people in his film too.

I will resist my own socially-constructed urge here to say things like, “As a gay filmmaker himself, Mr. Van Sant should realize the exponentially devastating effect his images are going to have on the already too fragile constitution of America’s puritanical psyche.” But I will not do it. There is no rational position that would suggest that a person’s sexual preference should necessarily limit the ways in which they depict sexuality in their art. Heterosexuals are not held to this arbitrary standard so I am not suggesting that the gay and lesbian film community be held to it either. Van Sant’s sexual preference aside, I find it gratuitous and appalling to juxtapose images of homosexual sex with those of teens shooting each other in the head. Artists are not responsible for how people respond to their work, but even an anemic sense of community should have alerted the self-proclaimed “aloof and eccentric” director to how, say, people in rural Colorado might respond to the connection made between teen homosexuality and mass murder in this film. Might I suggest that it might lead to much of the same fear and alienation that we can all agree were truly at the heart of events like Columbine? Are homosexual teens now even less able to explore their emerging sexuality in a secure and supported environment for fear that they will be viewed as potential killers? In the end, there’s nothing here that you can’t get from the original Columbine security tapes, unless, of course, you’re a Catholic priest.