PLAY AND KILL - FILM TEENAGE VIOLENCE IN WESTERN AND EASTERN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES: VAN SANT’S ELEPHANT AND FUKASAKU’S BATTLE ROYALE

In spite of all the cultural and social differences that separate the American and Japanese societies and the way these same differences are depicted by these two films, the controversy of the topic is similar in both countries and it jumped from the underground culture and press to the mainstream, showing the growing importance of the subject not only among the audiences but also among scholars all around the world. Both films take place in fictional worlds but they depict real teenagers who play high school students giving an extreme effect of reality, especially of physical violence, involving guns, shots and deaths. In a way, the killers are living their lives as a video game (in Elephant we watch Eric playing a violent video game before the massacre occurs; in Battle Royale the kidnapped teenagers are informed they have to play a game and kill if they want to survive) but there is no conveyed moral message in either film concerning teenage copy cat effects. If Elephant avoids gore scenes and concentrates on faces and bodies, Battle Royale explores these almost as a B-movie, a genre loved by most teenagers. Is the aesthetics of violence inappropriate or the substance of the film comes from its form denying the exogenous motives for social determinism? Draining from significance the violent images can be watched as philosophical allegories of the systemic violence in our societies.