Bully is an
issue-oriented documentary, and for that reason you feel like a cad if you try
to apply critical analysis to it as a work of art. Some can do it.
There are such things as good critics. I’m not one of them, though, so let me warn you if you’re
looking for a reason to see or avoid this movie, I’m not going to be
helpful. I’m anxious to get to the
chase and discuss the content.
I’ll start there and maybe weave some comment in here and there about
the film itself.
It’s hard for me to look at the lives of people living in
Mississippi and Alabama and Oklahoma and any other place in the Bible
Belt. I always want to shout at
people. “Hey, you guys in
there. You with brains and
sensitivity and insight and an appreciation of ideas and a respect for
diversity. Get on anything that
moves. Plane, train, donkey
cart. Get out of there. Get to civilization.”
I know – you don’t really need to tell me – that there are
good reasons for staying in places like the three I mentioned. Friends, family, childhood
memories. Maybe even good food and
fresh air. Whatever. I also don’t need to be reminded that
it’s not only places where people attend the Church of St. Stupid where kids
are bullied and life is tough. And
I do understand – really I do – that there are people with big hearts and
intelligence and generosity everywhere.
Just because it’s easier for me to find it here where I live than in
certain other places I’ve been in this country, doesn’t mean we need to shut
those places down (even if we could.)
But I was distracted in this tale of bullying by the fact
the people were by and large not well-educated people, living in cultures where
the pressure to conform to the village standards was high. My guess is that may be precisely why
filmmaker Lee Hirsch chose these particular places to tell the bullying
story. He went where the bullying
was likely to be most intense.
And maybe his point was the other side of the coin than the one I
focused on at first. People
missing their front teeth with tattoos on their necks also cry when their
children hang themselves in the closet.
And they also get good at organizing town meetings to take action when
the school board and the mayor and the sheriff fail to be of any use. Done right, asking people to “get
theirselves off their butts” can be a powerful call to action.
Two of the stories spoke most directly to me. One was of a boy named Alex. He had been born prematurely and his
face was slightly off. Kids called
him “Fishface.” His response to
the bullying was to withdraw and his parents didn’t know how to draw him
out. Only when the filmmakers
decided they had to show his parents what they had filmed on the schoolbus did
they jump into action. The other
was of a girl named Ja’Meya. Things
got so bad for her that she got hold of her mother’s gun and took it on the bus
and threatened the bullies with it.
For which she was arrested for forty felony counts of kidnapping (40
kids on the bus, you see), a sentence which could have led to hundreds of years
in prison, if they had not realized in the end the kind of pressure she was
under.
A major character in the film is the middle school principle
who thinks she’s doing the right thing by asking a bully and his victim to
shake hands, as if this was a normal fight between equals – and then takes the
victim aside, when he shows a lack of enthusiasm for the handshake, and scolds
him for being “just as bad as him!”
I can’t do justice to the arguments that should flow from
this film, or from the topic of bullying now being called to our attention
bigtime. I’m just glad they’re out
there and want to do my best to keep the topic alive. Solutions are elusive because they lie in the larger context
of social values and how people learn to behave in any given social setting.
One poignant moment in the film was the mother’s question,
“Why is it you can’t control the kids on the school bus! When I was a kid, if you got out of
your seat, the bus driver pulled the bus over and you got hell.”
Now there’s a good question. On the surface, it would appear that our fear of doing
damage to kids by coming down on them with too much authority and control has
led us to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. We have to find a way to bring balance
back into child-rearing, if that’s the case.
Others will no doubt explain this violence away by pointing
to violence on television, by the presence everywhere of guns, by the
narcissistic culture we have created where people routinely sing their own
praises, because we’ve come to believe you have to make princes and princesses
out of your children. All of these
amateur psychology explanations
will have truth, no doubt. And
possibly if we put them all together and build a program on them we can make a
dent in to problem of bullying.
Something else nagged at me as I was watching this
film. It was bad enough that there
was no adult supervision on the schoolbusses, but the kids knew they were being
filmed and they bullied anyway.
And then, when it was reported, they denied it. I don’t know what conclusions to draw
from this other than that kids are so inured to cameras and media and public
exposure they have totally unplugged their brains on the issue.
This, obviously, points out how difficult it is to get a
handle on the problem. How do you
shame kids who have no fear of being exposed? Or – if you don’t like the idea of shaming kids – how do you
make them recognize the ethical gap in their behavior? How do you get them to the Golden Rule?
As with everything wrong with the world, from war to the
pettiest of local injustices, you can’t be expected to take it seriously if it
doesn’t affect you directly.
But you can go out and have a look at an issue from time to
time – the environment, the political and economic devastation in this country,
whatever. Bullying has moved front
and center in my life suddenly, so this story has come home.
I urge you to have a look at the film if it comes to your
area – it doesn’t have wide distribution yet. And to look at as many of the “It Gets Better” videos you
can find time and energy for.
And then spout off.
This is a tough issue. It
needs lots of suggestions, from people of all backgrounds and experiences.
Join in. You
might do some kid a very big favor.
1 comment:
Alan, you are an outstanding critic.
And you've made me now very much want to see a film that I think may not reach my benighted area of the country. Thank goodness for the internet, though. Surely I can see it online at some point.
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