Bully: Film Review
Few films will make you feel as hopeless and yet tentatively hopeful as Bully, the heartbreaking new documentary from Emmy winner Lee Hirsch. Following the stories of not only the bullied but the bullies themselves (and the frankly clueless adults who enable them), the film goes beyond what most documentaries are supposed to do: it does not simply tell the stories of the people involved – it actually offers a solution, albeit through pure implication. The solution, the cure (if you will), begins within and then grows to power in community. If Kindness can kill, let it slay cruelty, the film says, especially cruelty against children. By children.
The film tells the stories of several children, but the most affecting are those of the families whose children were bullied so mercilessly that they took their own lives. Certainly, there can be nothing worse than to watch a parent bury her or his own child. The pain is unimaginable when one considers the reason for suicide in instances of bullying, and this the film makes sure to hammer home.
One teen, for example, is ostracized because she comes out as a lesbian, even after having been lauded by her tormentors as a star athlete in the past. Another boy named Alex is tormented daily on the bus by his classmates – and we’re never entirely sure why.
That perhaps is the biggest question: why? What is it about children and teens that makes them think it is permissible to taunt and tease and torment another person whose only offense is that they are different to only the most minuscule degree? Why haven’t they learned that most basic lesson that one of Life’s biggest lessons is that differences are worth celebrating?
Part of the answer, the film hints, lies within the adults who orient the world, both at school and at home. You won’t be alone in feeling outrage at the assistant principal who simply refuses to acknowledge that the bullies in her school are compelling other students to take their own lives. She calls them “angels”, telling anyone who asks (including the parents of tormented children) that there’s nothing she can do since no problem exists.
If these are the stewards charged with protecting our children, may they learn to protect themselves. If nothing else, I suspect that the film will make adults in the audience looks at themselves in the full light of their ignorance. I’ll even go a step further and say that the film should be mandatory viewing in every school. Will America be brave enough to look bullying in the face?
