Running Time: 1 hour, 39 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Lee Hirsch
Quick Impressions:
While watching this movie, three things jumped out at me:
1) Seriously? This was at one time rated R? What exactly did they remove to argue the MPAA down to the PG-13 rating? Because of its high-profile struggle to avoid the R-rating, Bully makes a much better case that the ratings system needs an overhaul than the manipulative (though enjoyable) This Film is Not Yet Rated ever did. Bully shows kids having a typical day at school. So people under eighteen can’t handle watching documentary footage about themselves during a typical day? Perhaps the MPAA’s (copious) energies would be better spent by following children to school and censoring the objectionable behavior of their peers. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people commit suicide because of what others say to them in real life, not how many times an actor on a screen repeats a certain four-letter word.
I’m not much of a rebel. I work within the system no matter how stupid the system can be (and it can be). But seriously, if school children’s reality is rated R and deemed unacceptable for people under 18, then the ratings system is out of touch with the culture of the country. That’s the only conclusion possible. Grindhouse, Kick-Ass, and The King’s Speech all having the same rating is funny, but Bully fighting for a PG-13 is just sad.
2) That assistant principal (or principal or whoever she is)! She knows she’s being filmed (or at least watched). She’s on her best behavior. Man, I sure hope she signed some release ahead of time and never watched the finished film before giving her approval to appear in it because if she thinks she comes across well in this movie, there is no hope. I left that open-ended and absolute for a reason. That woman gives me chills. She should star in her own horror movie. (Maybe the MPAA gave Bully an R because the “evil witch” was scarier than Kathy Bates in Misery.)
To be the bigger person, I’ll give the principal the benefit of the doubt and assume she was confused about the genre of the film she’d signed up for. I’d like to ask her, “Did you mistake Lee Hirsch for Roman Polanski?” But to do that, I’d have to be in the same room with the woman, and I don’t think I’m quite that brave. What if she makes me shake her hand? If I don’t do it, I’ll be just as bad as she is! There will be no escape!
3) I think if you’re a minority student who runs afoul of an obviously racist law official in a small town in the middle of nowhere, avoiding serious criminal charges is probably easier if you have a documentary camera crew following you around. Now maybe Ja’Maya would have gotten off anyway (I mean, stranger things have happened. She was innocent), but I’m glad her fate wasn’t left in the hands of that surly man explaining the reasoning behind the charges against her. (Was he the sheriff or a prosecutor?) As I watched his reactions to the school bus video, I initially thought the guy was very racist, but when he began to speak, I gradually realized that he was actually out of touch with all humanity. Certainly, he’s never been bullied.
The Good:
This would be a wonderful film for classroom use. It raises awareness of an issue actually, immediately relevant to the lives of school children. At times, the film feels sort of light—like it skims over the topic instead of delving into it—but examples of bullying generated by students watching the film would be more interesting and more useful, anyway.
Bully also does a good job of humanizing the victims. Empathy doesn’t always kick in immediately. Some kids definitely need a push in the right direction, and I think we all grow more compassionate with age, experience, and greater self-awareness. As obvious as it seems, some young people may not realize how much bullying hurts victims. Seeing something from a fresh point of view never hurts.
The film feels pretty real, too. My husband, who spent a large portion of his childhood in a small town in Oklahoma, said it the whole thing seemed just like school as he remembered it. Ironically at dinner just before the movie, we had talked about his stubbornness. The more people push him, the more defiant he becomes. He will succeed doing things his own way, even if it means walking through a mountain. He’ll do it the hard way just to show the people trying to coerce him onto another path. After the movie, he reasoned, “Maybe I feel that way because I was bullied so much in school.” He identified with the stories in Bully and found the whole thing painfully authentic.
The movie also has a great message. Bullying must stop. The only way to make a change is one person at a time. Don’t bully. If you are bullied, speak up. And—most importantly—if you see someone being bullied, do something about it. Having the courage to stand up for someone else can make a huge difference. If the community will not tolerate bullies, bullies will go elsewhere.
The Bad:
I feel like this section ought to be called, “the limitations.” I don’t disagree with the filmmakers’ goals of giving a voice to the oppressed and bringing bullying in schools to an end. But I have two types of issues with the cinematic results.
First, I want to talk about Bully’s shortcomings as a movie. I’m not sure that the footage we saw was as effective as what we could have seen. Early on, we’re given the premise: Children are a gift, and (good) parents cherish them and find them special. But then they go to school where not everyone loves them. Persistent bullying—whether verbal abuse or physical harassment—can cause a person’s self-esteem to plummet. When the pressure becomes too great (and nobody at school intervenes to stop the bullying), some victims kill themselves.
Okay. All of that is genuinely sad—many of the parents tortured recollections are painful to watch; I spent most of the movie with tears in my eyes—but that’s really all that the movie has to say. Bullying is bad. Children committing suicide is sad. This must be someone’s fault. There must be someone to blame. We must do something.
I wish we had seen more evidence of bullying. (I also wish we would have known more about how the scenes of Alex being bullied on the bus were captured. Where was the hidden camera?) We saw Alex getting picked on while riding the bus, but we didn’t see much more than that.
Most of the “juiciest” bullying was recounted, not shown to us first hand.
Kelby, the lesbian teen with a good support system told stories about being bullied not only by students, but by teachers and administrators, as well. I wish some of that had been caught on tape. I’m not saying I don’t believe her. I certainly do, but the movie would have been more interesting if that material had been included.
We’re asked to take far too much on faith. I’m not saying that I don’t believe the subjects, but far too much of the movie’s relatively short runtime is devoted to shots of kids walking around rural Oklahoma talking.
And then when we learn that a sixth grader killed himself, we’re immediately told that school administrators said he wasn’t being bullied. Then his friend tells us that actually some people had picked on him, and that the last time he saw him, he was crying. Well…I don’t mean to insult the families or friends involved, but sadness before suicide seems almost a given.
How do we really know why this boy committed suicide? People commit suicide for many reasons. Not everyone who is bullied commits suicide, and surely not every suicide victim who endured some form of bullying committed suicide solely for that reason.
Here the shortcomings of the movie blend into the ideological problems of the project. Despite the fact that concerned (and grieving) parents at the town hall meeting want a scapegoat, bullying really is a complex issue, not simply solved.
What are teachers supposed to do? Imagine someone who teaches because he loves math. Yes, it is that person’s responsibility to keep order in the classroom, but can he help what’s done on the playground, in the bathroom, on the school bus?
Administrators should do more, but sometimes they are a part of the problem. Sometimes the local culture accepts and even prizes bullying. Sometimes, too (like the kid called into the office at the end), children bully to avoid being bullied themselves.
From my point of view, the biggest problem is that bullying is too big of a catch-all term. A teacher who shares homophobic views in front of a gay student may have different motivations than a teen who shoves someone in the bathroom, or a kid who calls another kid names because he “looks weird” and/or “creepy.” Granted all of these people are jerks, but they may be different kinds of jerks. Some bullies are probably motivated by fear. Some may think they’re doing something necessary or being helpful. Some are sociopaths or sadists. Some are victims of abuse themselves, acting out in the only way they know how.
A close friend of mine recounted a story about how at her high school, a guy in drama was severely beaten for being gay on the advice of a community youth minister who thought attacking homosexuals would put the fear of God in them and inspire them to choose heterosexuality. In a bizarre twist, the drama student beaten for being gay was actually straight, but the youth group members didn’t know that because none of them was in drama. This situation seems pretty complicated to me, and that’s the thing. When it comes to bullying, every situation is complicated. The victims have feelings. The bullies have motivations (often complex motivations that they themselves likely do not understand). Sometimes a whole community is involved. But every case is different. So like “cancer,” “schizophrenia,” or “the Soviet Union,” bullying is fine as a jumping off point, but it’s a term that can mean any number of different things when examined more closely.
As the movie went on, I didn’t see a lot of complexity or development, just lots of rehashing and talking and similar stories. I don’t mean that those stories shouldn’t be heard. I just think the movie should have gone further, pushed harder, delivered more than sad anecdotes. (And as a mother whose child was born at 25 weeks, 5 days, I really wanted to hear more about twenty-six weeker Alex who seemed to have some social developmental delays as well as odd looks. We get to see that Alex is mistreated by others, but we never really learn what makes him tick or possible reasons for some of his issues.)
Best Scene:
It’s hard not to be moved when someone says, “My son will be eleven years old forever.” When all the characters come together to honor the memory of victims of bullying, we suddenly understand how all the stories tie together. This man had many of the best moments in the movie. His earlier speech was also very moving as he sat on the bed and talked about being poor and unimportant politically, adding, “But we loved our son,” while his grief-stricken wife wept on the floor.
Seeing everyone come together, determined to make a change and put a stop to bullying is inspiring. Personally (as someone who probably should have been bullied more than I was), I have found that by the time you get to high school, for every bully there is at least one person who stands up and says, “What’s wrong with you? You shouldn’t treat people like that.” Growing up brings increased empathy or at least better manners. As they mature, most people recognize that someone who seems odd should be helped not ridiculed.
Overall:
When I was in seventh grade, right after spring break, I moved to a new school in a small, isolated, Southern town. For some reason, people got the idea that I was “possessed by thirteen demons.” Teachers even got involved. It was not the greatest time in my life. Of course, some of my chief tormentors didn’t know what an octagon was and pushed a blind girl down a flight of stairs. At the time I couldn’t decide which was worse. I remember wishing that one of these charmers (complacent, smug, and totally unaware of his microscopic world view) would have to move somewhere completely alien to him and start a new school where everything was different. That was all I wanted for him—culture shock, an epiphany, maybe a geometry lesson.
But my “bullying” only went on for a few weeks. If I’d had to live through that for years, I might have brought a gun on the school bus just like Ja’Maya. (And you know, the sad thing is, now all the kids who used to bully her probably say, “I told you that girl was a freak. She tried to kill everybody! That proves it!”)
I don’t know how to stop bullying for good. The problem is a lot bigger than a rowdy school bus. The movie Bully doesn’t have any revolutionary answers, either. But it does, at least, introduce an important topic and provide a jumping off point for a meaningful discussion.