Bully
There’s a moment during the second half of Lee Hirsch’s celebrated documentary, “Bully,” that is enough to make you break down in tears. We’ve just seen as the film’s main subject, 12-year-old Alex, bullied on his school bus– strangled, verbally abused, punched, and stabbed with pencils as the camera watches. Hirsch was so concerned for Alex that he showed the footage to his parents, and school officials. When his mother talks to Alex about what she’s seen, and what it makes him feel, he says, “I guess I don’t really feel anything.” In that moment, Alex is past the point of no return for some people, and indeed, we’ve already seen the consequences of reaching that point for 17-year-old Tyler Long and 11-year-old Ty Smalley, both of who took their lives after enduring years of bullying. Will Alex make the same decision?
If you’ve been following the publicity and controversy surrounding Hirsch’s film, you know that Alex hasn’t, and indeed, he’s in a much better place now than he was during the 2009-2010 school year, when Hirsch filmed him. But when we meet him in “Bully,” his life is painful to watch, as is Kelby’s. She’s a 16-year-old Oklahoma girl who recently came out as gay. A talented basketball player, now she finds herself, and her family, ostracized, even by people who have been friends of the family for years. How bad is it for her? Even her TEACHERS have rubbed salt on her emotional wounds. No one has it worse than 14-year-old Ja’Meya, though, who decided to take action when she had had enough; unfortunately, that meant bringing her mother’s gun onto the bus, leading to multiple felony counts of kidnapping and aggravated assault. (The charges were later dropped, and after a couple of months under psychological watch, Ja’Meya was able to go home.)
I think if you asked a good amount of people, I think they’d admit to being bullied at some point in their life, especially during school. I know I was, although I’ll be the first to admit that it was nothing like what Alex or Ja’Meya or Kelby have gone through. (Although I do remember being called “stupid” by one teacher in 7th grade after I failed three classes. That’s a long story, however, that I’d rather not get into here.) That said, I think most of us are able to brush it off, and move on. Yes, we might have some lingering psychological damage that will make our adult lives difficult at times, but in the end, it didn’t drive us to the brink like it does Tyler and Ty. What is it about bullies NOW that are causing so many children to end their lives?
Unfortunately, “Bully” never really delves into that question, instead just following its subjects, which include Tyler and Ty’s parents, who have since advocated passionately against bullying, as we see how their lives are affected by bullying. In this respect, Hirsch’s film is simply a good documentary, not a great one. A great one would delve beneath the surface of a problem that has been around for as long as many of us can remember, and find out what has gotten so out-of-hand that not a week goes by without another child taking their life as a result of bullying. Just because it isn’t a great documentary, however, that doesn’t mean that “Bully” isn’t an important one– it’s far too emotionally difficult to watch to be anything less. Hopefully, this won’t be the last word on this destructive subject.
