If they want to make a movie about bullying, they need to SHOW it! ALL of it!
I agree, David.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2012/04/02/120402crci_cinema_denby?currentPage=allThe Current Cinema
Kids at Risk
by David Denby
April 2, 2012 Is bullying on the rise? The
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children claims that a hundred and sixty thousand kids stay home from school each day out of fear, but hard numbers that would identify a trend are difficult to come by. The
National Center for Education Statistics has documented a rapid rise in recent years in the number of reported incidents of bullying, but that may reflect an increase in reporting rather than in actual incidents. We can’t measure the current rancor against the bullying of fifty or a hundred years ago, and the causes are difficult to pinpoint. Yet many people feel that kid-on-kid malevolence has become a kind of epidemic, given the prevalence of cyber-bullying and, in particular, the unnerving stories of teen-age suicides that have dominated the headlines in recent months.
Lee Hirsch and
Cynthia Lowen, the filmmakers who made the moving documentary
“Bully,” don’t try to answer any questions. They avoid charts and graphs, talking heads and sociology. Their approach is more direct and, perhaps, more effective. They chose as their subjects five youths from different parts of the country. As the movie begins, two of them are dead.
Tyler Long, of
Murray County, Georgia, hanged himself in 2009, when he was seventeen;
Ty Smalley, who lived outside
Oklahoma City, shot himself in 2010, when he was eleven. The boys’ presence, mostly in old home videos, haunts the film. Both had been persistently bullied. We hear about what happened—physical intimidation, some of it severe—from their inconsolable parents, but why the boys were targeted remains a mystery. Hirsch and Lowen, hoping to celebrate their subjects, have rightly created a lyrical work. They film the other kids at home, at school, and at leisure, as they wander in the woods or around railroad yards. At times, the movie becomes a wistful idyll of rural American childhood under threat. Violence hangs in the air.
One of the subjects is
Alex Libby, a twelve-year-old seventh grader at
East Middle School, in
Sioux City, Iowa. Alex was born prematurely, and he has a slightly curved and flattened upper lip. He’ll be considered cool-looking when he’s older (an American
Belmondo), but he doesn’t know that yet, and he has been bullied for his appearance since grade school. The filmmakers embedded themselves at East Middle School for a year, and filmed many children, so as to disguise their real purpose, which was to see how Alex copes with his predicament. He mostly takes it in silence, because he wants to maintain the fiction that his tormentors are his friends. His father tells him to stand up for himself, but some kids are not fighters. Sitting in the back of a school bus, the filmmakers,
using a Canon 5D Mark II, which looks like a still camera, managed to shoot a rubbery little heavyweight beating Alex.
Hirsch and Lowen took the footage to Alex’s parents, and they went, enraged, to the school administrators, who had also watched it. The Libbys come across as loving and alert, as do the parents of the two other kids in the film—
Ja’Meya Jackson, a fourteen-year-old African-American girl in rural
Mississippi, and
Kelby Johnson, in
Tuttle, Oklahoma, who is sixteen years old and openly gay. Ja’Meya’s mother fights for her daughter in the criminal-justice system after Ja’Meya, tired of being called stupid, waved a loaded revolver at kids on her school bus. Kelby’s father says that, once his daughter came out, the kids at her school turned on her, and the town began shunning the entire family. Kelby, it becomes clear, doesn’t want to pick up and go elsewhere—though she has cuts on her wrist, she’s jolly and combative—and her father supports her decision. The school administrators we see, however, cannot be described as alert. (At East Middle School, the vice-principal assures the Libbys that the students on the bus are as “good as gold.”) Their attitude is one variant or another on “Kids will be kids.” Managing huge public institutions, they don’t know how to change the culture they work in.
“Bully” has powerful friends: the
Weinstein Company is distributing it, and celebrities like
Ellen DeGeneres, Justin Bieber, and
Meryl Streep have been talking it up and appearing at screenings. But only a change in popular culture can seriously affect attitudes, and, at the moment, that change is being impeded by an improbable enemy—the
Motion Picture Association of America. The
M.P.A.A.’s rating board counted six “f”-words in the film and gave it an R rating, a decision that has effectively destroyed the possibility that the picture will do any good. Most public schools are not going to sponsor screenings of an R-rated film, no matter how high-minded, and somehow I can’t see bullies demanding that their parents take them to the mall to see “Bully.”
Chris Dodd, the former Connecticut senator who is now the head of the M.P.A.A., has said, “If we change the ruling in this case, I’ll have ten other filmmakers lined up saying they shouldn’t be given the R. And who are we to say why this film should be different than the others?” For starters, the M.P.A.A. could consider the context in which profanity is used. In “Bully,” the most virulent use of it is by a boy who threatens Alex Libby in a particularly obscene way. That child uses the word to frighten and to punish. The rest of the language is just color and punctuation, like most profanity, and few middle schoolers today are likely to be wounded by it.
Katy Butler, a seventeen-year-old high-school junior in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had a finger broken by kids when she was in middle school, began an online petition drive to fight the M.P.A.A.’s rating, which, so far, has more than four hundred thousand signatures. Kids may understand better than their elders what actually threatens them. ♦