Bully (2011)

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courtesy of the400club.org

Kyle: "If this video needs to be seen by everyone, why don’t you put it on the Internet for free?"
Stan: (no answer)

(South Park episode "Butterballs," which discusses the bullying epidemic)

I graduated with only about 170 people, about the average class size in my high school. At some point, a girl from our school went on Sally Jessie Raphael's talk show to discuss how she was bullied every day. Now, St. Marys, PA is not exactly a hot bed of media activity, so I have no clue how she managed to get on the show; I didn't even know her. But, what fascinated me was the response in my hometown. People didn't say "poor her" or "I didn't know this was happening." They essentially said "what a crybaby." I won't say I wasn't one of them.

Lee Hirsch's oft-talked about documentary from last year Bully chronicles the lives of a number of children and their families who have been touched by relentless bullying, some who have taken their lives as a result. Hirsch's film is inter-cut between these different kids and families, comparing different levels and types of bullying, showing them in different stages in the process. A few families have lost children. A few of the kids are constant targets. One girl may still be bullied, but has found a support system and people and seems happier (for the most part). One girl is being released from prison after she brought a gun to school (never fired it) as a way to combat these people who tormented her.

It seems that, in the past ten years, bullying has become such a hot topic, based on a rise in teenage suicide and hate crimes. As we move to a world where people are accepted for their differences more and more, we see a sharp rise in violent bullying and response, mostly because of outliers working against the ever-changing system, for whatever reason. Bully does its best to shine a light on the people who deal with this every day, but falls a little short of the catharsis I expected to have after viewing the film.

Hirsch jumps between so many different people and places (all of which are in the southern United States, perhaps just for travel's sake), that every time he starts to get deeper into one of the students' psyches, he breaks concentration by shipping you off to another subject. He works so hard to prove that "bullying affects everyone" that he never gets close enough to any of the characters to reveal a side beyond what's on the surface. Hirsch would have been better served just focusing on one child for the duration of the film. And that child should have been Alex.

Among the "cast," Alex stands out as the most interesting. He gets the most screen time (at least, it feels like it), he seems to be the most inundated with bullying, and has an extremely closed off reaction to his situation. At one point, the "fourth wall" is sort of broken and the filmmakers actually show their footage to the school administrators, for fear of his safety. But, in an unfortunate turn of events, the principal and school board won't do anything, most likely fearing backlash from the perpetrators' families. Alex's reaction to all of this is to mistake his bullies' aggression as playfulness, assuming they are his friends. He won't open up to his parents, never cries when he's being attacked, and rarely shows any emotion at all. Alex is a subject that, if possible, should be diagrammed to the fullest extent as a victim, a case study, and, hopefully, a survivor.

courtesy of jonathanlack.com

While other stories within the film deserve their own time (parents trying to bring awareness after their son killed himself as a result of bullying, a former bully turned "sympathizer" mourning the loss of his friend who also took his own life, etc.), the film ends up feeling like about six or seven unfinished episodes of Dateline or 48 Hours strung together loosely with pieces that only slightly relate to one another. Even so, six separate documentaries about this subject may feel like overkill; you'd just keep retreading the same steps over and over. Either way, too many questions and unfinished business remains with these people, but we never get to know any of them enough to want us to pursue more information about them (except maybe Alex). While the film is a bit scatterbrained and a tad manipulative, it has many interesting aspects to it. But, while the topic is important to explore, showing the bare minimum about 6-8 different families won't have the same impact as diving deeper into one specific child's experience.

While bullying is and will always be an important topic, this film is only opening the door to a house that everyone already has the blueprints for. If you aren't aware of how terrible bullying has become or have at least formed a stance against it, you've been hiding under a rock for the last 20 years or you're just a bad person (yeah...I said it). Unfortunately, Bully can't provide the solutions people need to fix the problem; it can't. All it's doing is shining a brighter light on those kids who are being hurt by it (possibly making them bigger targets) and showing gaps in the schools' efforts to combat bullying that aren't so easily fixed.


I'll admit to being one of those people who always used to think "every kid goes through getting bullied; deal with it and move on." While I haven't moved to the side of "everybody gets a trophy" or "competition is terrible...let's not make anybody feel bad," I understand fully the importance of treating others with respect and kindness, especially now that I have children. We all joke around with one another, but there's a difference between teasing your friends and systematically destroying one person's spirit by never letting up. You''ll never end bullying, but you can hope to teach kids that standing up for yourself and others isn't just throwing a punch when forced into a fight. It's about understanding, relating to one another, and trying to respect everyone else's choices in life.

SHOULD YOU SEE IT: Possibly