Bully is a very popular highly rated documentary playing in first run theatres around the country now.
25 years ago a documentary of this type would have been shown to select parent teacher groups or other education/school groups, and it would have been shocking. It would not have been shown in movie theaters along with the movie fare of the day because it wouldn’t have been considered marketable.
But right now bullying, although of course, not new, has become the popular offender that needs our attention and determination to erase it from the social life of schools.
That’s a good thing of course. Identifying the problem is a first step in making changes. But the problem is highly complex and so are the solutions if there are any, and the message of this film is to build advocacy to eliminate bullying.
It is somewhat like a Gay Pride film, or Black is Beautiful, or Germany making anti semitism illegal.
These are important aids to huge problems..and of course we should have all these forces at work..but the problems will still exist.
I saw this film at a 5 pm, a time when the movie theaters don’t have huge crowds. The theatre was packed with high school kids, mostly black kids. I thought it was a class but there were no teachers or leaders so I don’t ‘know.
They were eating pizza, popcorn, candy, and I thought that this was going to be a noisy audience that would ruin the film for me, but it proved to be a very attentive and quiet audience. At the end, these kids all applauded the movie and I was very moved by the appreciative audience.
The film highlights 5 families who have had a child abused by bullying. In two of the families the sons killed themselves, which the parents attribute to bullying. The camera names the town, all small towns, most in the South, and shows some of the physical setup of the town or countryside. Pictures of the school are shown, hallways, school buses, janitors cleaning, children walking the halls, on the playground.
The parents talk about the experiences of their child, and some of the children speak.
Despite the bland scenes of a school or bus or janitor, the narrations of the film are very moving. This builds up to a crescendo at the end when grief stricken parents address large groups of parents about bullying, their losses, and speak emotionally of their commitments to ending bullying. Balloons and T-shirts with mottos to stand up for people,to not allow bullying rally up larger crowds, and a feeling of unity in addressing a societal illness is ignited.
If there is a bad guy in this movie, it is the administration who is portrayed in interviews as avoiding the discussion, and doing nothing..or negating the charge of bullying with statements such as boys will be boys, they have to work it out themselves and I have ridden that bus and the kids are as good as gold ( from a teacher listening to a mother say her child won’t go to school because of fear of riding the bus)
But is is not really a movie about blame. Its a movie that says together we can make an army and lick this problem. together we can get rid of bullying by not tolerating it. There is merit to this and it is a help, but of course only a partial help to the complex problems of angry and unhappy children acting out, and adult acceptance of conditions, the tough journey to adulthood, and myriads of other problems. The vowed commitment doesn’t even start to explore the characteristics of bullying…victims and aggressors. There is no path suggested for learning, observing..just to disallow it.
Almost no attention is paid to very early childhood, home situations and other breeding grounds of bullying and tying the past or indeed the present home to what is going on at school.
There are two small instances of making a connection.
One of the most appealing youngsters serving as narrator of his life is Alex. Alex is a slight boy with perhaps a delicate…or a studious look about him. A jock he is not He doesn’t have a movie star face. He is full lipped, with prominent teeth, and he came across to me as the most lovable child. He says his tormentors call him fish face, and he feels very bad about this. He is very articulate, introduces you to his family and tells what happens on the bus and in school. At one point, the mother happens to say that he was born at 26 weeks, and a picture is shown of a tiny preemie monitored with tubes to keep him alive. Maybe it was actually a picture of Alex. We don’t know. She says she was told that he wouldn’t live very long, but of course he did, and she regards him as her miracle baby. And that is all that is said of his early life.
Another father who talks throughout the film eloquently of his son who killed himself says that his son was a cheery talkative youngster, and then he said something happened. He became very quiet..something was different and that was the end of that reverie. He explored it no more. So it is not a movie in depth but it serves its purpose very well, in organizing feeling and anger and energy to “fight” bullying. It is something like “fighting drugs”, used by politicians as a promise of what they will do. I could never understand that expression, but I am certainly aware of the destructiveness of drugs.
There is a high school girl who is lesbian and besides being bullied was refused admittance to various places. Luckily this child seemed to have a supportive family but classmates were not.
Another mother talks of the horror of the morning her family woke up to walk past the open bedroom door and open closet door where they saw their young son/brother hanging. She talks from the closet where she shows they removed the shelf. But her narration is of this terrible morning and their grief..and not of the dead boy. It seems accepted that bullying led him to this. Maybe it did, but she makes no mention of the fragility he may have been suffering.
Another highlighted child is a girl who is in jail because she pointed a loaded gun at her aggressor on the school bus. The gun was taken from her, and luckily no shots were fired, but this child is in jail with enough charges, an officer tells us to keep her in jail for most of her adult life.
In one scene a teacher is asking a boy why he hit another on the bus. the child says easily and in a matter of fact fashion…he made me mad so I just let him have it. He certainly seemed to have no anxiety telling the teacher nor did he seem to have any need of trying to deny it or distort it. Kids get mad…even the ones who are bullied get mad…but there is no discussion about the problems of anger, or hero worship of the strong & powerful..or fear of the victim and onlookers and other considerations that need to part of the observation when trying to make resolutions of bullying problems..
It seems to me materials that show what has happened in such programs as Stuart Twemlow’s work in Jamaica and Mark Smaller’s work in Chicago and also many other communities that have analytically oriented programs should be reading material for school administrators who are pictured here as not having a clue.
The adolescent audience seemed to leave the theatre energized and laughing and relieved. I left a little depressed. All the energy this movie is trying to encapsulate is a necessary and good thing, but some of the work done in psychoanalysis would be so beneficial and also have some good practical advice. The need is so enormous and psychoanalytic insight into these problems could be life saving…and possibly help change the helplessness that is felt.
I would like to see a movie of this caliber made of the community experiences of some of our psychoanalytic programs. I believe that would be inspiring.
Selma Duckler