Bully (2012)

VERDICT:
9/10 Invisible Scars

Makes you proud that this movie exists, makes you appalled at the ugliness that inspired it.

Bully is a documentary that follows a handful of families and teens across America that are, and have been, the target of bullying. It’s as simple and unfortunate as that.

If you’ve ever been to school, you know what it looks like. Maybe you were the bully, maybe you were the victim, maybe you watched it happen, or maybe you tried to break it up. Whatever the part, we’ve all had a role, and for the longest time it was accepted as the norm. Kids will be kids, whatcha gonna do? And then that all started to change. I don’t know if it was Tyler Clementi or one of the many others who decided that death sounded better than another day of torment, but we started treating bullying with the gravity it deserves. But movement or no movement, it seems like there isn’t a month that goes by without a new story of a teenage suicide or teenage shooting spree that wasn’t in some way fueled by bullying.

Needless to say, it was only a matter of time before this movie got made.

Not too long ago, I found myself talking about this movie with my mom and my wife. The more we talked, the conversation found its way to the big question: “Were you ever bullied in school?” When I think about my days as a student, my memories are always fond. I’ve always considered myself lucky in that respect. I probably could have done better on the grades, but I had a great social life, great friends, and I prided myself on never pigeonholing myself into a clique. But by the same token, I vividly remember those occasional bad days, the ones where I felt like the butt of every joke just for showing up that morning, that left me like a ball of rage at the end of the day. I still remember the kids who I made a point to avoid because they made life suck when I couldn’t, and you know the kids I’m talking about. There are some names that people just won’t give their kids, and that’s not ’cause they don’t like the names, it’s because of the people they associate with them. With the exception of Adolf and Anus, I’d say bullies are to blame for those names on the blacklist.

I’m not the only one who remembers these things. When someone hurts you or makes you feel worthless, how couldn’t you remember that?

For instance, the subjects of Bully. It revolves around a scrawny kid whose “friends” stab and punch him on the daily, a gay girl from the Bible Belt whose classmates and teachers reminder her that she’s a “fag,” a girl who got so fed up with the daily abuse that she brought a gun to school, two parents who found their son hanging in his closet, and two parents whose 11-year-old boy took his own life with a gun. They all remember, and for them to be part of this is a textbook definition of bravery. For these kids to go on camera and share their stories, for these parents to do the same in the wake of the world-shattering tragedies they’ve endured, for Lee Hirsch to get out there and make this movie at a time when the world really needs it – that doesn’t come easy.

For these kids especially, to have cameras following them around for a year to catch their anguish on film, it almost seems like an invitation for even more bullying. You hope that it works as a mirror for the kids who’ve made make them a target, but you can’t help but wonder about the off-screen backlash once those same kids see this in theaters. Although as much as we can wonder, I can’t even start to imagine what life must be like for these individuals, and the least we can all do is listen.

But as important as their stories are, I still have this feeling that some people might pass on Bully because it’s already all been said. Bullying is a problem, it needs to stop, what else is there to tell? But that’s just the thing: it’s still a problem, it’s still going on, and this is a story that needs to keep being told until the problem is fixed. Bully might not tell you things you didn’t already know about bullying, but what it does do is put a face to its victims, celebrates those who are working to fix it, and holds accountable those who allow it to fester. It’s one thing to hear about a teen’s suicide, it’s another thing entirely to hear it from his father.

So when you watch a school official “resolve” a bullying situation with a half-assed handshake or put a concerned parent’s mind at ease by saying, “You’ll just have to trust that we’ll do something about this” before sending them on their merry way, it’ll make your blood boil. As someone who plans on being a father himself, the idea of putting them on that bus and sending them off to a school like that scares the living daylights out of me. It’s tough to watch these kids get picked on, but it pales in comparison to the administrators. Imagine a cop standing by while someone got mugged in front of them. That’s what this is like. Rather than address the problem and try to find a way to fix it, they pretend that the problem doesn’t even exist. And unless we’re talking about the troll under your bed, no problem has ever been fixed by pretending it didn’t exist.

I was one of the few in junior high who broke up the fights instead of egged them on, but I still could have been nicer, we can always afford to be nicer. ‘Cause at the end of the day, I still remember the kids that I gave a hard time to, and I still feel like shit about it. So why is it so-freaking-hard to be nice, to do the right thing even if it’s unpopular? What ever happened to The Golden Rule? It’s a lot more understandable when you’re dealing with kids because they can be cruel for even the most inane of reasons, but the adults are just as much to blame.

While the final scenes center on the efforts being made to stop bullying, I do still wish there was more of a focus on what we can all do as parents, as educators, as kids. Granted, there’s no silver bullet to get the bullies to stop bullying and there’s no one thing you can point to as the cause, but the attitude of “There’s only so much that can be done” has only served to foster an epidemic. There is a great deal of incompetency and inaction on display here, and as important as that is to a diagnosis, this could have been an even better venue than it was to start working on the cure.

If someone looks different, if someone’s gay, if someone doesn’t have nice clothes, so what? No one should have to look back on their childhood and think of the hell they had to endure just for being born. To be deprived of a college scholarship because of your sexual orientation, to be deprived of an education due to a group of punks? That crap is just unacceptable and there is no shortage of things we can all do to help.

If you don’t get what the big deal is, I’m guessing you were the bully or your head’s too far up your ass to hear the question because it boggles the mind that a dead child is what got people to address the issue. But if there’s any one reason I gave this movie a 9, it’s the fact that it takes a low point in our history as a people and uses it as a catalyst for change. I mean, bullying has been around forever, and that in itself is a huge reason why no one’s ever done anything about it. But just like the tag line says, it is about damn time we took a stand. These are the kinds of movies that alter our lives, that future generations are going to look back on and be proud of us for. As you can imagine, this is a tough movie to watch, but that tends to come with the territory with required viewings.