I felt for these kids; the poor prematurely-born teen who has a near panic attack on his walk to the school bus on the first day of school, then rides the bus with a bully promising to stab him in the ass with a knife among various and sundry threats on the kid's life. The girl who had to pull out a gun to get the older boys to stop threatening to beat her up and rape her. The salt of the earth kid shown only in remembrances as a hunter who was taught to "be the better man" when bullies picked on him. But I was overwhelmed by a flash flood off other emotions and thoughts, each building on each other in an attempt to make sense of this movie and, even more, figure out what the fuck the directors were trying to do other than shed light on an age-old phenomenon, all bringing me to the final conclusion that bullying is, in fact, as American as apple pie and slavery.
The first vision that kept flashing through my head - all those national Geographic specials that depict a herd of, say, wild elks where they turn on the weakest in the herd. They tear the poor creature apart until and unless he leaves, goes off by himself to live or, more likely, die alone and frightened and wounded. It's a part off Darwinism, thinning the herd to make it stronger. As such it's the key to our evolution as humans.
So how do these pups ever survive? Two ways - they toughen up or their parents stand up for them. And the combination, of course, is that their parents teach them to toughen up.
Like all guys, at points in my life I've been bullied, usually by older kids. I remember getting the shit beaten out of me by a couple teenagers when I was 6 or 7 in Thames Street Park around the corner from where I grew up in Fells Point, Baltimore. I also remember going to a parent-teacher conference with my parents when I noticed the kids on the street corner who pounded me. And I remember my dad slamming on the brakes as he and my mom jumped out to harangue the poor bastards for a good half hour until the punks were white around the gills, fearing for their lives. They never fucked with me again.
I remember my grandfather, a WWII vet and as such not one to take crap off anyone, teaching me how to throw a punch on the heavy bag in my basement. My father getting me a home gym set to work out when I was just in double digits. My mom never backing down from a fight, whether with an administrator or another parent who she felt was fucking over her kids. And from all of this I became tougher, not just physically but also mentally stronger. When I watched BULLY, what struck me most were these parents who ask their son - who, sadly, looks, talks, and acts like the living definition of the word "geek" and not in the cool Hollywood way - if he likes to be bullied. Why he lets other kids do this to him. Never for a second realizing they shouldn't be making him feel guilty about it, they should be showing him how to stand up for himself and, even more, if necessary how to come back against the bullies. I was reminded of a scrawny punk from Jersey who moved to Reseda and was picked on by a bunch of blond rich kids with dirtbikes who liked to dress up as skeletons. Did he just crumple, let them take him over? No. He became the KARATE KID. I never once felt bad for the parents bewailing their dead or bullied kid because all their moaning and pleading aside, there's one simple fact - they didn't prepare their kids for this harsh, cruel world, to live in a country forged with guns, germs, and steel as Jared Diamond showed us, a country where might makes right is still a chant we use to back up our enforcement of the proliferation of our idea of what's the correct way to live around the world.
I think of the scene where the parents talk to the principal about the kids beating up their kid on the bus and how cowed they get by this frumpy Lane Lynch villain because she holds some sort of official title. They cry and slink away when she says there's just nothing she can do, a couple cowards too weak to keep the powers in the herd from destroying their eldest son.
So the parents didn't teach their kids to be tough and they didn't step in for their kids against the school administration that doesn't care (shocked! the underfunded American schools with their "No Child Left Behind" mandates and the bus driver paid less than 30k a year to drive a bus full of screaming kids to and from school - both of whom, might I add, are not allowed to discipline kids as they used to - don't have the time or energy to protect your kids) and then wonder why these fragile creatures, the raising of whom falls first on their parents, become the targets of angry, tougher kids? How come these parents aren't taken to task more for poorly preparing their kids?
One guy brought up the idea that there would be a much greater hue and cry if the kid who committed suicide was the son of a politician instead of the admittedly simple man he was. But the son of a politician would never commit suicide. Because his parents would have told him to be strong; would have made sure he was strong, that he stood up to bullies, just like his strong, proud mother or father. And if anybody did start fucking with him and he couldn't handle, his parents would step in to squelch it then and there. Sure, perhaps people would listen to them more because of their title but even without it they wouldn't be in political office if they didn't epitomize American fire and refusal to step down. Which is what the other parents lack.
The movie ends with parents organizing rallys against bullying. And they're attended by all the good kids. Know who don't attend those? The bullies. Because they don't care. Because nobody's gonna stop all the rage they have inside themselves. Nobody's gonna protect them from the bullies who await them at home or the mental bullies in their skulls. So what do you do?
A record settlement was just made on behalf of a kid who was permanently disabled by a bully. He'd had the parental support and prescience to put on record a complaint about the bully a few months before it happened. The school had to pay him $4.2 million dollars. Think that's not gonna send shockwaves through the community? Parents bitching, crying, pleading? Who gives a fuck, send them to private school if you got a problem. Can't afford? Fuck yourself. But when you bring up money, every cash-strapped principal and school superintendent'll be pissing their pants. What's sad is this movie, while well-shot and poignant, won't have half the impact of this lawsuit. Because liberal Hollywood can babble on all they want about what's good and right (did BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE stop Florida from passing laws that led George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed 17-year-old?), all that matters is force, whether physical or, increasingly, legal - America, the land of lawsuits.
But don't misconstrue, I'm not blaming the victims. I'm blaming their parents a bit, sure, but I know and will state the bullies are the main problem. And something has to be done about these bullies. But where do they come from? How do they become monsters in this utopian dream of democracy and capitalism? On to the final point. America is a land of bullies.
I'm a bully. I am. I went to high school amongst movers and shakers in Baltimore with tendrils to both D.C. and NYC. I went to college amongst similar on the West Coast and currently live in Hollywood and work in Beverly Hills. I watch arthouse movies and read literature and the Wall Street Journal and admittedly have a negative impression of most of the places depicted in BULLY as backwoods flyover states - as in we fly over them to get to the real places. Our American culture is based upon the aggrandizement of people like me, working intellectual jobs in major metropolises. Look at any and every Hollywood movie.
From the Occupy angle, look at the 1% - Wall Street could be seen as a bully of every day Americans, using their power and size to bend companies, wealth, job markets, hell the whole country to their will. But we see those rich folks with yachts and islands and mansions as gods, great golden idols. Let's admit it, folks - Metropolitan America looks down on the the lesbian-hating bible thumping Okies, always have, and they know it. We make fun of rednecks and families living in trailer parks.
A lot of these families are farmers, rural communities and whatnot. Farmers have been bullied. It's almost impossible to run a sustainable small farm anymore - you either have to sell out to a McDonald's or a supermarket chain or some other mass-market food firm or at least adopt their high-volume (by many accounts reprehensible) approach to raising mass-produced livestock or watch as the ones who give in to the big conglomerates run you out of business. Capitalism has a lot of elements of bullying - Bill Gates bullied plenty of smaller competitors out of the business as he made Microsoft into the neo-monopoly it is. Burton bullies snowboard shops by requiring them to purchase more Burton merchandise every year or risk losing the right to be a Burton dealer. Fraternity hazing is a form of bullying. American imperialism, essentially one of the grandest tenets of our national foreign policy, is international bullying.
Let's look at American history - Europeans first bullied the Indians out of this land, British bullied the Africans into slavery, then Americans bullied the Mexicans out of the West. America's a big bully.
So what's the solution? Yes, we would like to believe we have evolved past all that, that we're no longer a country that awards bullies but that's not true. South Park posited that everybody is a bully and in turn has a bully. For fuck's sake our government has a bully pulpit. So we've got a lot to work against but all other points aside, no child should feel so helpless and beaten down that he or she kills him or herself. It is a tragedy, absolutely and inexcusably.
But like the drug war won't ever be won by using force and law to stop the suppliers (ever heard of the balloon effect?), we gotta start with the bullies' twisted little heads. Wanna know a documentary I want to see? One that follows the bullies home to the fucked up homelife that makes him or her into the schoolyard psychopath preying on the weak and then calls child protective services on the parents and gets the kid in therapy. But this would lead to expensive social services which are already on the chopping block from every Tea-partier and rhetoric-repeating right wing person. And perhaps they're right - we shouldn't be responsible for fixing this person's life. Sorry but we're all responsible for ourselves and so let's give up on the bully. So do we make bullying into a crime? Send these kids to juvie? Jail for manslaughter if they bully a kid into suicide? The national average is about $29k (double that in California) per prisoner. Wouldn't that money be better spent on fixing their heads than caging them up for a year or two? And where do you draw the line - at the ringleader, most likely the most fucked up of them all, or does it extend to the followers who needle the poor victim, maybe send him or her suicide-encouraging Facebook messages?
Alright, so now let's go to the victim side. How do you force parents to teach their kids to fight back? How do you force the parents to fight back? People have a right to be pacifists and, hell, Jesus turned the other cheek. How does a parent even know when and where they should tell their kids to stand up for themselves since, in the grand scheme of things, they have so many other issues keeping them down - again, most of the people whose kids were getting bullied (and probably whose kids were the bullies too) seemed to be salt of the earth folks who've probably felt somewhat oppressed themselves their whole lives - "I don't look nothin' like those beautiful folks on the cover a' PEOPLE magazine" - so what do you do with that? Incite rebellion, uprising of the rural proletariat? Occupy's trying to start a revolution of the economically disenfranchised but just like this movie BULLY, they're making noise but seem loathe to posit a real solution, make a proposal. Because here's what it comes down to - the problem with the economy is more than just a few guys making money by manipulating regulators and the government. The problem with school bullies is more than just a couple disenfranchised or overblown pricks demeaning the weaker in the pack. There's something seriously wrong with the whole system, with the way things are now.
So in the movie they start a rally. And they call attention to bullying. And it becomes this big thing, celebrities tell kids to stop bullying and schools crack down on bullying and let's say we get the message across. For a few years, maybe even a generation kids stop bullying. But we as a people have a short memory. And there's always something wrong - maybe in a decade and a half an epidemic of impressionable misfits decide to make live videos of themselves committing suicide and suddenly we have to direct all our attention to convincing kids to stop doing that. And even more, as long as the underlying problems - the paradigm of big political, economic, and cultural bullies being put on pedestals as well as the constant attack on funding for social programs for the poor and disenfranchised - go untreated, all this hoopla and these rallies and videos (even the $4.2M lawsuit will someday fade into obscurity or a new law will be snuck in absolving schools of bully-prevention requirements when everybody's decided to zero in on the suicide video crisis) will serve as little more than window dressing. We gotta change the store. Because as it stands, BULLY, while well-intentioned and in some ways eye-opening, rather than pointing out a new crisis or offering a legitimate solution simply points out another symptom of a much deeper problem within our society. We're all bullies and we have been for a long time. What, you gonna tell me different? Yeah right, pussy.
- Ryan
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