The documentary Bully does a tremendous job of raising awareness about the prevalence of bullying in our nation’s public schools, while also exposing its adverse effects on victims. Bully accomplishes this by following a mixture of children and parents from different spots around the country, who have either experienced bullying or are currently trying to combat it.
Bully is not for the faint to heart. It’s images and situations are incredibly tough to watch, often driving you outrage. Among the people profiled, are parents who lost their children to suicide provoked by bullying, a boy who is picked on for his appearance, a young woman ostracized for her sexual orientation, and a girl in legal trouble for pulling a weapon on the kids who harassed her.
Each piece is affecting in its own way, although the documentary’s focus on grieving parents is the most compelling. Hearing their stories, you’re moved by the difficulty of their loss and inspired by their crusade to end bullying for other children. Additionally, the boy’s perspective is impactful because you see his parents and administrators floundering to give him the proper support that he needs. What’s really crazy is that the threat to his safety becomes so severe, that the documentary crew intervenes by showing the troubling footage to both parties.
Although Bully shines a light on bullying and drives you to anger by showing the lack of action school administrators are willing/able to take in order to stop it, the documentary ignores a couple of major perspectives. First, despite its close attention to several people, the documentary’s subjects are not that geographically diverse. The filmmakers chose all people from middle America, completely ignoring East and West Coast perspectives. Second, it does a lot of finger pointing without discussing positive ways to stop bullying. It would have felt much more well-rounded with interviews from psychologists discussing effective means to curb bullies or strategies from school districts that feel particularly good at keeping their students from engaging in this kind of behavior. At the end Bully starts to get there as the parents profiled tell other children how they can help, but this comes a little too late.
After all the controversy surrounding this documentary’s proposed “R” rating, I didn’t find anything in it worthy of that stigma. At points it can be difficult to watch, but only because of the frustrating ways that people treat one another. Definitely worth seeing though regardless of whether you’ve been bullied in school. At the very least you’ll get a good laugh from its use of the song “Teenage Dirtbag.”