It feels a bit ironic to say that Larry Clark, the director of Kids, Wassup Rockers, and Ken Park, failed to push Bully as far as it could go. It feels doubly so because, at times, Bully feels like a venture into pornography and sadomasochism. At the same time, these elements seem more like redundant exposition to define characters rather than a form of social commentary or examination of the murder of Bobby Kent, a young man in Florida who was killed by a group of “friends” in 1993 for being a manipulative bully.
Like he did in Kids, Clark explores the boundaries at which his audience will squirm over the content; neither film does this in a horror-movie sense where we wait for something to jump out of a closet or to see someone disemboweled on screen. Rather, Clark makes us the voyeurs of a group of teenagers whose backboneless parents are oblivious to their children’s extracurricular activities: sex, drugs, fetishism, and murder.
To Clark’s credit, he illustrates the parents’ laissez faire attitude by their paucity. For the most part, they function as scenery: a baby sitter for Ali Willis’ (Bijou Phillips) child, Lisa Connelly’s (Rachel Miner) intermittent voice of reason, and Marty Puccio’s (Brad Renfro) indifferent father. These three parents move the plot along, but in the grand scheme, they represent a partial cause of their children’s isolation and ultimate gravitation toward one another. An exception to this grouping could be Bobby Kent’s father (Ed Amatrudo), who is oblivious like the others but is a presence in his son’s life, telling him that he has a bright future and to stay away from the likes of Marty. Still, Clark uses Mr. Kent to illustrate the pedestal on which children are placed, offering the parental assumption that their children are incapable of doing wrong.
So, in one capacity, Bully offers a look at a seemingly effusive parental ignorance. In correlation, the parents’ ignorance also fosters a feeling of detachment between them and their children, ultimately pushing them to seek acceptance through other arteries of illusory friendship: namely, each other. This is a fine theme to tackle, though it is often hyperbolized to the point of cartoonish. Each of the young characters treads in their own apathy and indifference: Ali Willis, a mother whose child is not referenced until the final twenty minutes, prances around in shorts that would have a hard time being upgraded to underwear, is promiscuous for the simple sake of being promiscuous, and is, for the most part, unaffected by the fact that Bobby has raped her. Lisa Connelly, Marty’s girlfriend, initially comes up with the idea to kill Bobby, falls in love with Marty after one date, or rather, one night stand, declares, “I love you so much, I can’t believe how much I love you,” and is also generally unaffected by the fact that Bobby also raped her. Aside from their experience with Bobby, another common denominator between Ali and Lisa is that they construct their value through their image. Ali is the “knockout” of the two, but both adorn their walls with magazine cutouts of female supermodels and male hunks, giving themselves and idyllic image to strive for and using sex and physicality as a substitute for love and acceptance.
Something similar can be said for both Marty and Bobby, two young men who are in fine physical shape but whose relationships are built on sex and sexuality – even their own. Portrayed as a closet homosexual, Bobby bonds with other males by watching male on male pornography and uses it to get off while he has sex with women. Ostensibly this would boil down to a person’s individual tastes, but there seems to be a forced connected between Bobby’s fetishes and his adoration for Marty. In other words, Bobby pines for Marty, but fearing the label of “homosexual,” Bobby buries them and takes the resulting aggression out on the various women that he meets to show that he is the stereotypical, heterosexual alpha male. Similarly, his jealousy of Marty also manifests itself in violent outbursts, often verbally deriding Marty or physically assaulting him, particularly when the subject of a woman arises – in this case, Lisa. While Bobby’s violence and verbal castigation asserts a measure of control over Marty, it’s more telling that Bobby immediately feels remorse for his actions – genuine or not it’s unclear – which is a reaction to the fear of losing Marty.
Bully’s look at homosexuality in an ideologically constructed society is also poignant – or at least it could be – but this theme becomes mishmashed in a film that tries to tackle too many external influences in a ninety minute period. (The movie runs for close to two hours, but the last twenty minutes is the denouement that runs the gamut of alibi fabrication, paranoia, consultation, arrests and accusations of snitching). Another poignant topic skated over is violence in video games and the media that illustrates how the insouciance of inflicting violence in a video game is much different than inflicting violence on someone “you’re not trying to hurt […]; you’re trying to kill.”
Ultimately, the most powerful part of the film, and best shot, is the murder of Bobby Kent and its immediate psychological aftermath as the gravity of the act dawns on the clan of assassins, leading each one of them to quantify the part they played to absolve themselves of the actual murder, preferring to claim having only “stuck the knife in like this much,” showing the size of the wound by holding a thumb and forefinger two inches apart, or just “mov[ing] the body,” even though the purpose of moving the body was to drop him face down in the swamp and finish Bobby’s unconscious body off by drowning him.
Like other Clark films, Bully is well shot and has a fair amount of artistic merit that defines the characters, but in the end, the audience is given no character to sympathize with. Bullying – and its progeny cyber bullying – is as much a contemporary issue as it was in 1993 when the real Bobby Kent was murdered, but the overall plights and motivations of each character are so superficial that it’s difficult to care about who died, how, and the subsequent punishment of the attackers. Despite his flaws, the filmic version of Kent should have evoked sympathy. He doesn’t. The isolation of Marty, Lisa, and Ali should make us feel sorry for their wonky, misguided views on life. It doesn’t. We should want to shake each of their parents. We don’t. Bully offers a glimpse at the external influences on today’s world and their seemingly imminent, nihilistic consequences; unfortunately, its cursory nature elides any desire we might have to change them, preferring that they just pick each other off through a circuit of annihilation.
