The most astounding thing about the 2011 documentary Bully is not the aggression forced upon children – though moments of this are difficult to watch without becoming angered. In truth, Bully looks at the indifference endemically bred through bureaucracy. The system of blame-shifting in public school is apparent. The parents are at work all day and trust that their children are being cared for – and, hopefully, educated.
Judging by the videos provided, the bus drivers merely transport children to school. So long as they arrive in one piece, all is presumed fine. The hall monitors prevent children from sprinting from class to class but often miss one child knocking books from another’s hands or someone being shoved into a locker. The teachers maintain a sense of control in the classroom. The principals and assistant principals attempt to smooth over conflicts with backward rhetoric.
The final assessment of authority is most interestingly exhibited in Bully. Unfortunately, the documentary only looks at one tandem of principal and assistant and therefore doesn’t offer a very solid litmus test of whether or not this is one of the abject reasons why bullying so often seems to fly under the radar. Regardless, in Bully, the assistant principal seems oblivious. She recognizes that undue aggression is meted out on weaker children but chooses to smooth it over with a soft-spoken “we’ll take care of this,” a line she utters a number of times as bullying is perpetuated. For the most part, her reactions center around the young Alex, a twelve-year-old boy with the nickname “fishface.”
Born fourteen weeks premature, Alex’s physical features are a bit unusual when set in a group of a hundred other students. His shoulders are a bit thin while his knees and elbows are large. His glasses are thick, magnifying his eyes, and his upper lip appears a bit closer to his nose than what we might consider normal.
In truth, he is, unfortunately, a prime suspect for bullying. He is perceived as weaker. His time during lunch echoes the rhetoric of lunch-room politics and clique-forming loneliness. He is harassed on the school bus, told “I’ll break your Adam’s apple, which’ll kill you,” or “I’m going to fucking end you.” In one sense, his is a case of “boys will be boys.” There is little denying that adolescents will attempt to become the alpha males and females.
At the same time, there appears to be little done to stem the tide of aggression. Most often this is seen when the bullied retaliate and end up being the ones punished. This is true in both the actions of the assistant principal above and the young Jameya, a fourteen-year old girl in Missouri who was so fed up with being bullied that she brought and unloaded weapon to school just to frighten the other girls.
And this is where Bully goes a bit deeper than just playing on our sympathies for the young children (which it does quite a bit). In this moment, Bully looks at our culturally stigmatized symbols of violence. For example, a gun equals violence. A gun equals an infringement on human rights. A gun equals a crime that lands Jameya in a psychiatric hospital for months until the charges are ultimately dropped.
However, threats made about crushing Adam’s apples, “light” strangulation, punching, poking a fellow-bus rider with pencils, or slamming a kid’s head against a locker are more often seen as kids acting out. The problem with this apparently effused rhetoric is that the administrative indifference to bullying pushes the bullied to take matters into their own hands.
On the one hand, children should be taught to stand up for themselves. Coddling and cosseting adolescents is not what I’m preaching here, but when repeated reports to upper administration are denied, put on the back burner, or simply ignored, then the child will feel that they are indubitably alone and will need to act out. Unfortunately, this often takes two disparate but equally disturbing paths.
One is suicide, like in the case of a Tyler, a boy whose father begins this film by recalling his memory in the past tense. The other is ultra-violence, like what happened in Columbine and what folks feared that Jameya would do.
Bully does not offer an answer to this problem. And, while it heavily sides with the bullied children, it doesn’t completely elide that “boys will be boys” and that children need to be taught to stand up for themselves. At the same time, it illustrates the convoluted nature of this situation when all parties involved feel that it is someone else’s responsibility to keep the children safe.
The school needs to monitor closely and take responsibility, but they can’t be the only solution.