#50 We just watched this on Netflix streaming: Bully

The Film: Bully

Bully is quite possibly the best movie ever made about a suburban murder.  I was going to add it to my greatest films list, but I thought I’d give it some time to fester and see whether people would return to it eventually. The movie follows the true story of a group of kids from Hollywood, Florida who murder a boy in their town.  Some of the kids knew him and others seem to not have anything better to do. I’ve been to Hollywood and it did seem pretty crummy.

The film is polarizing and uncompromising, as all Clark’s movies are, but few directors besides him could make a movie like Bully. A movie that considers violence with disgust and not joy. When we see Hannibal Lector rip into a man we’re disgusted, but thrilled at the same time. Violence is entertaining — so is nudity and sex, another aspect of Bully that shocks people to their core. Teenage/underage sex is taboo. Almost everyone loses their virginity at a very young age, so why not talk about it more frankly in the movies?  Well, a lot of good reasons…but none Clark cares about.

Why to watch it: It captures something about murder that so few movies do: The idiocy of it.

News flash: Most people are pretty stupid. Bully captures the mentality of kids I grew up with and people I know even to this day. Nobodies from nowhere with nothing to do. They don’t know anything and don’t want to. They’re not necessarily ”bad” kids, they just don’t have any outlet of creativity or career goals. And don’t think of them as Beatniks. They don’t have the capacity for such things.

They live to get money for drugs and to have sex with as many people as possible. A huge problem with murder and violence is not entertainment like movies, video games, literature, etc, but that the kids who commit it, like in Bully, don’t have any way to understand what they’re doing has consequences.

It a psychosis not of chemical imbalance, but of ignorance and boredom. How many kids do you know who had loving parents, but just went the wrong way? Why does it happen? Bully might be on to something…

When they see murder the Bully character, Bobby (Nick Stahl), they do so because they didn’t have much else to do. Bobby is, indeed, a horrible human being whose cruelty had no bounds. He was disturbed, spoiled, sexual deviant, and confused, but we don’t think he “got what he deserved”. Instead, we see the situation for what it is: A pathetic tragedy.

Pay attention to this: Larry Clark’s style

You may think this is typical subject matter, but it is not because of the way that Clark handles it. He has his own brand. One that even is too much for me sometimes. His movie Ken Park is not a total success and Wassup Rockers is dull. However, his porno film Destricted is actually pretty good, while Bully and Kids are masterpieces in their own way.

Alpha Dog, a similar movie with similar themes, shows how you can approach a story that isn’t all that much different and not achieve the same results. Clark is able to make things just look so much more grimy, more hopeless, more inescapable. Clark creates a world where sex and drugs is all the characters care about. Because Clark refuses to look away with his camera, he infuses the characters’ own obsessions with the subject matter into the audience’s head. The leader actor Brad Renfro died only a few years after making Bully from a drug overdose and the pain and hopelessness his character feels seems so real. 

The movie is not exploitation and to consider it so is the problem of the audience member, not the filmmaker. Critics were turned off by this movie (though notably Roger Ebert gave it a perfect score) and it isn’t hard to see why. It  shows a society that has failed to supply a group of kids with any way out.

You’ll notice I’ve kind of glossed over exactly what Clark’s style is because I’m not exactly sure. Maybe his uncompromising view on sex and violence. Whatever it is, it works.

-Collin