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After a typical day of school, 12-year-old Alex Libby jumps on the trampoline in his yard, or walks around the neighbourhood, delicately holding hands with his angelic sister Jada. Sometimes, he throws rocks near the train tracks behind his house as the burly freights pass. In the morning, Alex heads back to East Middle School where he is greeted by cries of “fishface,” and endures a torturous bus ride; he is stabbed with pencils, strangled, and has his head beaten against the seat. Although he tries to laugh it off and convince himself that his tormentors are just joking, Alex’s mother unequivocally tells him that the only connection he shares with them is as the object of their violence. Alex flatly replies, “You say these people aren’t my friends. Then what friends do I have?”

Alex is one of the subjects Lee Hirsch profiles in Bully. Others include Kelby Johnson, a 16-year-old lesbian who copes with her townspeople’s vitriol through her tightknit circle of friends; Ja’Meya Jackson, who wanted to teach her bullies a lesson by bringing a gun on the school bus; and Ty Field, the grade six boy who received a suspension for shoving his long-time bully, and then shot himself in his parents’ bedroom.

Hirsch, who was bullied himself, tells these stories in a clean, almost sterile manner, abstaining from any verbal narration. We benefit from his distanced approach, since our objectless indignation and sympathy do not stem from the polish that is acquired through production, but rather through the cruelty of the events themselves.

Alex’s story seems the most viscerally pitiful. Born some three months premature, he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, which noticeably hobbles his understanding of social relationships. Apart from his circumstances themselves, Hirsch amplifies the sense of misery by virtue of his complete access to film throughout Alex’s school-in one terribly lonely scene we see him awkwardly milling about the other children during recess, taking long, deliberate strides to nowhere.

Hirsch’s camera also introduces viewers to Kim Lockwood, the vilely myopic assistant principal of Alex’s school. When Alex’s parents confront her with the footage of his daily abuse aboard the bus, Lockwood assures them that the children on his bus route are “just as good as gold.” She then assumes a vapid smile, and proceeds to show them a photo of her granddaughter. It is this sort of neutered, anaesthetized response on the part of authority figures that prevents victims from telling others about their suffering.

Unfortunately, Hirsch misses an opportunity to prove his journalistic mettle when documenting the suicide of 17-year-old Tyler Long. Poignantly portrayed in the film as a boy driven to suicide by a barrage of bullying, Tyler is the subject of a mendaciously two-dimensional account. Rather than showing him as a bullied, mentally ill boy (bipolar, ADHD, Asperger’s) who was removed from his honours and AP classes by his parents, and whose girlfriend had recently left him (as Emily Bazelon’s thoroughly-researched Slate piece shows him to be), he was depicted as a shamefully crude sketch. 

With Bully garnering a PG-13 rating, and many young students certain to see it, Hirsch perniciously simplifies Long’s death, giving a potentially fatal model to victims. In such affecting documentaries, filmmakers’ veracity should be held to a higher standard. With Bully, Hirsch jolts the audience’s indignation. It is disappointing that he wasn’t more honest about it.