Some time ago, I reported having watched a documentary called "Bully", once in a
"write-up" and once referencing it while
responding to another forum member relating some of his personal experiences with bullying and the emotional consequences that accrue.
If you don't care to follow the links and read my TL;DR posts, that's perfectly OK (especially if you already endured them seven and eight years ago), but some of the newer forum members or visitors may want to given them a fast scan. LTROI presents relatively mild bullying, just enough to give Oskar's emotional makeup some solid mass. LMI's presentation is more graphic, more visceral and may help explain why Oskar could probably eat Owen's lunch with very little effort: Oskar was subdued but not broken, whereas Owen was able to exert about as much control over how his story went as a wadded up piece of paper in a high wind. Owen's wings were broken, perhaps never to heal. This documentary may help crystallise this impression.
As noted before, this documentary doesn't give much in the way of facts, figures or analysis. Mostly, it's about a pile of lost people trying to make sense of what's happened to themselves and to the people they love. It's emotional, it's "here's who we are, here's what's happening to us, here's us not understanding one blessed thing". Other forum members have subsequently watched this documentary and shared on the forum that it was very hard to watch. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that part of the LTROI moondust that keeps some (or most?) of us in thrall after all these years is that Bully won't tell us anything we didn't already know. We've been there, we've done that, we've had all this garbage happen to us. What I myself didn't know until I was in my twenties (forty years ago) was that I wasn't the
only one who'd been there or done that or been basically destroyed by this phenomenon. For many of us, it's not that we can understand Oskar or Owen. It's that we ARE Oskar and Owen.
I don't remember if I'd mentioned this in any previous post: LMI and this documentary came out within the same smallish time frame. I remember this very clearly because I'd driven an hour to $Bigger_City to see them in my brand spanking new (used) Ford Taurus not long after I'd gotten it. There weren't very many people gone to see LMI, but this might not be so surprising because early afternoon Saturdays aren't prime moviegoing time, but on both occasions I went to see it, there
were other people there. By contrast, the first time I'd gone to see Bully, as I recall, there were maybe two or three other people in this huge honking stadium style auditorum. The second time I'd gone (this time with a laptop to take notes), I had the whole stadium to myself.
I interpret this as apathy. Hand in hand with it walks ignorance.
Some forum members seem to feel that Eli's revenge on the boys who tried drown Oskar in the pool was over the top. After all, Eli is so fast and so strong, couldn't she have just punched in a few noses and broken a few ribs and promised them that worse would come to anybody who seems to feel that treating people like crap is OK? Maybe yes, and maybe no - but I don't remember anybody ever definitively proving that Eli wasn't just Oskar's imaginary friend, and that Oskar actually
did draw his last breath in that pool, and that the whole blood'n'guts scene just was Oskar's dying fantasy. If she weren't, Eli was from a different time and a different place. Maybe rural Swedes from her time had a different moral yardstick by which to measure socially acceptable payback.
Maybe Eli
was just a dream that lives in every oppressed person's heart. We are what we are, no matter how you might try to spackle, wallpaper and paint over our essential natures with "civilisation" and "religion" and "civic duty" and "rule of law". If you punch me in the nose for no good reason, you certainly want to believe I'll have fanatsies about taking your body apart - slowly - one itty bitty bit at a time, and plenty of other people I've known have made similar confessions.
The 2013 remake of the 1976 original "Carrie", just a few minutes before the end credits roll, Sue Snell is heard in a court proceeding saying:
Sue Snell wrote:Carrie had some sort of power. But she was just like me... like any of you. She had hopes, she had fears, but we pushed her. And you can only push someone so far before they break.
Within
that story's reality, the massacre on the gym floor wasn't a dying dream. It was a dying
act. It was real; it happened. Some folk say that, too, was over the top. Again, maybe yes, maybe no... but when Sue had asked Carrie not to hurt her, Carrie's response was "Why not? I've been hurt my whole life." There are a few stories about teens who've bombed or shot up high schools, one suspects, who'd have said something similar.
I suppose my inability to forget this documentary comes from my own ongoing personal experience as a nearly deaf person smack-dab in the middle of the Midwestern US where there's still scarcely any distinction bwteen hearing impairment and what used to be called "mental retardation" - on the streets, in the schools and churches, in
court (I once almost had a chance to help put away somebody improperly involved with children but was dismissed because I can't hear)... and at work, where the possibility of promotion simply does not exist because I can't use a phone or a radio, and can't understand announcements on the loudspeakers. They didn't even want to give me a forklift licence, specifically citing my hearing, until I mumbled something about a lawyer.
Watching this documentary helped make a few things a bit clearer for me, and brought new things for me to ponder. The earlier "writeups" mentioned in the first few lines of this post run over some of it. There've been so few movies over the decades that've stayed with me, and they're not very hard to enumerate (Babel, LTROI (and LMI), the original Frankenstein and Dracula movies, among very few others), and this documentary is one of them.
Anyway, enough gassing. If you want to watch it, it's on YouTube, I believe, for about $4.00 USD last I'd looked, and free on
tubitv. Try not to watch it within an hour or two of your last meal.
