Armond White Annihilates 'Bully'

I don’t always agree with Armond White, but he is at least a rarity among the critical community–someone willing to challenge the liberal orthodoxy and throw stones at sanctimonious political correctness.

He’s also an extraordinarily gifted wordsmith.

It’s the blockbuster-doc mentality that undercuts “Bully”. Hirsch’s do-gooder impulse recalls “Waiting for Superman,” where the filmmaker’s sanctimony confuses special pleading with the work of journalistic investigation. An additional problem arises from the film’s test-group subjects: its red state/blue state prejudice implies that bullying only occurs in the South or Midwest.

Hirsch exploits these kids and their communities-though with the best intentions. But “Bully’s” feel-good-about-feeling-bad approach is offensive because it’s also the “That’s-not-me” approach, allowing viewers to think they would react differently or more effectively than the helpless parents, clueless school officials and young, terrified All-American prey. Hirsch goes for sorrow when there is no sorrow in our Hunger Games culture, just an atmosphere of relentless competition-despite our inflammatory media’s pious lip service to anti-bullying. This cultural disaster is exacerbated by social media-the open platform for incivility mistakenly celebrated as democratized, technological progress. …

The MPAA is right to recommend restricted viewing for such scenes as a boy threatening “I will end you! I’m bringing a knife tomorrow, I’m gonna fuck you up!” It is self-righteous for filmmakers to ignore that such voyeuristic scenes glorify menacing bravado, especially in a film and video culture dedicated to crime and violence. Arguing for a non-restricted rating once again ignores the need for responsible film-viewing. MTV’s Bully Beatdown offered a better remedy, so does the porn satire It Gets Bigger whose mockery of the sanctimonious “It Gets Better” campaign naughtily implies that no amount of Liberal sloganeering will resolve unchecked animal instinct. The problem of p.c. sanctimony only gets bigger.

Bully’s promoters seem ignorant of the fact that kids don’t want to see docs like this anyway. They already know what bullying is and most movies congratulate them for it.

I must say, though, that it was a film that helped to teach me how to deal with bullies.

My philosophy is very simple: I take every threat seriously and take every bully at their word. Either literally or figuratively, the best way to handle a bully is to confront them, get in their face, and punch them dead on the nose.

But we don’t want to teach our kids that anymore. because the parasitic left thrives on the helplessness of victims.

It’s all politics.