Bully (2001)
Bully is a horrible film. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s nasty, sleazy, brutally violent and often painful to watch. From its opening seconds Larry Clark’s film is absolutely desperate to confront audiences with coarse vulgarity and nihilistic hatefulness. None of its characters are particularly sympathetic, and a few are sickeningly contemptible. I think it’s an overlooked modern classic.
Based on the 1993 murder of Floridian teenager Bobby Kent, Bully follows a group of permanently high, completely listless teenagers with rich parents and no prospects. They cruise around in expensive cars, drop acid, play Mortal Kombat, have sex and listen to Eminem. There doesn’t seem to be anything more to any of their lives. Their parents have given up, leaving the kids free to enjoy their endless, seemingly consequence-free hedonism. The sun never stops shining, the sky is always blue and palm trees line the streets, but Larry Clark’s film is icy cold. Each character only thinks one day at a time. This will prove fatal.
Slow-witted Marty Puccio (Brad Renfro) is close with sadistic tormenter Bobby Kent (Nick Stahl). Marty is Bobby’s favourite target. Bobby beats him, humiliates him and exploits him with absolute relish. He justifies his behaviour by clinging to the belief that Marty is his closest friend. Marty is desperate to escape Bobby’s control, but cannot see a way out. After meeting, and quickly impregnating, a young woman named Lisa (Rachel Miner), a solution is suggested. Bobby could be killed. At first, the idea of murder is discussed casually. As more and more of Marty’s friends learn of Lisa’s suggestion, it becomes a plan. When enough kids are in on the plan, it can’t be reversed.
Director Larry Clark (Kids) is unhealthily fixated on his cast of characters. He’s keen to observe the most squalid, sordid aspects of their lives in extreme detail. There’s plenty of skimpy clothes, male gaze photography and deliberately uncinematic sex scenes. It’s difficult to dismiss Clark’s pre-occupation with teenage bodies as pure lechery. Everything is laid bare, making nothing glamorous. I don’t doubt that lechery is at least partly a factor, but I never find Clark’s images titillating. The result is creepily voyeuristic, but not pornographic. Sex is undoubtedly a fixture of these characters’ lives, but seeing it doesn’t flatter any of them.
There’s an air of guilty fascination surrounding the entire project. Bully is shot like a docudrama. The cast act naturalistically, mumbling and giggling their way around swear words and murder tips. We spend a great deal of time hanging out and cruising with the murder gang. There’s always somewhere to drive to, someone to talk to, a girl to flirt with, a friend’s place to crash at. The idle chat and hook-ups are punctuated by sudden flashes of grim, realistic horror. Bully reminds us (and shows us) that every school has its stories of sexual violence. Bobby’s sadism first targets Marty, then Lisa, and then Lisa’s friends. Curiously, the catalyst for Bobby’s crimes appears to be a complete fixation on keeping his ‘friend’ Marty submissive. It spreads into a relentless campaign of control and violent domination.
Clark does a good job at progressing the murder plot in incremental pieces. There’s an early abandoned attempt, one friend suggests hiring a hitman, new friends join in, weapons are obtained and a plan of attack is discussed. The bloody snowball keeps rolling and growing in size until it moves of its own volition. Bobby has no clue that his schoolmates are planning to kill him. Perhaps he should. By systematically abusing Marty’s acquaintances, Bobby makes his own murder inevitable. Marty needs Lisa to suggest the killing, and he needs Lisa’s friends to give their support: only then does he have the courage to participate.
None of Bobby’s victims every consider telling their parents or calling the police. Neither of these options cross their minds. Every single character who participates in the murder plot has multiple opportunities to back down, tell a parent about their plans or grass the others up. These opportunities aren’t taken. The planning becomes another social activity, just another reason to hang out until the big night. The killing becomes an abstract project. Watch how casual all of the characters are as they discuss their plans. Each is trying to fit in, look tough, outdo the others and avoid upsetting the status quo.
Everything changes with the murder. Some are happy to take part, others hide and cry. Each contributes to Bobby’s death. As much as we loathe and hate Bobby, we take no pleasure in watching his murder. Clark makes us suffer. We aren’t given the easy escape that so many films offer us. There’s no quick gunshot, or tidy offscreen execution. We’re subjected to an agonising series of blows, none of which seem to finish the job. Watching this scene feels like having the air sucked out of your lungs. It’s a testament to the success of Clark’s docudrama aesthetic that the murder is in no way glamorous, exciting or satisfying.
The film changes gears entirely as the enormity of the murder becomes clear. Despite all the planning, the shared group secret is quickly and stupidly exposed. Each wants to confess and shift the blame. Before long, all are rounded up. Clark audaciously plays Fatboy Slim’s Song for Shelter over the final ten minutes of his film, bringing the teenagers’ merciless, endless summer to an end with a downbeat club banger. As the song transitions into a trance-like repeated motif, the teenagers squabble in a courtroom while dozens of grown-ups look on. We’re seeing two separate worlds. The separation between them allows Bobby’s behaviour to go unchecked and the murder to happen in response.
Bully succeeds through its reckless determination to capture a murky, warts-and-all image of the very worst aspects of teenage life. It’s as teenagers that we first experience criminality, that we’re first exposed to drugs and sex, and that we realise we can do terrible things and have terrible things done against us. The cast are absolutely fearless in their commitment to the film’s unpleasant tone, giving it the frenetic naturalism that it needs to support itself. They don’t allow a second of sentimentality to creep into the frame. Nick Stahl, who you may recognise as the doomed son in In the Bedroom or the Yellow Bastard in Sin City, plays Bobby Kent with such vile menace that I felt myself grimacing every time he appeared on screen.
Bully is a film that belongs to a different era. Today’s films about teenagers are comedies (Booksmart, Do Revenge) or quirky dramas (Lady Bird). The era of fucked-up teen movies full of murders, drugs, abuse and nihilism seems to have ended long ago. Films like Kids, Bully, Gummo and Thirteen enjoyed a brief period of parent-scaring prominence at the turn of the millennium, but then they disappeared. As a child, these were the films that fascinated me and terrified me in equal measure. It felt risky to look at their cover art.
Despite all of the controversy and button-pushing promotion, these films continue to offer something genuine and necessary. Teenage life is brutal and scary. We should make films about the crimes that teenagers commit and the horrors that they suffer through. Take a look at the news on any given day, and you’re almost guaranteed to see a story about youth knife crime. I get absolutely nothing out of the current whimsical teenager genre or the comedies designed to be chopped up into TikTok clips. I get something out of Bully. As seedy and violent as it is, it understands the unvarnished fears, desires and pains that fester as kids collide into adulthood. The current cinematic landscape feels barren for the absence of teen movies with guts.