Pathos In Bully

Filmmaker Lee Hirsch, in his documentary Bully, claims that bullying needs to stop and that can only be done by the many and not the few. Hirsch’s purpose is to persuade people to fight back against bullying. Bully is directed in a somber and frustrating tone, which creates a depressed mood in the viewer. Lee Hirsch uses pathos as an effective tool in his documentary because the first-hand accounts of victims and their parents further encourages his audience to act on the fight against bullying. Lee Hirsch creates pathos through the structure of his film. Starting the movie with Tyler Long’s father describing his late son immediately instills empathy in Hirsch’s audience. The director does this to flood viewers with emotions from the initial

First, Principal Lockwood appears in the movie as something of a beacon of hope, leading the audience on to believe that this woman of authority should set things straight and stop Alex’s bullying once and for all. Maddeningly, that is not what happened, Principal Lockwood refused to see what Alex was going through as bullying at all. Her obliviousness convinces her to believe that bullying is taken care of at her school. When finally confronted by Jackie and Phillip Libby, all she could muster was that her students were as “good as gold” (Bully). This insinuates a pathos of complete anger and exasperation. This situation leaves the viewers wondering if the bullying problem was ever going to be recognized and solved. What Alex Libby went through is a paragon of how these situations take the many and not the few to solve. With filmmaker coercion and parent uproar, disciplinary action was finally dealt out to Alex’s abusers. Another opposition included is the sheriff working on Ja’Meya Jackson’s case. This girl should not have lashed out the way she did as she is an all-star in sports and an academically acclaimed student and yet one day on the bus she had enough of all the torture and held students at gun point. Instead of understanding Ja’Meya and her suffering, the sheriff chose to give his flawed opinion of what happened to Lee Hirsch. The sheriff’s logic of the whole event was reasonable until he added a qualifier to his previous remarks. His qualifier was that bullying is only physical violence and only physical violence warranted the gun on the bus. Director Lee Hirsch placed the sheriff’s scene in the movie so that the audience can discover the ignorance of what people think bullying is. Bullying is much more than just the physical aspect of things and what the sheriff fails to see is that bullying can wreak havoc