Cynical Cinema

An intensive, in-depth, and sometimes exhaustive look at the issue of abortion in America, Lake Of Fire is a more than two-and-a-half-hour documentary.  Which is awfully long, but then, it has an awful lot of people to interview and a lot of information to disseminate.  While the film makers clearly make an effort to stay directly in the middle of the issue, and not take one side or another, in the end, it appears as though they favour the pro-choice side a little more.  Which is fine, it seems like  it would be impossible to make a movie like this without having a little bit of your personal opinion come through. 

This is perhaps the most difficult ethical issue of our time in terms of definition.  When does a fertilized egg become human?  No one has an answer.  But this movie fleshes out the arguments on both sides.  One of the most convincing pro-life advocates is an intellectual colleague of Alan Derschowitz named Nat Hentoff.  His argument, however, is fairly contradictory to the rest of the Pro-Life movement.  His suggestion is that if you are against abortion, then that means you must be against the taking of life in all forms.  Which means you must be against war.  And against capital punishment.  The one follows from the other.  And yet, most of the Pro-Life lobby has historically been hypocritical in this respect.  Noam Chomsky appears in the film as well, taking this train of logic one step further.  If there are 15 million actual, live, real children who die in the world every year from preventable diseases, and all it would take is a change in American foreign policy to provide aid to the countries where this is taking place, if you are anti-abortion then you must be pro-increased foreign aid for Africa, Eastern Asia and South America.  But, in this case, the Pro-Lifers have once again been hypocritical.

Most hypocritical of all are the right-wing Christian zealot nutjobs who actually went so far as to kill doctors and staff at abortion clinics in the 1990s.  Driven to furious, frothing outrage by a few preachers who vehemently advocate the defending of life at all costs, these impressionable men were fashioned into basically suicide bombers of intolerance, bomibing clinics and shooting doctors with the expectation that they were giving up their own lives in the service of saving what they believed to be unborn lives.  Classic Christian zealot martyrdom, not too different from today’s jihadists.  And because 99.9% of the pro-life lobby is hardcore Christian, it becomes difficult to separate the issue from the religion.  Although there are a few who set themselves apart from the religious fanatics, like Hentoff, for the most part the zealots become crazier and crazier and creepier and creepier as we know more and more about them.

And there is another problem with lobbying to change public perception about something.  Here is a group of people who believe passionately in the idea that abortion is murder.  An idea that can be reasoned out in a logical, clear and sensible way by people who are not religious.  Like Hentoff, and Derschowitz, and Chomsky.  (Of the three, only Hentoff is pro-life, but all three make very reasonable arguments on both sides.)  But once you start labeling yourself - and the label “pro-life” certainly carries with it the connotation that if you are against them, then you are “pro-death” - and calling on God’s word to back you up, you are leaving yourself open to the possibility that people will ignore you.  After all, the most angry and passionate anti-abortion people are also the same who believe homosexuals should be executed.  And that Harry Potter is immoral.  And how can anyone, anywhere, really take these people seriously?

So, once again, we get religious bigotry clouding a real issue.  And this movie does what it can to get to the heart of the real issue.  Dozens of interviews, with all kinds of interesting (and sometimes scary) people.  Professors, intellectuals, religious leaders (some pro, some con), women having abortions, abortion clinic doctors and nurses.  Victims of the violence and insanity of the evangelical lunatics.  Those lunatics themselves.  Paul Hill, the Fred Phelps of the abortion issue, who preached the “execution [murder]” of abortion clinic doctors, under the pretext that if you killed them, you were doing God’s work.  Which is the really dangerous thing about these people - they believe they speak FOR God.  That only they know what he’s really saying in his little book there.  And they are insane.  Hill among them, who eventually put his ideas into action and murdered two people, while seriously injuring a third.  He was killed by lethal injection in 2003 - a fate that really underscores the sensible philosophies of Chomsky, Derschowitz and Hentoff in this film.

Throughout Lake of Fire, there are graphic and disturbing images of actual abortion procedures.  And their emotional and physical side-effects.  This is not, I repeat, NOT for the squeamish.  We see women being pried open, in full detail.  We see the actual stuff that comes out of the uterus.  We see more than I’m sure any of us ever wanted to see, ever, in our lives.  For any reason.  But this stuff is essential for the essentially neutral tone of the movie.  When the anti-abortion activists claim that the doctors who perform the abortions used to crush the skulls of the babies, but now they sell the heads because it’s more profitable, we need to know that this is an insane thing to say.  We need to know what’s true and what isn’t.  And Lake Of Fire attempts, over a very long running time, to do just that. 

And it does a good job.  Tony Kaye, the director, worked on this film for more than 15 years.  And there has been ample material to film over those fifteen years.  Which means that this is as complete a film document as you will find on the issue, as well-researched as anything you might find, and will stand for years as the definitive movie about abortion.  Whether you’re pro-choice or anti-abortion, this movie will teach you something you didn’t already know, and is worth watching.  If you have a strong constitution.