Mar. 26, 2008 - Issue #649: My Name is Rachel Corrie

DVDetective

Tony Kaye’s documentary falls in to a burning Lake of Fire

Abortion. The subject isn’t fading from screens (witness Vera Drake or, more recently, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days) or from un-reel life. Bill C-484, recently proposed by an Edmonton-area MP, may put the issue back on the table in this country. Two years ago, the state legislature of South Dakota passed House Bill 1215, banning all abortions except in the case of saving a pregnant woman’s life.
 

That 2006 act is where Tony Kaye’s documentary Lake of Fire (ThinkFilm) begins. But this largely self-financed project (Kaye was the cinematographer, writer, director, producer and shared the executive producer credit with his wife),  which has been Kaye’s main focus since his publicly disowned feature debut American History X, mostly covers the 1990s: Bill Clinton was President and abortion practitioners were being murdered across the country.
 

Some of Kaye’s aesthetic choices are clever. What better look for this divisive subject than black-and-white? The inverting of credits and titles is particularly appropriate in a topsy-turvy world where Norma McCorvey, who was Roe (in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion in the US), has become a born-again Christian who denounces abortion.
 

Flip Benham, the man who turned McCorvey around (although no doubt years of harassment and insults, to the point where McCorvey almost killed herself, pushed her towards the zealots she’d unwittingly helped band together in the ’70s), is a religious fundamentalist. And Lake of Fire, from its shots of Christian iconography to its continual return to abortionist shootings by Travis Bickle-types who’ve gone off the deep end of the Bible, is most concerned with fundamentalists’ arguments against abortion. Kaye gravitates to the most dramatic, violent aspect of the issue, perhaps still intrigued by the white right-wingnut undercurrent he examined in American History X.
 

If Kaye had focussed on that one extreme side (although one reverend, so out-of-touch that he talks of children lifting up their skirts and deciding if they’re homosexuals or not in elementary-school sex-ed classes, should merit no screen-time) Lake of Fire might have been interesting, even a definitive look at a specific aspect of the abortion “debate” (ie American white fundamentalists, 1990-2005). But he returns occasionally to a few pro-choice opinions, a number of mostly male academics’ views, and some of the most graphic shots of an abortion and its aftereffects ever put on celluloid (other than in, notably, anti-abortion videos).
 

These shots are disturbing and argumentative when considered next to the photo of a woman dead from a self-administered abortion with a coathanger or the snapshots of the bullet-bloodied bodies of abortion clinic doctors and nurses. But the first appearance of such graphic shots, early on, lends fire to the religious fundamentalists given so much attention throughout. So once Noam Chomsky makes the point, 90 minutes in, that anti-abortion fundamentalists rarely demand the provision of basic obstetric care or aid for millions of children suffering from easily treatable diseases, the film’s focus on Bible-belting zealots seems as diversionary as those zealots’ own focus on abortion.

 

Kaye’s film has largely been outpaced by time. The Bush era has been friendly to the religious right—one reason, no doubt, abortionist killings have dropped—and the issue hasn’t yet raised its head in the run-up to the 2008 election.
 

Some of the smaller stories here are involving. There’s McCorvey’s turn-around, which might seem more like a cornered conversion, depending on your point of view. Loaded language, particularly on the anti-abortion side, is shot off rapid-fire. Paul Hill’s proclamations that “abortionists should be executed” leads to him killing people he calls killers, and then he’s executed in the name of the state—only in America can God and country become so twisted around a middle finger on a trigger. The Church’s denunciations of abortion providers as child-killers are particularly hypocritical given the widespread sexual-abuse scandal that emerged in the past decade (Amy Berg’s superb Deliver Us From Evil suggested that Cardinal Mahoney of the LA diocese, shown pounding the pulpit in Lake of Fire, knew of and helped protect a pedophile priest in California.)
 

In the last half-hour, Kaye wisely lingers on what the film far too often ignores—a woman’s view (though race is largely ignored, too; African-Americans are notably absent, for instance). As one woman says, “I never met a woman who didn’t take abortion seriously.” Kaye follows a lower-class white woman into a clinic. She fills out forms, answers questions, undergoes the procedure, and expresses her feelings afterwards. The question that Lake of Fire never asks, though, is the truly fundamental one: does the law, government, even God, have any right over a woman’s body here on earth?
 

Most talking heads in the film, and most of the critics who’ve praised Lake of Fire, can detach themselves from the subject or become frothing moral demagogues, turning abortion into a “debate,” because they’re men. They will always be disembodied from what abortion really is, an operation that a woman decides on and goes through. How can an all-too-visceral reality for so many women be pronounced on, denounced, argued about, discussed abstractly?
 

Lake of Fire never acknowledges that starkly gendered reality and never notes that, several months after Bill 1215 was passed, voters in South Dakota repealed the bill. People—not a bunch of politicians, academics or fundamentalists—decided for themselves. V

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