Be prepared. In Tony Kaye's "Lake of Fire" you will see a portion of an abortion procedure. You will see the dead pieces of a being you cannot simply label "fetus" & thereby distance yourself comfortably from it. You will see crime scenes with the bodies of people executed by anti-abortion zealots. You will also see quite a number of Bible-slappin' loudmouths & pro-choice intellectuals.
Being a pro-life viewer, I must give Kaye credit for allowing 2 moments that are very strong for the pro-life camp. The first comes near the beginning of the film, in which we do actually see the dismembered pieces of that aborted baby. This is echoed later with shots of corpses stored in a clinic freezer. The second moment comes with the story of Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade. Kaye presents McCorvey's story of working in abortion clinics after her trial & later converting to Christianity & completely reversing her position toward abortion. McCorvey's conversion came about through the efforts of a man we see here, a man who, incidentally, is perhaps the single non-wacko pro-life leader that Kaye deigns to show: Operation Save America's Flip Benham.
Other than those two points, all the scoring goes to the pro-choice crowd. Kaye includes as many homophobic, gun-toting, anti-abortion loudmouths as he can find. And he can't hide his own prejudices when he zeroes in on the mouth of one particular windbag & lets it fill the screen while he rants--a technique, it should be noted, that is never applied when Alan Dershowitz is on screen. Here we have pro-lifers who do the cause no favors by opening their mouths, saying for instance that they think blasphemers should be executed, that they've seen Satan-worshiping abortionists barbecue babies right in front of them, etc. And this spectacle goes on & on, with only one answering clang on the Left. At one point we do see a single leftist dork: a woman singer who dances 95% nude during her performance, shoves a coat hanger in her crotch, & mimes giving herself an abortion & eating the baby. We also get to hear this "artist" speak in an interview, & she is stunningly clueless. But that's it for whack-jobs presented on the Left, & we're clearly meant to come away from the film with the sense that the majority of pro-lifers are sub-mental creeps while the majority of pro-choicers are enlightened, brainy people you'd trust to guide public policy.
Nearly all the people interviewed for this documentary use dishonest, loaded arguments: that is, "the Bible says so" (& if you don't believe the Bible, you don't count), or "it's a woman's right" (& obviously the fetus isn't a person, so it doesn't have any rights). The difference is that the people Kaye sought out are primarily intellectuals on one side, and on the other they are primarily uneducated and backwards. The film includes only a few brief seconds of articulate speech on the pro-life side, in contrast with the nonstop barrage of interviews with leftist celebrity intellectuals like Dershowitz, Noam Chomsky, and Peter Singer. Chomsky, who has several PhDs in HairSplitting, gets away here with everything from comparing the religious climate in the U.S. with that in Iran, to raising absurd, overly-clever counterarguments such as his statement that women "kill bacteria" every time they wash their hands (the implication being that killing bacteria is, on some gray scale, morally comparable to killing a fetus). Dershowitz pulls some similar garbage when he says that every time a man & woman refrain from having sex they are preventing a potential human being from being created, & therefore maybe we should have sex 24/7 if we're really going to make God happy. And Singer? Well, he defines murder in terms of "what makes it wrong." That is, murder is killing someone who has the mental capability to wish otherwise, & since a fetus doesn't have the cerebral development allowing him to know what he's missing out on--well, tough. One wonders what Singer might think of killing comatose persons or even victims who are merely sleeping.
Particularly disappointing--& revealing, in terms of the documentary's prejudices--is that almost no effort was made to bring in articulate intellectuals from the pro-life camp. You'll see no Peter Kreeft here, no Frederica Mathewes-Green. And while Kaye gives screen time to a conspiracy theory about "Christian Reconstructionism" & the Religious Right's supposed desire to retake the country & execute anyone who doesn't obey the ten commandments, no similar examinations are made of possible conspiracies on the Left. No mention is made, for example, of Planned Parenthood originating from a scandalous soup of eugenics, racism, & elitist, upper-class paranoia directed at the burgeoning lower classes.
This pro-choice prejudice is seen further in the film's recurring, sledgehammer theme: pro-life = anti-abortion terrorism. Kaye is little interested in portraying anything but the sensationalistic stereotypes of pro-life activists, & the final portion of the film stresses these stereotypes repeatedly. As the film winds down & we follow a woman into her clinic to see the "brave" choice she's going to make & see that she's an emotionally disturbed woman who really shouldn't raise a child, we get an answering bombardament from the Left. The intellectuals that Kaye brought out earlier now return, & we're given a dizzying number of alternative, gray-scale methods for thinking about abortion, methods for making a simple thing more "complex." For instance, Alan Dershowitz says that when it comes to abortion, "everyone is right." This is a pleasant, non-conclusive answer that will not lead to any hasty overturning of laws.
Finally, on a personal note, I was glad I saw this film but can't recommend it. After all, a documentary heavily skewed like this can't be admired for its intrinsic worth. Kaye merely shows us how a film may pay lip service to "fairness" while ending up with a propagandistic message.
Being a pro-life viewer, I must give Kaye credit for allowing 2 moments that are very strong for the pro-life camp. The first comes near the beginning of the film, in which we do actually see the dismembered pieces of that aborted baby. This is echoed later with shots of corpses stored in a clinic freezer. The second moment comes with the story of Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade. Kaye presents McCorvey's story of working in abortion clinics after her trial & later converting to Christianity & completely reversing her position toward abortion. McCorvey's conversion came about through the efforts of a man we see here, a man who, incidentally, is perhaps the single non-wacko pro-life leader that Kaye deigns to show: Operation Save America's Flip Benham.
Other than those two points, all the scoring goes to the pro-choice crowd. Kaye includes as many homophobic, gun-toting, anti-abortion loudmouths as he can find. And he can't hide his own prejudices when he zeroes in on the mouth of one particular windbag & lets it fill the screen while he rants--a technique, it should be noted, that is never applied when Alan Dershowitz is on screen. Here we have pro-lifers who do the cause no favors by opening their mouths, saying for instance that they think blasphemers should be executed, that they've seen Satan-worshiping abortionists barbecue babies right in front of them, etc. And this spectacle goes on & on, with only one answering clang on the Left. At one point we do see a single leftist dork: a woman singer who dances 95% nude during her performance, shoves a coat hanger in her crotch, & mimes giving herself an abortion & eating the baby. We also get to hear this "artist" speak in an interview, & she is stunningly clueless. But that's it for whack-jobs presented on the Left, & we're clearly meant to come away from the film with the sense that the majority of pro-lifers are sub-mental creeps while the majority of pro-choicers are enlightened, brainy people you'd trust to guide public policy.
Nearly all the people interviewed for this documentary use dishonest, loaded arguments: that is, "the Bible says so" (& if you don't believe the Bible, you don't count), or "it's a woman's right" (& obviously the fetus isn't a person, so it doesn't have any rights). The difference is that the people Kaye sought out are primarily intellectuals on one side, and on the other they are primarily uneducated and backwards. The film includes only a few brief seconds of articulate speech on the pro-life side, in contrast with the nonstop barrage of interviews with leftist celebrity intellectuals like Dershowitz, Noam Chomsky, and Peter Singer. Chomsky, who has several PhDs in HairSplitting, gets away here with everything from comparing the religious climate in the U.S. with that in Iran, to raising absurd, overly-clever counterarguments such as his statement that women "kill bacteria" every time they wash their hands (the implication being that killing bacteria is, on some gray scale, morally comparable to killing a fetus). Dershowitz pulls some similar garbage when he says that every time a man & woman refrain from having sex they are preventing a potential human being from being created, & therefore maybe we should have sex 24/7 if we're really going to make God happy. And Singer? Well, he defines murder in terms of "what makes it wrong." That is, murder is killing someone who has the mental capability to wish otherwise, & since a fetus doesn't have the cerebral development allowing him to know what he's missing out on--well, tough. One wonders what Singer might think of killing comatose persons or even victims who are merely sleeping.
Particularly disappointing--& revealing, in terms of the documentary's prejudices--is that almost no effort was made to bring in articulate intellectuals from the pro-life camp. You'll see no Peter Kreeft here, no Frederica Mathewes-Green. And while Kaye gives screen time to a conspiracy theory about "Christian Reconstructionism" & the Religious Right's supposed desire to retake the country & execute anyone who doesn't obey the ten commandments, no similar examinations are made of possible conspiracies on the Left. No mention is made, for example, of Planned Parenthood originating from a scandalous soup of eugenics, racism, & elitist, upper-class paranoia directed at the burgeoning lower classes.
This pro-choice prejudice is seen further in the film's recurring, sledgehammer theme: pro-life = anti-abortion terrorism. Kaye is little interested in portraying anything but the sensationalistic stereotypes of pro-life activists, & the final portion of the film stresses these stereotypes repeatedly. As the film winds down & we follow a woman into her clinic to see the "brave" choice she's going to make & see that she's an emotionally disturbed woman who really shouldn't raise a child, we get an answering bombardament from the Left. The intellectuals that Kaye brought out earlier now return, & we're given a dizzying number of alternative, gray-scale methods for thinking about abortion, methods for making a simple thing more "complex." For instance, Alan Dershowitz says that when it comes to abortion, "everyone is right." This is a pleasant, non-conclusive answer that will not lead to any hasty overturning of laws.
Finally, on a personal note, I was glad I saw this film but can't recommend it. After all, a documentary heavily skewed like this can't be admired for its intrinsic worth. Kaye merely shows us how a film may pay lip service to "fairness" while ending up with a propagandistic message.