An intriguing, suspenseful, and poignant film: Ben X

            Imagine a student getting bullied. How do you feel? Probably sad, angry, and indignant. Indeed, bullying is cruel and cannot be condoned. But strangely and sadly, such blatant wrong is committed so frequently among mankind. It is a problem that plagues every school. But it’s not a problem among children only. Although in a milder form, it appears in basically every human community; someone is left out, rejected, and ostracized deliberately, and someone else will gloat over the situation. A bully is defined as ‘a person who uses strength or influence to harm or intimidate those who are weaker’. My personal view is that following this definition, the very structure of the society we live in, wherein the poor are pushed around by the strong to desperately find jobs and feed their families, is a form of bullying. As much as bullying is such a predominant problem of mankind, it powerfully relates to every one of us.

            Bullying, in most cases, stops at an adequate point where the victims suffer emotionally. But in some cases, it is taken to the extreme, resulting in assaults, sexual harassments, and even deaths. ‘Ben X’ is film based on a true story of one of these cases, in which a boy who committed suicide after being bullied. But rather than replicating the exact story and becoming another sad but trite film about how serious bullying is, ‘Ben X’ takes an unexpected swerve at the end that renders it creative and thought-provoking. In the film, Ben, the victim, fakes a suicide and reveals himself at the memorial ceremony in his school. This surprise turns out to be a careful ploy to make the bullies and the world learn and repent.

            The film is intriguing, suspenseful, and poignant. The brilliant acting and the unanticipated twist at the end are especially notable. But it was also the ending that made me a little uncomfortable. The ending reveals that Scarlite, the girl who Ben befriended in a game, met in real life, and saved him from committing a suicide, is merely Ben’s imagination. Scarlite is more than an important friend to Ben; it is only through Scarlite that Ben regains composure and confidence and is able to come up with the creative idea to fake a suicide. However, such important role of Scarlite also implies that if Ben had not befriended Scarlite, he would have quitted forever. 

           This message is daunting and sad because Ben is an exception. That Ben has such an intimate friend in a game and she will devote herself into Ben without evening meeting him, calling herself a healer of Ben, isn’t likely to happen in real life. Even if we take into the consideration that Scarlite outside the game is Ben’s imagination, normal people are not able to conjure a friend into their lives and treat him or her as real, which Ben did out of his exceptional immersion into the game.

            However, despite this impracticality, ‘Ben X’ is definitely worth watching. It warms our heart with the hope that there is probably a way to solve bullying. It gives hope that the cruelest bullies around us also have prospects of change.