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.
