It’s been a while since I posted a What Lisa Marie Watched Last Night, which is unfortunate because these are some of my favorite posts to write.  If nothing else, they give me an excuse to use this site to extol the virtues of a good Lifetime movie.  Well, last night, I watched a made-for-TV movie that belonged on Lifetime, despite the fact that it actually premiered on ABC Family.  The name of this film is Cyberbully and it doesn’t have much in common with Larry Clark’s Bully.

Why Was I Watching It?

After you see the same commercial about fifty times, you really don’t have much choice but to watch.  That’s why commercials work.  However, I am happy to say that I did stand up to the forces of relentless advertising by DVRing the movie and watching it on my own time.  So there.

What Was It About?

So, there’s this teenage girl (played by Emily Osment) who gets a laptop for her birthday and her mother (Kelly Rowan) foolishly allows Osment to spend hours surfing the web unsupervised.  So, Osment joins this social site called Clickster which is supposed to be like Facebook but, from what they showed onscreen, really looked a lot more like MySpace.  And I mean the MySpace of today and not the cool MySpace that we all used to brag about being on.

Anyway, somebody hacks Osment’s Clickster Account which leads to Osment getting a reputation for being a slut and soon all the rich girls in high school are giving her a hard time and then somebody sets up a fake account as some boy from another school and eventually, Osment tries to commit suicide and her mom ends up blaming it all on a lack of governmental regulation.

What Worked?

It’s difficult to really criticize this film, despite the fact that — like a lot of films about cyberbullying — it was obviously made by people who don’t really understand how the Internet works or how teenagers view the world.  The people who made the film obviously had their hearts in the right place and the film’s ultimate message was a pure and sincere one.  It was obvious that a lot of the film’s plot was inspired by the true life of case of Megan Meier, a 13 year-old girl who committed suicide after being cyberbullied in much the same way as the character played by Emily Osment in this film.  The case of Meier was so tragic that I can still not write about it without getting tears in my eyes. 

The film was actually pretty well-acted, especially by Osment and Kay Panabaker, who plays Osment’s best friend.

Most importantly, the film didn’t allow its good intentions to keep it from going totally and completely over the top in a few key moments.  Perhaps the moment that most made me forget about the film’s good intentions and just enjoy it on a camp level was when Osment, struggling to open up a child-proof bottle of pills, screams, “I CAN’T GET THE TOP OFF!”

What Didn’t Work?

Okay, maybe this wasn’t a big moment but it’s something I noticed and it really gnawed at me.  When Osment first finds herself being bullied, she responds by calling one of the bullies a “bitch” online and then her mom finds out and goes, “No, you cannot be mean just because other people are being mean,” and as the film goes on, it becomes apparent that we’re meant to agree with her.  But seriously, some day, I’m going to have a daughter and if she ever gets in trouble for calling a bully ” a bitch,” you better believe I’m going to stand behind my daughter 100%.  Actually, I’ll probably call the bully a bitch first.

When I saw that scene, I immediately flashed back to what my mom once told me when I came home from school crying because of some mean girls.  She sat me down, explained to me the importance of keeping my thumb on the outside whenever I made a fist, and then said, “Lisa Marie, if those putas de mierda try to make you cry, you break their nose.” 

Now, I have to be honest — despite the fact that I now knew how to make a fist, I still had no idea how to use that fist to break someone’s nose.  I doubt I have the upper body strength to pull that off anyway.  But, regardless of whether it was good advice, it was what I needed to hear at that time because, at the very least, it let me know that I had someone in my corner and, even more importantly, it assured me that I was the victim and not to blame.

Anyway, back to Cyberbully, the main problem with this film is that after one hour or so, the movie’s storyline becomes far too much of a PSA for its own good.  Unfortunately, the PSA isn’t for bullies to reconsider their actions or for the victims of bullies to know that “it gets better.”  Instead, the PSA tries to convince us that we can wipe out bullying by passing legislation, getting the government involved, and doing the whole activist thing, as if 1) bullying is an activity that can be regulated as opposed to just a really ugly expression of human nature and 2) we can actually trust the government to make life better for anyone. 

This is one of those films where, at the end of the film, the entire school stands up to the bully and basically bullies her into being a nicer person.  Honestly, it seems like it would be a lot more helpful for all these anti-bullying films to just say that being a teenager sucks, it’s going to suck for a long time, but if you get through it, you’ll have the pleasure of seeing everyone who bullied you get fat and miserable.  Instead, we get these false visions of humanity in which the entire world will have your back just because you’re in the right.  That’s all very uplifting but what are you going to do once you realize that the world, for the most part, doesn’t even know you exist?

“Oh my God!  Just like me!” Moments

Well, the entire film was about silly girls acting over dramatic so there were … ahem … there were a few just like me moments.  Well, more than a few. 

Perhaps the biggest just like me moment was due to the fact that I had my e-mail, Facebook and MySpace accounts hacked by an ex-boyfriend once and he changed all of my statuses to something slutty (well, more slutty and definitely lacking my trademark sense of postmodern humor) and sent out a mass e-mail under my name that read, “I want to fuck you madly.”  (If nothing else, that made me the most popular girl in the Art History study group for a week or two.)  Anyway, I ended up deleting every account I had, getting a restraining order on the guy, and spending the next two years being very paranoid and untrusting.  So, in other words, don’t be a cyberbully because it seriously fucks people up.

Lessons Learned:

Be kind and remember that there’s a human being reacting to everything you say.  Also, some pill bottles are more difficult to open than others.  But mostly the be kind part.