Film

“Abortion is every woman’s tragedy,” a friend of mine, who’d undergone the procedure several years earlier, once told me. Her sentiment echoes that of Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice, interviewed in Lake of Fire, who says, “I never met a woman who did not take abortion seriously.” If only Tony Kaye took a similar stance. Despite the grandiose claims of working nearly two decades to complete his project, the millions of his own money spent, Kaye does not take abortion seriously. He treats the subject using the basest of exploitation tactics.

Twenty minutes into Lake of Fire, after rather banal footage of pro- and antichoice forces clashing at a January 1993 rally in Washington, D.C., Kaye shows an abortion being performed. Not content to document fetal tissue being suctioned out of a woman’s vagina, he proceeds to film, in extreme close-up, the sifting of the material, revealing a tiny eye, a minuscule foot. No interviews with medical personnel are provided to explain what, exactly, is happening. Kaye, who, in the press notes, admits to being “addicted to controversy when I began,” boasts of this scene: “There is no other footage in the history of the world that is as shocking as that. Actually, there must be something—but you’d have to look pretty hard!”

This is not impartial filmmaking. This is manipulation. Kaye’s documentary is part of a recent trend of films that show deep distrust with the procedure. In Knocked Up, abortion can’t even be muttered; it’s simply “the a-word.” The Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, much like Lake of Fire, shows little concern for the politics of a woman’s body and far more investment in freaking the audience out. Abortion is still—barely—a legal right in this country. Whether or not you find it a tragedy that this right exists, Kaye’s tabloid tactics will do nothing to elevate the discussion.