Lake of Fire (2007)

I had been very eager to watch Tony Kaye’s documentary (a film 18 years in the making, according to the trailer) since I first heard about it in late 2006. Distributed in limited release, it grossed less than $22,000 and stopped showing in theaters in early November 2007, after opening only a month earlier. It was quickly forgotten about and I don’t recall reading any articles or reviews of it at the time. However, upon further research, I found that it received almost universal critical acclaim, which doesn’t surprise me, considering the film’s sober, impartial manner of presenting both pro-life and pro-choice advocates, as well as interviews with Noam Chomsky, Alan Dershowitz, and Jane Roe herself, Norma McCorvey.

Tony Kaye is capable of considerable more artistry than a Michael Moore documentary and is concerned with balance: he shows despicable pro-life people and despicable pro-choice people who make me feel hesitant to be on either side if they are also on it. The film is defended as being impartial, and presents itself ostensibly as so, but I don’t think the film is as impartial as it would like the audience to believe – it seems to present far more unreasonable pro-life supporters than pro-choice ones. Then again, the pro-life position, itself, draws more fundamentalist religious individuals who have extreme and ludicrous attitudes about justice, tolerance, and social issues in general. These “righteous” members of the nation are more frightening to me in their provincial religious fervor than the controversial public figures or institutions they claim are morally corrupting the country, primarily because the controversial figures they condemn are not commanding obedience. We see intolerant members of both persuasions, but it is inevitable that the fundamentalists will always come off worse. They are more inclined to spout rhetoric founded on a black/white, right/wrong, saved/damned perspective.


But their passion does not end with rhetoric. Those who take every word in the Bible literally and prefer quoting the Old Testament to Jesus can often develop a notion that they know how God’s mind works better than God does, which results in madness. The film interviews a woman who worked with 3 different abortion doctors who were shot dead by assassins, all of whom explained later that they were doing the work of God. One of the murderers approached a doctor as he was exiting his car in the parking lot of his clinic and shouted “Stop killing children!” and then fired 3 shots into the doctor’s back. It is hard for me to despise these killers because they do what they do out of a deluded sense of compassion, not because they needed a scapegoat for their bloodlust. However, I do agree with those who ask, “Where are these same fanatics’ sense of compassion for the already born infants or children suffering outside of the womb?”

The level of power this film has will fluctuate depending on how pressing an issue abortion is to you. I’m sure there are some who will be profoundly moved by it because they feel abortion is a paramount moral crisis; some pro-lifers in the film refer to it as a “Holocaust.” However, being a pragmatist, I think all the time and outrage being devoted to this issue could be better spent serving threatened lives of people who are fully sentient, and already born. Since I form all of my opinions on political and social issues from stand-up comedians (kidding), I’d like to share with you a few choice observations from George Carlin on a great majority of pro-life conservatives:

“They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn, but once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you, they don’t want to hear from you, no nothin’- no neo-natal care, no daycare, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no Welfare, no nothin’.”

He goes onto say, “If a fetus is a human being, how come when there’s a miscarriage, they don’t have a funeral?” I think this is a legitimate challenge. Why, indeed? That bloody flesh discharge was a human life and if removed through abortion would have been classified as murder. So why is it that when the pregnancy is terminated naturally, the bloody flesh discharge is disposed of as if it were simply that, a discharge? That was a human being, right? Where’s the coffin? Where’s the service? Or could it be that the practical costs of a funeral cause these moral crusaders to hesitate? Suddenly their zealous conviction is flexible when faced with the financial consequences of their shining ideals. Practicality is never considered or addressed by them: if all abortion was prohibited, are these same people prepared for the results, the follow-through of their beliefs in action? I realize I’m revealing my bias, but since Lake of Fire asks the question, it is the duty of the audience member to answer, and mine is this: blanket restriction of abortion by uncompromising pro-lifers is short-sighted and favors idealism over reality. As adults, it is only sensible to embrace compromise.

On the other hand, many pro-choice advocates are just as disgraceful – there are rabid defenders of abortion who do so merely out of spite and vindictiveness. Whether or not one considers the fetus a human being or not, everyone must acknowledge that it will be a human being. It doesn’t matter if you snuff out he, she, or its existence before it has visible fingers and toes, or after - an opportunity for life was terminated due to interference. It may just be a “cluster of cells” but that cluster of cells has a future.

Tony Kaye’s film has the benefit of thought-provoking and sensational subject matter, but I didn’t see any particularly new or revelatory insight being communicated here. All of the points being made should be common knowledge to anyone who gives a damn about the issue, and since the only people who will gravitate to his documentary are people intensely interested in the issue (and thus likely well-informed in its particulars), Tony Kaye has an obligation to offer them something more esoteric than what’s presented here.


As is, it’s a basic tutorial on the pros and cons of abortion, but since it is the first notable documentary on the issue, it seems more significant than it really is. Since the material it covers is pretty superficial, it stretches the running time to supplement. It’s 2 hours and 32 minutes and restates the same fundamental message of the film, that this topic is too complicated for right/wrong divisions, again and again and again. I don’t take issue with lengthy films so long as the length is necessary. There is a lot of padding here to hide the leaner, better documentary inside. The self-righteous choral music attempts to impose profundity on proceedings that were obtaining a gravity just fine without it.

Abortion is tricky subject matter, this we know, and Tony Kaye’s film repeats this knowledge back to us. If it took him 18 years to make Lake of Fire, we're owed about another 16 years worth of effort and advancement.


Grade: C+