Not surprisingly, the author of this piece of cultural shock treatment is Tony Kaye, the British filmmaker (‘‘American History X’’) and legend in his own mind who has been working on ‘‘Lake of Fire’’ for 16 years. Shot in opalescent black and white, the film lacks voice-over narration and lets us pick through the minefield on our own. Kaye has made the movie as much to rattle his own assumptions as ours; that turns out to be one of its strengths.
The approach is deceptively simple. ‘‘Lake of Fire’’ doesn’t just give us voices from both camps in the abortion debate but from the rational and lunatic wings within each camp, and from thoughtful midpoints in between. For every evangelical crackpot like Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry or the late Paul Hill (seen here railing against the unrighteous not long before he went out and murdered a doctor who provided abortions), there’s an earnest defense, devout or not, of the irreducibility of life.
For every pro-choicer fearing a new era of back-alley botch jobs or a medical worker describing terrorist acts at clinics, there’s a fatuous gadfly like bio-ethicist Peter Singer, theorizing that murder only counts when the victim can conceptualize death.
The pro-lifers do end up looking worse, if only because the most extreme among them are possessed by a sense of apocalyptic doom that renders them freakish and easily mocked. In the end, ‘‘Lake of Fire’’ isn’t evenhanded because it recognizes that abortion is to some people the front line in a larger moral jihad, and that the subjugation of ‘‘sinners’’ and control of women is the end goal. (The film’s title comes from the place in hell where the Holy Rollers say the unworthy will go.)
The great divide turns out not to be political or even religious but a matter of primal wiring: There are people on both sides who want to discuss, convince, resolve, and there are those who want to obliterate what they can’t stand.
