An unbiased documentary on abortion, says the producer

But then, he also says he doesn’t know what he thinks of abortion. After spending 15 years working on a documentary about it, he doesn’t have an opinion.

That’s only the beginning of what’s wrong with this picture. Tom Hoopes draws out the rest very well in this NRO review of “Lake of Fire.”

“The concept was to make a film about the debate over the issue of abortion,” says its director “but to make it a non-propagandist way and to create a kind of war of words.”

But ask him where the name comes from, and you might start to smell a set-up. “Lake of fire” is one pro-lifer’s description of what awaits abortionists.

The “non-propagandist” director in this case is Tony Kaye. He started as a music video director (he did a classic video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and an edgy video for the classic Johnny Cash) and TV commercial creator. He dipped his foot into cinema with 1998’s American History X. But that film became more famous for the director’s bizarre attempt to have his name removed from it than it did for the examination of skin-heads he made it to be. (He wanted his name to be changed to Alan Smithee, the perennial Hollywood pseudonym for an embarrassed director. When that was rejected, he tried “Humpty Dumpty.” But the film says “Tony Kaye.”)

Kaye claims he made this movie to “explore the issue without taking any sides.”

“It’s very easy for me to do that because… I don’t really have a point of view. I’m not a politician or a commentator,” he adds.

This noble and enlightened posture sounds very impressive. Impressive, that is, until you stop to think about it. What kind of person claims to have no point of view on abortion, and yet spends 15 years filming different sides of the question? And what kind of person spends 15 years filming pro-lifers and comes up with the kind of material reviewers describe in Lake of Fire?

A tendentious one, of course. Pro-lifers are linked with all sorts of fringe, radical activities.

It would seem that the documentary is a skewed and twisted look at the pro-life movement. Mix and mingle at the March for Life this January, and see how many people you can find with links to the KKK, anti-government militias, or mad bombers.

The film does show one radical act of violence and its abhorrent consequences, and it is stunning. It shows an abortion. Credit Kaye for deciding that a never-before-done ‘unbiased’ documentary on abortion needed to show a never-before-seen abortion, blood and body parts and all.

How can he claim to not have an opinion on this?

He ends the film on that ‘it’s all okay’ note, the moral relativism that feeds the abortion mentality. Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz summarizes that everyone has to decide for themselves…..and everyone is right.

Yes, that’s incoherent.

In other words, the grand conclusion of this ground-breaking non-propagandist documentary is: Believe whatever you want to believe, but whatever you believe, you had better be “pro-choice.”