Understanding Hate Crimes: A Service for Jeremy

No one disputes the fact that Jeremy Wong was an outsider--not only was he openly gay, he also wasn't really white. In fictional Tungston County, which could be Anywhere Not Metropolitan, USA, these facts sealed his fate. One night, while walking along a deserted stretch of highway, two popular high school boys beat him to death--allegedly because of his sexual orientation. In this excellent, complex "hypothetical situation" video, viewers follow a few students, including the killers, in the days following Jeremy's murder, as the school wrestles with planning a memorial service. Using a quasi-documentary format which includes interviews, media coverage, and flashbacks to flesh out the drama, the program sidesteps a simplistic treatment to raise serious, often disturbing questions: What does is mean when you treat someone badly when they're alive, and then treat them like a martyr when they're dead? If more kids were friends with the killers than with the victim, where do true sympathies lie? Does high school really make kids numb to moral issues? Touching upon these and many other subtle questions, A Service for Jeremy is a realistic, brutal examination, in which hateful terms ("faggot," "queer") are tossed around freely, and the flashbacks and description of the actual slaying is extremely violent and fairly explicit. While the tech credits are uniformly good, the program tends to suffer, unfortunately, from exactly what it's trying to prevent: knee-jerk prejudice, in its broad portrayal of Christians as nasty religious bigots. In addition, the final ten minutes has problems as subtlety is sacrificed for drama in an unrealistic and slightly melodramatic ending. On the one hand, it's good to see a video that doesn't shrink away from some very uncomfortable stuff, and assumes intelligence in its viewers even as it challenges them; on the other, because of the aforementioned drawbacks, we can only recommend this program with reservations, for use in the hands of a skilled instructor. Aud: H. (E. Gieschen)