Beyond the Multiplex

"Lake of Fire": A time capsule and a war of words, in black-and-white and shades of gray
It's an accident, pretty much, that Tony Kaye's highly compelling, if overlong and overwrought, abortion documentary, "Lake of Fire," was almost all shot in the 1990s but is being released in 2007. Yet when you sit down with Kaye and listen to him talking about fate, you begin to half-believe that all things in the universe do happen for a reason, even the long-delayed release of a motion picture. Certainly "Lake of Fire," with its focus on figures who seem like ghosts of the recent past -- like murdered abortion doctors John Britton and Barnett Slepian, executed "pro-life" murderer Paul Hill and Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry -- now feels like a peculiarly resonant slice of Clinton-era history, a bitter prequel to the political chaos of the late Bush years.

If antiabortion activists stand today on the brink of a long-awaited judicial victory (it's hard to imagine that Roe vs. Wade will survive the Roberts Supreme Court for long), in the '90s they still seemed like fringe wackos, fighting a losing political battle at best and devoted to murder and terrorism at worst. With his elegantly composed black-and-white images, Kaye frames this bitter warfare, and activists on both sides of the issue, as combatants in a grand rhetorical struggle, unresolvable by its very nature.

Kaye himself insists that he has no point of view on abortion, or at least none he cares to insist on throughout the film. A lean and ascetic looking fellow of 55, Kaye does not resemble his long-standing wild-man image. He chooses words carefully and speaks slowly, often pausing for several seconds at a time, partly to mask a speech impediment that has troubled him since childhood. "I'm not a politician or a historian," he says. "This isn't a comment. I tell stories with motion pictures and sound. I'm like an empty vessel with no real point of view. I just let these things come through me. Well, I don't let them; I make them. They end up how they end up, and that's it."

Of course, the central ambiguity of Kaye's statement -- he doesn't just let his subject flow through him, he makes it -- is central to the film. One pro-choice interviewee, constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz, likens the abortion dispute to the old Jewish joke about the rabbi who adjudicates a marital dispute. He listens to the husband's side and tells him, "You know, you're right," and then hears the wife's side and tells her, "You know, you're right." "But rabbi," protests one of his students, "they can't both be right!" The rabbi reflects a moment and says: "You know, you're right!"

In a pair of sequences guaranteed to unsettle any viewer, Kaye shoots two abortions in intimate detail, one of them a late-term intervention and the other a much earlier, more routine procedure. In both cases, we see exactly what comes out of the women's bodies into the doctor's steel tray, an assortment of chopped-up "tissue" that must then be pieced back together to make sure the entire fetus has been extracted. The principal difference between the two procedures is a matter of size and quantity, but the removed material is recognizably and shockingly human. For much too long, the pro-choice movement has relied on comforting euphemisms suggesting that early abortions result in nothing more than unrecognizable globs of goo. That was always sophistry; when you see tiny severed legs, arms and other body parts in that tray, it seems like something worse than that.

"I was very curious to learn what an abortion actually looked like," Kaye says, "and I quickly became aware, in terms of the structure of the film, that I needed one, and that I needed the story of a woman who goes through one. But I never thought in my wildest imagination that I could film one and that I could get so close. When I did film it, which was after five years of working on the film, I was in" -- here a long pause; he's having trouble getting the words out -- "an altered state when I came out of that place."

Next page: Chomsky weighs in