‘Lake of Fire’ delves deeply into abortion debate

A 2 1/2 -hour documentary on abortion may sound like a hard sell, but the depth and scope of Tony Kaye’s grueling “Lake of Fire” nonetheless justifies feeling like you’ve just taken a long, blistering soak in one. The title refers to that special place in the afterlife reserved -- according to some who have made the overturning of Roe vs. Wade into their own crusade -- for those who believe in keeping abortion legal, the doctors who perform them, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the great unsaved.

For a director best known for his grand, mad assault on Hollywood, Kaye (“American History X”) has assembled an evenhanded and exhaustive history of the most incendiary (and politically handy) debate of the last 30 years. Militant fundamentalist nut-jobbery notwithstanding, the film is perhaps more likely to rattle those on the abortion rights side than the other way around. Kaye front loads the movie with graphic footage of the procedure and its positively gothic aftermath, footage so brutally hard to watch that it’s hard to think of any argument that could attenuate it. And yet soon afterward we are also reminded that the anti-abortion movement would like to eradicate sex education and contraception as well, presumably to create a holy Neverland in which none of these things would be necessary.

What is Kaye doing by including these images? Is he co-opting the methods of the anti-abortion movement to persuade the other side to reconsider its beliefs? Is he presenting reality as it is? Or is he demonstrating the insidious power of images on a culture that rejects nuance, fears ambiguity and embraces sound bites? Apart from Nat Hentoff (a journalist also known as a civil libertarian and free-speech, anti-death penalty and anti-abortion activist), most of the abortion opponents featured by the film are problematic, to put it mildly.

Among them are the hell-and-brim fire spouting former Klansman John Burt, who is believed to have had influenced the killers of two Florida doctors in the 1990s; the troublingly slick founder of Operation Rescue, Randall Terry, who quips on his radio show that “intolerance is a wonderful thing”; one guy who thinks people should be executed for profanity.

The problem with people like Terry, critics in the film suggest, is that they manipulate people’s feelings about abortion to promote a fundamentalist Christian political agenda. And yet the film never dismisses people’s feelings about abortion. Instead, it returns over and over to the gray area at the heart of the issue. As Alan M. Dershowitz remarks, “Everyone is right when it comes to the abortion debate.” Or, as Noam Chomsky puts it, we are faced with the difficult problem of holding conflicting values within a single value system. (For instance, Hentoff believes that to be consistently anti-abortion, one must also be antiwar and anti-death penalty.) In other words, “the values that we hold are not absolute,” Chomsky says, “they are always contingent.” The movie provides an interesting example of this -- a man who murdered an abortion clinic doctor was later executed by the state of Florida.

The final sequence features a young woman about to undergo her fourth abortion. (A fifth pregnancy ended in adoption.) She’s poor, victimized and, at 28, looks twice her age. She’s sure of her decision and yet racked with guilt or grief. She’s the poster-girl for both sides -- an irresponsible person who is obviously using abortion as a form of birth control, and a troubled, disenfranchised person unfit to raise a child. Ultimately, what emerges is a bigger picture. More than an exposition on abortion, “Lake of Fire” feels like seminal document in the American culture wars.

carina.chocano@latimes.com

“Lake of Fire.” MPAA rating: Not rated. Times guidelines: Graphic depictions of abortion procedures, aborted fetuses. Running time: 2 hours, 32 minutes.