Cruel Instruction (Happily Ever After Films, Lighthouse Pictures, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was of a film that proved interesting – though not unexpectedly so since the promos had also made it look better than the usual run of films. It was called Cruel Instruction and it dealt with two sets of parents who are at their wit’s end ini how to deal with their disobedient teenage girls. One is a Black family, the Adamses, daughter Kayla (Kelcey Mawema) is blowing off her schoolwork and constantly being bullied by two white male students – their decidedly unwanted attentions stop short of out-and-out rape but they seem to be getting awfully close. Her parents Ray (Viv Leacock) and Karen (Cynthia Bailey) don’t know how to deal with her, so they accept the suggestion of a (white) school counselor to send her to Appaloosa Mountain Girls’ School, a place in Utah which advertises itself as featuring a swimming pool and plenty of outdoor activities for their students – more accurately, their inmates, since the place is actually run like a prison and the warden is Miss Connie (Camryn Manheim), who announces to her charges, “I’m here to give you the tough love you didn’t get at home.”

The other principal victim is Amanda Scheff (Morgan Taylor Campbell), who gets sent to Appaloosa when she tries to escape from a previous program she was enrolled by her single-parent mother Carly (Julia Benson), who herself is up to no good because when Amanda calls her and asks about her boyfriend Steve, she makes it clear that Steve, whoever he may have been, is out of her life right now. Kayla and Amanda become roommates at Appaloosa, and Amanda becomes her unofficial mentor because she’s already been through several programs like it, and she’s just waiting for her 18th birthday, when she’ll be able to tell the entire adult world to fuck off and die, she’ll legally be able to do whatever she wants. I was especially fascinated by Camryn Manheim’s presence because she’s also on the cast of the current reboot of Law and Order, playing S. Epatha Merkerson’s old role (not the same character, of course!) as the commander of the police station at which detectives Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson) and Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) work.

I was intrigued by Manheim’s presence here in a quite different sort of role, and quite frankly actors of her physical type – middle-aged, pasty-faced and hefty – get cast, when they get parts at all, more often as villains than heroes. Manheim frankly hadn’t impressed me much in her Law and Order role, but she’s marvelous here, hitting just the right note of gooey sentimentality masking a deep-rooted sadism and hatred for her charges. Through much of Cruel Instruction’s running time we see Connie behaving much like the two classic stories of young girls terrorized at boarding schools, Charlotte Brontê’s novel Jane Eyre and the 1929 film Diary of a Lost Girl, directed by G. W. Pabst, written by Rudolf Leonhardt based on a novel by Margarete Böhme and of which the writer had said, “Where’s the rest of it? The film that got made was only the first half of what I wrote.”

Cruel Intentions writer Adirenne Bush even copied one of the most famous scenes from Jane Eyre – Amanda starts feeling ill and ultimately coughs up blood, and at first Miss Connie is sure she’s faking (she even tells her, “Did I give you permission to cough?”) and it’s up to Kayla to break into the closely guarded and carefully locked phone room to call 911 and rescue her friend. Earlier in the movie Kayla is allowed to call her parents, but she’s given a carefully written script of what she is permitted to say, and when she goes off script and tries to tell her folks how she’s really being treated, the phone call is abruptly cut off and her minder calls her parents back to tell them all is well and assure them nothing untoward is happening to her. The weird combination of open self-righteousness and ultimate cruelty is perfectly drawn by writer Bush and director Stanley M. Brooks, and there was a fascinating vest-pocket documentary about the real-life industry of setting up “treatment centers” or “troubled teen centers” that in real life are just as much hellholes as the one ini the movie.

When I watched the movie I wondered if there were some significance about the facility’s being located in Utah – where the Mormon Church has a great deal of influence – though despite the Christian crosses on the wall and the hard-edged reaction the staff has when they catch Kayla in a Lesbian affair with a fellow inmate (though the two don’t get any farther than holding hands, embracing and kissing each other on the cheeks) and they ghve her a hard-edged lecture about the alleged evils of homosexuality and her fellow students tell her not to look at them undress (while understanding Amanda tells Kayla there’s nothing wrong with being Gay if that’s indeed who she is). Miss Connie immediately transfers Kayla’s sort-of girlfriend to another unit in the facility, thereby breaking them up, and she threatens to do that with Amanda as well – and Kayla responds by attempting suicide (whereupon the film cuts to a commercial break in which the first thing we see is an ad for the National Suicide Prevention Center at https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/suicide-prevention). What startled me most about seeing that title is that titles like that in Lifetime movies usually occur at the very end. Indeed, this one ended with a link to the Web site https://www.breakingcodesilence.org, which features Dr, Mel Gurr’s account of his own “treatment” in a facility like the one in the movie:

“Twenty-three years ago, on October 21, 1998, I was a depressed, non-gender conforming 13-year-old kid with undiagnosed neurodivergence. That morning, two strangers arrived on my doorstep, and they transformed my life forever. Without my knowledge or consent, I was taken to a remote facility called Cedar Ridge Academy, in Roosevelt, Utah - a place where I would spend most of the years between 1998 and 2003, when I turned 18. Cedar Ridge was a confirmedly abusive program, where physical, emotional, and sexual violence was just part of the fabric of daily life. It was a profitable family business, charging $5,600+ monthly, per child, and operated from 1996 until 2021. Where most American teenagers experience this life stage as a socially structured time of possibility, and the time to experiment with different interests, selves, and identities, children like me were institutionalized and tortured in the name of ‘treatment.’ While there, we were prohibited from speaking, moving freely, and deprived of an education. One of my most poignant memories of Cedar Ridge Academy was a moment when my friend Rose and I, taking a break from back-breaking farm chores, and hanging out near the barbed-wire fence surrounding the facility. It was a rare moment when we were out of earshot of staff. We talked about the Holocaust. Did anyone near Auschwitz care about the people suffering and dying in the concentration camps?”

The post-film documentary made it clear why these “troubled teen centers” are almost always located in out-of-the-way places – the better to elude both irate parents and strangers – and one of the most shocking things about these places is they’re virtually unregulated. Anyone, it seems, can declare themselves a “troubled teen center” counselor and set up such a facility without any regulation or official scrutiny. The center in the film gets unraveled when Kayla’s mom Karen calls the place and her phone call is answered by Miss Connie, who politely but firmly tells Karen that Kayla is in “group therapy” (we’ve already got a look at one of those “tuerapy” sessions, in which a girl admits she was finger-raped by her brother’s friend and she’s told in no uncertain terms that she must have wanted him to do that and have wittingly or unwittingly encouraged him to come on to her) and cannot be disturbed. Fortunately, she’d already been prepped by a call from Amanda’s mother, who after months of denial had finally got it through her thick, alcohol-addled skull that the people running the facility supposedly “helping” her daughter had in fact nearly killed her. Sne briefs Kayla’s mom, and when Kayla’s mom hears from her daughter she first calls her husband – who initially resists because it’s the last quarter of a football game he’s watching on TV and he doesn’t want to be disturbed until it ends (how typically American-male!) – and then the two of them drive to Utah to fetch Kayla from the hell-hole they stuck her in.

Judging from the real-life quote from Dr. Mel Gurr and others on the breakingcodesilence.org Web site, Kayla actually got off pretty easily: the script for Cruel Instruction contains no scenes of staff members sexually abusing the inmates, and there is at least a semblance of education going on in this “school,” including bits of two classes we see, one in English and one in geometry. The two teachers and the school nurse are drawn as oddly sympathetic characters, who care about the kids on at least some levels but are helpless in the face of Miss Connie’s reign of terror and too fearful of their own jobs to do anything to stop her. (In one chilling scene she reminds a decent but ineffectual schlub on her staff that she hired him even though he didn’t finish regular high school and just got his G.E.D.) And the students are carefully pitted against each other via Miss Connie’s rewards-and-punishment system, through which they get points for ratting each other out. Cruel Instruction, despite its bland title, is an excellent movie, not only by Lifetime’s standards but by anyone’s, in which the characters are drawn multidimensionally – even Miss Connie isn’t drawn as a cardboard villain but as someone who thinks she’s doing her charges some good even though we can see she’s abusing them psychologically – and among other things the film is an exposé of the American health-care system in that the people running Appaloosa are well aware of when each inmate’s health insurance is running out and therefore won’t be a profit center for them.