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Volume 20, Number 4 (1996) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum CHANGING IMAGES OF JUSTICE IN AMERICAN FILMS RALPH BERETS Film Review Editor, Legal Studies Forum. The majority of the films made are set in the real world and attempt to authenticate the worlds they portray. No individual film may capture the true sense of a time and place, but films set in a time and place provide us a view of a culture and how it works. This self- reflexivity feature of film is one of the hallmarks of a semiological approach to film analysis. Lapsley and Westlake have characterized the semiological approach as one in which "spectators take films as transparent renderings of the real when in fact they simply produce a reality effect."1 One of the most telling representations of a culture concerns its own sense of law and order, right and wrong. When we apply the semiological approach to an analysis of film, we discover something about ourselves and our culture. My analysis begins by noting that we have a national obsession with legal matters and judicial trials, an obsession reflected in the media and press focus on the O.J. Simpson trial. I take up this exploration of cinematic images of justice in recent films beginning with Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), a film that broke new ground in its explicit references to panties and relationships between a married woman and a man other than her husband. Today one might wonder what the brouhaha was all about. While the judge in "Anatomy of a Murder" may still embody the traditional image of the authoritative judge, the system that he represents was already beginning to break down. The jury in the film concludes that the defendant, portrayed by Ben Gazzara, is not guilty of premeditated murder; however, we discover after the innocent verdict has been rendered, that Ben and his wife, played by Lee Remick, have stiffed their attorney and managed to get away with the crime. What the film illustrates is that a good lawyer is more significant in winning a case, than the client's innocence. This motif is replayed repeatedly in more recent crime/courtroom films. "Anatomy of a Murder" gives us an opportunity to define how the stellar image of judges in our culture was once represented. Power, stature and respect are conveyed cinematically by a low angle image of a person whom we expect to be raised above that of an ordinary individual. Not surprisingly, this is exactly how Judge Welch is portrayed in "Anatomy of a Murder." In contrast, consider the more recent image of the judge in "Judicial Consent" (1994). Here, the judge is accused of being involved in a murder plot. In this instance, Bonnie Bedelia, a most attractive judge, looked down on by the camera, is portrayed as a frustrated, sensual woman who has sexual relations with the son of a former defendant in her courtroom. He sets her up to appear guilty of the murder of a womanizer who earlier tried to seduce her. Her image is hardly that of the sacrosanct judge. The judge is portrayed as an opportunistic and sensual female, not unlike the Carolyn Polhemous character, who worked in the DA's office in Scott Turow's "Presumed Innocent" (1990) and who brought about the corruption of Judge Little and the near conviction of Rusty Savitch. Reverence, respect, belief in authority and justice are all central concerns in a democratic society -- concerns made more problematic by a system that appears to protect the accused more effectively than the state or the victims. It is in response to contemporary concerns about the role of law and justice in society that modern audiences desire to experience a sense of control and self righteous indignation that the film industry has consciously or unconsciously sought to satisfy. expression. With modern computer generated alterations of "real" forms of expression (photographs and audiotapes, for example), film mythmaking has become both more problematic and intriguing. For example, "Zelig" (1983), "In the Line of Fire" (1993), and the Hollywood blockbuster, "Forrest Gump" (1994), are recent examples of films that have "fooled" the audience and rewritten history. Hollywood has become enamored with the 30-second sound bite and the advertised image and set them up to compete with hard won truths of the past that require sacrifice, diligence, perseverance and vision. Hollywood film-makers have promoted the cultural redefinition of success as an opportunity to succeed by buying a lottery ticket or hiring a good stock broker or effective attorney. American society has had a long romance with the law, but the romantic image of law seems now to be presented in the most critical of perspectives. Several films from the 1980s demonstrate the frustrations being expressed in popular culture as we come to grips with the reality of our legal system. "The Star Chamber" (1983) and "And Justice For All" (1979) are powerful illustrations of what happens in films when popular frustrations with law and lawyers are heightened. Both films illustrate problems with the present legal system and warn us that a simple solution, like executing apparent criminals, is not the answer. More recent films provide further examples but none as poignant and focused in their message as "The Star Chamber" and "And Justice For All." American culture values those who take the law into their own hands and summarily bring about a lay sense of justice when those working within the legal system have failed. A whole series of films that focus on the desire for "corrective" justice have glorified self-help. Film cycles such as "Death Wish" (1974), "Dirty Harry" (1971), "Walking Tall" (1973), and "Billy Jack" (1971) posit a hero who can define right and wrong and peremptorily act on a sense of justice that seems missing in the legal system. These films empower 1) an ordinary citizen to seek revenge against criminals after the murder of his wife; 2) a police officer who uses the same tactics as criminals in order to even the playing field; 3) a southern sheriff who makes certain that no criminal will walk away from his district without paying a heavy price for whatever infraction he may have committed; and 4) a "politician" who uses rhetoric and karate to attain whatever self-righteous ends he assumes he is entitled to. There is little popular or political protest against the version of justice represented in these films. And we seem to be entering a political era in which a similar "politics" of self-help is condoned and advocated. Such catchy slogans as "three strikes and you're out" make quotable campaign fodder, but not necessarily good law. The propensity to take the law into our own hands was part of the yet to be civilized west represented in film westerns has come full circle, with state legislatures rushing to pass laws protecting the "good folk" in a community, by granting them a license to carry concealed weapons and making it possible to easily obtain these weapons. Of course, it is weapons and their use that seriously undermine our sense of security and erode the ability of the legal system to respond efficiently to other civil matters. Frustrations with the slow workings of the legal process and present crime rates warrant, for many citizens, abandonment of traditional constitutional guarantees which protect citizens against warrantless searches and abuses of police and governmental power; however, the protections now afforded criminals by the legal system have so upset so many in our society, that many are willing to sacrifice individual rights for the sake of greater security. One might assume that the "contract with America" will itself be reflected in future films. I predict that films will increasingly embrace the philosophy of the "law and order" right and offer an array of self-help and community-based solutions to social problems attributed to an unresponsive legal system. The solutions will likely focus on swift justice, simple answers, and a desire for security over rights. The new myth of security will embrace the right turn in politics with vigor and enthusiasm. We must, however, keep in mind that Hollywood seems to be ambivalent about the future it portrays in films that set their action in the year 2000 and beyond. Films such as "Soylent Green" (1973), "Blade Runner" (1982), "A Boy and His Dog" (1975), and "The Terminator" (1984), illustrate how bleak and oppressive the vision of the future is in Hollywood films. These films create urban centers with no light, rampant crime, nonhuman or inhuman characters, and a world in which there is peace and little hope for justice. This bleak view is rampant because there is more drama in the depiction of a failed future and a plague of misfortunes than one in which we have seen the triumph of normality and ordinariness of everyday life. In the film version of the future, our problems dominate the landscape. Environmental blight and degradation, uncontrollable gang violence, and the invasion of alien creatures are all ahead of us. Few present day films forecast a better future than the present and many anticipate lawlessness and despair. Our nightmares will become tomorrow's news headlines. in films. In many instances, the legal system and justices who symbolize the system are presented in a way that plays to our skepticism about the system and how it operates. Films like "Jagged Edge (1985)," "Presumed Innocent," "Body of Evidence" (1992) and "Guilty As Sin" (1993) reflect a legal system that warrants our skepticism. These films suggest that lawyers, as well as judges, operate in a system of justice that no longer works. Most law-oriented films do not focus on judges as central figures, in part because the roles of lawyer are far more dynamic, and therefore, dramatic. In each of the cited films, the court decides for the defendant, while the audience is clearly aware of his guilt. Only after the verdict is rendered, does the attorney, in each case, discover the truth and turn to means and resources outside the legal system to address the faulty verdict. Laudable as it may be for actors in the legal system to finally discover the injustice and expose the truth, it is quite another when judges and lawyers trample on individual "rights" and attempt to accomplish socially sanctioned objectives by transgressing constitutional protections and "rules of law." In "And Justice For All" and "The Star Chamber," judges find extra-judicial means to deal with criminals that make use of the legal system to avoid punishment. For example, the judge in "The Star Chamber" raises a legitimate question: "Is the unjustifiable punishment of one wronged man out of ten sufficient justification to stop the process of revenge?" A world in which our anxiety about crime has become paramount and officers of the law demand more freedom to pursue the criminal may answer yes, but many will remember the victims of a system in which a community or individuals take matters of justice into their own hands. While "And Justice For All" and "Star Chamber" are extreme documents that clearly overstate their cases and never present a positive alternative to the perverted system of justice that is attacked, they do make a good case for caution in setting up alternatives that may prove that the cure is worse than the disease. For example, in "Star Chamber," Judge Steve Hardin (Michael Douglas), rules in favor of a number of apparently guilty defendants because the police have confiscated evidence without a proper search warrant. Douglas is extremely agitated about having to release the scum, but he feels he has no choice, because the law is clear on what is and is not admissible evidence. When three cases in a row are thrown out on technicalities, Judge Hardin seeks the advice of his law school mentor, another judge, played by Hal Holbrook. Holbrook promises to provide the appropriate tools when Douglas is ready for them. Douglas is in the running for a seat on the superior court and once he is appointed he discovers that these nine judges sometimes take the law into their own hands. They rule on cases that have escaped prosecution through some technicality. Once they hand down a verdict, a hit man is hired to punish the culprits. This system seems to satisfy all concerned, until Douglas brings up one of his most heinous cases, the one where two men kidnap young boys, force them into pornographic movies and then murder them. He presents this case and the justices agree that these offenders don't deserve to live. The wheels of justice are set into motion, and nothing can be done to stop it. Douglas discovers from one of his policeman friends that the two accused may not be guilty, since the truck in which they were caught was a stolen vehicle and the body of the mutilated boy was already in the truck. Consequently, the accused may not have been responsible for the murder. The audience realizes that these two losers were only looking to rob someone, not to murder young children. Douglas tries to intercede to prevent their murder, but is told that it is too late. Nothing can be done. He responds by saying "We have become them," and storms out the door trying to do what he can to prevent another miscarriage of justice. Up to this point, "The Star Chamber" is a provocative, exciting film. From here until the end, it is nothing more than a silly chase film that has little to do with the earlier questions raised. The stage was clearly set here for vigilante justice, but the director (Hackford Taylor) was hesitant to give too much authority to those in power. Consequently, the movie is reduced to silly gibberish at the end. Michael Douglas goes to the seedy part of town, tracks down the culprits and finds them engaged in fabricating PCP. He gets beaten up, tries to defend himself and finally sets the building on fire. The resolution has little to do with the issues of justice and the law that were the focus of the film. Consequently, a deconstructive analysis is most appropriate, since opposition is disclosed to be both asymmetrical and unstable. From this perspective, the idea of the law and the execution of the law are at odds with each other. The film creates a tension in the audience that the film fails to reconcile, thus forcing the viewer to resolve the issues. Audiences identify with the cultural sources of power in this film, the judges, but their exposure during the latter portion of the film destabilizes the identification and marginalizes the commitment felt toward this dominant social order. Law and justice are assumed to reside on the same side of the spectrum; however, the early episodes in the film establish them as forms of resistance undermining the hegemony of the system and challenging the viewers to impose their own sense of order in place of the one that is apparently breaking down. The film seeks to legitimate the corruption of the judicial system by having these pillars of society reside beyond the reach of the common folk, but when the system takes on a power of its own and cannot be controlled by those who are supposedly in charge, we are destabilized and experience anxiety about the authoritative rendered. alternatives that the film uses to resolve the issues it has manufactured. Since the resolution is unsatisfactory, the viewer must rely on his own experience and resources to provide an alternative reading. In this instance, judges are not to be placed above the law and neither are criminals to be normalized by evading their social responsibilities. Another resolution may be constructed from the viewer's perspective so that he can conceptualize reestablishing a sense of order through trust in a system that the film has illustrated is flawed and inadequate. "The viewer finds the opposition between spectator and spectacle to be unstable, begins to acknowledge his or her complicity with the object under consideration, and acknowledges that the extent of the complicity may never be fully acknowledged.... What results is the sense that we too have become implicated in the 'deconstruction' of the oppositions we have witnessed. "2 Too many recent crime related films reconfirm the anxieties audiences feel about their own sense of security and justice. It is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish fictional films from the news. To argue that one is "real" and the other is "fantasy" can hardly be supported. News footage, like documentaries, is traditionally edited to fit a time slot and an editorial point of view. Similarly, films legitimize images of the dominant social order by attempting to capture those icons of the dominant social order that define the canonical view of society. By challenging this order and valorizing the forms of discord, the film medium is challenging the status quo and destabilizing the foundations on which the social order rests. The censorship code used to demand that righteousness be rewarded and evil be punished and that sacrosanct institutions be depicted with reverence. In contemporary films, no outside force is legislating the content of the material beyond giving it a rating in terms of the maturity of the appropriate audience. To suggest that films anticipated the challenge to family values long before it became politically correct, is merely paying attention to what has been destabilized in films over the last decade. A similar attitude is expressed toward the legal process that has received such intense scrutiny of late. Films such as "Jagged Edge," "Body of Evidence," "Presumed Innocent," and 'Guilty As Sin" undermine the faith the public has in the judicial system, as the guilty characters are found innocent by the courts, but are clearly guilty from the audience's point of view. Just because all of them ultimately die, does not make the audience feel much more comfortable with the verdicts that are rendered. Films may provide escape, but they also indirectly instruct in the nature of our social world, perhaps more than we might want to know. This contradiction between the resolution of the plot and the lack of resolution of the theme reinforces this sense of insecurity. "And Justice For All," an all-out four-barrel attack on the legal system, effectively states the objectives of all the films that have been discussed when Al Pacino says, "What is the intention of justice? That the guilty are proven guilty and the innocent are freed." He also says that "both sides want to win regardless of the truth, guilt or innocence of the defendant." He is even more to the point, when, near the end of his opening arguments, he attacks the Judge, played by John Forsythe, by stating that he is supposed to stand for something. At the end, Pacino is forcibly escorted out of the court room and Forsythe is still on trial, but with his character witnesses still unblemished and the verdict for his case still pending. This ending unfortunately has uncomfortably close parallels with many of the ethics violations recently exposed in the Senate and the Clinton cabinet. The legal system, from the perspective of film, may be collapsing but it is not clear that this is the lesson taken from these films by viewers. A recent study by Bruce Austin, Immediate Seating: A Look at Movie Audiences, came to the following conclusions: Most audiences see films the way they see life, and that is through filters of prejudice, distrust, and destruction of community. Only changes in the social order will bring about a reconfiguration of the paradigms of filmic representation. INTRODUCTION 161 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 2. Bruce A. Austin, IMMEDIATE SEATING: A LOOK AT MOVIE AUDIENCES 104-105 (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1989). 3. Forest Pyle, Making Cyborgs, Making Humans: Of Terminators and Blade Runners, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (eds), FILM THEORY GOES TO THE MOVIES 228-229 (New York: Routledge, 1993). |
