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Volume 15, Number 3 (1991) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum YOUNG MR. LINCOLN: THE LAWYER AS SUPER-HERO NORMAN ROSENBERG Department of History Macalester College* studies, and a "law and literature movement" has gained considerable promi- ence.1 Although a few writers have also taken motion pictures and television seriously,2 efforts to extend legal studies into visual media face special difficul- ties. Film and television, for instance, employ unique visual "styles." And while lawyers routinely deal with printed texts in their professional lives, watching motion pictures or gazing at the tube seem off-duty pastimes. Never- theless, by examining a "legal film," John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), this essay will suggest how both motion pictures and cinematic theory might enrich the study of legal culture. Starring Henry Fonda, Young Mr. Lincoln was released at the end of the 1930s, a decade in which Abraham Lincoln's historical shadow fell across the political spectrum. Even the Communist Party, pursuing its Popular Front strategy, held "Lenin and Lincoln" rallies.3 By the end of the 1930s, Holly- wood had two Lincoln films in production. Adapted from a successful stage play, John Cromwell's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) stresses familiar political events, such as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Seeking a different focus, Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln looks at the beginning of Lincoln's legal career. I propose neither the definitive "legal" reading of Young Mr. Lincoln nor a general model for "law and film." I do, however, want to use cinematic literature on this much-discussed movie in order to suggest how films offer representations of legal culture that may be even richer than those in literary texts. Any "law and cinema movement" should recognize, at the outset, that motion pictures about law are films rather than printed texts.4 Although Young Mr. Lincoln rests upon popular histories of Lincoln's legal work, its representations of law and lawyers ultimately depend upon the cinematic practices of classical Hollywood. As one cinema scholar explains, "A film is stylistic before it is grammatical."5 Thus, if one looks only at Young Mr. Lincoln's dialogue and lengthy trial sequences, they may seem to cast Lincoln as the symbol of legal purity. In this sense, the film initially appears to challenge the critical tone of the 1930s by offering a "positive image of the virtuous lawyer" - the independent, responsible professional who will defend unpopular clients in the worst of times.6 But tapping the work of film scholars, as well as legal history and theory, I want to highlight other, more critical layers in this complex film. Viewed as a complicated set of cinematic discourses and seen against the back- drop of the 1930s - a time in which many legal writers looked critically at what lawyers were doing, as opposed to what they claimed to be doing - Young Mr. Lincoln raises a set of troubling issues about the search for justice and the role of the legal profession.7 feminine and to nature. While swapping the Clays, a family of homesteaders, flannel cloth for a barrel of bric-a-brac, Lincoln discovers that the barrel con- tains a copy of Blackstone's Commentaries. "Why, that's law," he reverentially exclaims. "Law. I knew that book was about something ... . We took mighty good care of it," replies an equally-awestruck Mrs. Abigail Clay. This almost comical adoration for legal texts, which function symbolically as representations of abstract justice, will contrast vividly with Abigail Clay's later confrontation with actual legal practices. The early portions of the film, though, continue to identify law with nature and the feminine. Using the filmic technique of a dissolve, where the final image from one scene is superimposed over the first image of the next in order to suggest continuity, Young Mr. Lincoln shows its title character receiv- ing Blackstone from Mrs. Clay and then reading it under the protective shade of a tree. The Blackstone scene is carefully composed, evoking the spirit of nineteenth-century landscape painting: With his feet propped up above his head and against the tree, Lincoln studies amidst the pastoral tranquility of rural Illinois. Inspired by his natural surroundings, young Lincoln finds Blackstone radiating a natural, common-sense morality. At the outset, then, the film identifies Lincoln with a view that strips law of ambiguity and historical contin- gency. "By Jing! That's all there is to it: right and wrong," Lincoln joyfully concludes. "Maybe I should take up this legal thing." Soon, he is joined by Ann Rutledge, his (mythical) first love. Still shielded by the protective tree, he reflects on Blackstone and her wish that he become a lawyer. Following Ann's sudden death, a grieving Lincoln kneels at her grave and ponders his future. If the stick in his hand naturally falls toward Ann's grave, Lincoln pledges, he will become a lawyer; if it topples toward him, he will remain a store clerk. Falling toward Ann's headstone, the stick taps Lincoln for a legal career. (He admits his own ambitions, though, by conceding that he may have tilted the twig "just a bit.") Continuing with images from nature, Young Mr. Lincoln uses pictures of seasonal change to represent the practice of law as anything but serene. As Abe thinks about Blackstone and talks about law with Anne, for instance, a peaceful river gently flows, from screen left to screen right, behind them. But at Anne's grave, when the lone Lincoln confronts the concrete prospect of a legal career, the river has become ice-clogged and swifter-flowing, and it has ominously changed direction, running away from the rural simplicity of New Salem and toward the bustling state capital of Springfield. Following the river's changed flow, Lincoln acquires a new career and different clothes. Riding into Springfield, he now wears a black suit and the familiar stove pipe hat; even when later appearing in rustic settings, Lincoln remains straight-jacketed in the bourgeois uniform so closely identified with urban-industrial culture and male power. Although Young Mr. Lincoln gives no further clues as to how the country kid became a city lawyer, he still does not know "enough" law "to hurt me," Lincoln assures potential clients. Lincoln settles his first case without using the court system. Physically interposing himself between two feuding Mormon farmers, Hawthorne and Woolridge, Lincoln proposes a simple compromise, including a small fee for himself, in order to save "us all a heap of legal trouble." Although avoiding litigation by settling disputes in a lawyer's own office accorded with "republ- can" legal ideals of the early nineteenth century,8 Lincoln scorns the rhetorical tools and doctrinal categories of his new profession. Anxious to attend Spring- field's Fourth of July festivities, Lincoln bluntly issues his own decree. And when one of the disputants threatens to reject this settlement - and "go to law" - Lincoln threatens to bang both of their heads together until his solution is accepted. Having resolved his first case, by threatening violence in order to avoid "legal trouble," Lincoln wanders through Springfield's Independence Day festivities. By midnight, he has stumbled upon his second case, a murder charge against two boys from the very same family, the Clays, whose barrel had brought him to Blackstone. During the July Fourth events, Scrub White, a deputy sheriff, and his friend, Jack Cass, repeatedly harass the Clay family. While getting the worst of a fist fight with Matt Clay, Scrub White pulls a pistol. Both Matt and his brother Adam wrestle for the gun; it goes off, and Scrub White, cradled in Jack Cass' arms, lies dead of a stab wound from Matt's knife. Significantly, this night-lit scene is carefully staged so as to deny film viewers a clear, unambiguous view of Scrub's final moments. Frontier violence provides Lincoln the opportunity to repay Mrs. Clay for introducing him to the law. Rejecting her sons' impulse to flee, in order to avoid their own legal trouble, Abigail Clay retains her devotion to the legal order and insists that the sheriff be called. But after listening to Jack Cass' account, the law officer arrests the Clay brothers and then nearly loses them to a lynch mob. Informing a confused Mrs. Clay - who does not recognize Lincoln, though he remembers her - that "I'm your lawyer, Ma'am," Lincoln takes over from the ineffectual sheriff and - with measured doses of threat- ened violence, homespun humor, and frontier bravado - scatters the men- acing crowd. As with Hawthorne and Woolridge, Lincoln shows his individual power to be more potent than that of the institutionalized law. Dispersing a mob, however, appears easier than negotiating the judicial system, and potential lynchers seem more reasonable than members of the bar. The trial judge, for instance, will hold both boys equally guilty of first-degree murder, unless it can be proved that only one inflicted Scrub White's fatal wound. Moreover, the bumbling trial judge and two politically-ambitious lawyers, including a pompous prosecuting attorney and an opportunistic Ste- phen A. Douglas, remain equally oblivious to their own shortcomings and to Lincoln's superior abilities. Young Mr. Lincoln stages the trial of the Cass brothers as a frontier circus that threatens to end with a grave miscarriage of justice. Apparently, Scrub White has fallen victim to an unfortunate accident, one that he and Jack Cass, in no small measure, brought upon themselves. At worst, Scrub's death seems a case of manslaughter rather than first-degree murder; alternatively, the two brothers may have acted in legitimate self-defense, and the stabbing was a byproduct of a fight that the Clays had not begun. But can even Abraham Lincoln, the narrative asks, save the boys and secure justice in a legal forum filled with incompetents and buffoons? Lincoln's task becomes more complicated when Abligail Clay refuses to testify. She will risk seeing both of her boys executed rather than save one by naming, in a court of law, the other as Scrub's murderer. After briefly at- tempting a private interrogation of Mrs. Clay, Lincoln supports her motherly desire to remain silent. And when the prosecutor demands that the judge order her to speak truthfully on the witness stand, Lincoln intervenes to protect her silence. At this point, then, Young Mr. Lincoln hails the lawyer who risks chances for a courtroom victory by elevating human concerns over legalistic one. Yet, by faithfully representing Mrs. Clay's wishes, Lincoln also gambles w ith the lives of both his clients and puts the law in the position of condem- ning an innocent person to death. Confronting these legal and moral complications, Lincoln appears stunningly inept. Contributing to the carnival atmosphere, Lincoln avoids legal arguments in favor of backwoods humor. He clowns at the expense of Jack Cass, who appears as a surprise witness for the prosecution and claims that he saw Matt Clay fatally stab Scrub White; during the trial's first day, Lincoln cannot shake this testimony. Even the slow-thinking trial judge seems a shrew- der lawyer. With Lincoln apparently uncertain about his next move, the judge implores him to let an experienced lawyer, such as Stephen Douglas (who has hitherto been consorting with the prosecution), assist him in pleading Matt Clay guilty in exchange for leniency for Adam. Lincoln refuses and prepares for the trial's final day by sitting alone in his office and playing tunes on a Jew's harp. But, just when tragedy seems inevitable, Lincoln stages his own court- room show. In a dramatic turn, he reveals that neither of the boys caused Scrub White's death, Both are innocent! This ending is "dopey, to be sure," notes the legal scholar Anthony Chase, "but moving nonetheless."9 Part of this appeal, especially in an era when many people were conver- sant with the Lincoln legend, comes from the way in which Young Mr. Lincoln transfers anecdotes from popular histories to the silver screen. Although the most reliable student of Lincoln's legal work, John P Frank, doubts the Black- stone in a barrel story, the poet-biographer Carl Sandburg confidently includes it in Abraham Lincoln - The Prairie Years (1926), and he, like John Ford, has Lincoln reading Blackstone, upside down, "under the shade of the tree."10 More specialized accounts of Lincoln's legal career also provide historical grounding for the legal scenes in Young Mr. Lincoln. Lincoln's first documented case, for example, did involve an out-of-court settlement between two farmers named Hawthorne and Woolridge, and the film's dialogue here follows Sandburg's account closely enough to support a prima facie case of plagiarism.11 Similarly, much of Fonda's courtroom humor comes directly from popular histories of Lincoln's law practice.12 Young Mr. Lincoln also follows accounts of Lincoln's most famous criminal trial, the 1857 murder prosecution of William "Duff" Armstrong. Screenwriter Lamar Trotti moved the case back to the beginning of Lincoln's career, and he borrowed the idea of a mother refusing to testify at the murder trial of her two sons from an incident he recalled from his days as a young reporter in Georgia.13 In most other respects, however, Young Mr. Lincoln resembles the Armstrong case, including the idea of Lincoln repaying a debt to a mother figure.14 Most important, the crucial incident in both the Armstrong trial and Young Mr. Lincoln features Lincoln cleverly impeaching the prosecution's evidence. In the Armstrong case, a witness came forward and claimed to have seen Duff strike the fatal blow, but Lincoln used a Farmer's Almanac to demon- strate that, contrary to the witness's claims of seeing the crime by moonlight, the moon would have been too low in the sky to lluminate the fatal inci- dent.15 Young Mr. Lincoln goes beyond the facts of the Armstrong trial by having Lincoln employ an almanac not only to discredit testimony against his client but to unmask the real killer. In a withering interrogation, which takes place away from the witness stand, Lincoln browbeats Cass into admitting he lied about the moonlight in order to pin the blame on Matt Clay - and to conceal his own guilt!16 Suddenly dropping his role as a buffoon, a newly- ferocious Lincoln miraculously sees things others simply miss.17 All along, the question should have been who killed Scrub White rather than which boy was guilty. connection between law as an ideal of justice and law as a set of institutional practices. Using both cinematic and legal sources, I especially want to "cross- examine" the film on a particular question that has long troubled lawyers and laypeople alike. Can citizens trust a special caste of legal "experts" to speak effectively for their silenced clients and for broader community values? As Allan Hutchinson has recently observed, lawyers generally claim "to speak and act in a voice other than their own" and to "justify themselves by reference to an authority beyond themselves - the law."18 Skeptics have long questioned this rationale for the power of lawyers - and for the transcendence claimed for legal discourse - and skepticism verged on cynicism during the 1920s and 1930s. In the heyday of legal realism, critical lawyers rejected claims that the specialized languages of their profession could adequately represent complex social and moral issues and search for alternative ways of framing legal issues. Young Mr. Lincoln was surely not directly inspired by legal realists from Yale Law School (any more than it was directly inspired, as some film critics contend, by a desire to defeat Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election); 19 still, the film's view of lawyers and legal language bears traces of the realist critique that permeated both elite and pop- ular legal culture during the Depression decade.20 Most obviously, Young Mr. Lincoln transforms hagiographic histories about Lincoln's legal exploits. Using the unique stylistics of cinema and draw- ing upon the popular legal culture of the 1930s, it highlights deeply-rooted tensions within liberal legal culture. The film's early glorification of written law, identified with nature and the feminine, for instance, disappears once Lincoln begins the actual practice of law. The confrontation between young Lincoln and the potential lynch mob offers an obvious example of how the popular legal culture of the 1930s helps to shape the film's representations of law. Mob justice, of course, was an important issue during the eras of both young Abraham Lincoln and Young Mr. Lincoln.21 Lincoln himself took a strong public stand against the mob spirit of the 1830s in his famed "Lyceum Speech" of 1838. During the 1950s, when the reaction against legal realism and the veneration of legal discourse were both at high tide, the political theorist Harry Jaffa offered an elaborate exegesis of this speech, celebrating the depth and subtlety of Lincoln's defense of the rule of law. Every citizen every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, [should] swear Jaffa hails this "defense of the rule of law from all forms of arbitrary rule," while the psycho-historian Charles B. Strozier sees Lincoln's Lyceum speech as a "vehement defense" of his longer-term embrace of the ideal of "the procedural community."23 Young Mr. Lincoln frames the young lawyer's response to mob justice very differently. First, Lincoln threatens to beat a loud-mouthed provocateur to a bloody pulp. And though he also appeals for calm, the film's version of Lincoln's 1838 speech is hardly an exposition on the rule of law. Lincoln, for example, reminds the crowd that they will cheat him, a struggling young lawyer, out of a potential legal fee if they hang the Clay boys without a trial. Young Mr. Lincoln's hero does defend the social order and the idea of a trial by jury, but not with elaborate legal arguments; indeed, this young Lincoln, from the 1930s, appears ignorant of the elegant legal patois employed by Harry Jaffa's youthful Mr. Lincoln of the 1950s. Similarly, this 1939 film represents courtrooms more as sites for moun- ting elaborately-staged performances than as places for presenting erudite legal arguments. The prosecutor's attempts at "lawyer talk," for example, primarily serve as rhetorical foils against which to privilege Lincoln's "plain-talk." More- over, the camera unmasks the prosecuting attorney as a self-conscious perform- er, an ambitious politician who calculatedly acts out the role of a lawyer on a courtroom stage. Skillfully played by character actor Donald Meek, the prose- cutor ostentatiously carries a fancy cane as a courtroom prop; when flustered, however, the camera catches him striding vigorously without the cane and, after catching his slip, returning to his limping, cane-assisted part in the courtroom drama that he is helping to script. Young Mr. Lincoln, then, represents legal discussions as based upon artificial, highly manipulable, and hardly transcendent discourses; similarly, it sees legal practices imbedded in a variety of unequal power relationships, especially that between lawyers and clients. The dramaturlogical aspects of the courtroom sequences reinforce the ways in which Young Mr. Lincoln foregrounds the ways in which legal discour- ses can serve as weapons of the powerful. Thus, the prosecutor and the judge persecute a saintly woman who worships the ideal of the rule of law. And in a cruel variation on the parable of Solomon and the two women who claim the same baby, they invoke the authority of law, Biblical as well as temporal, in trying to coerce Abigail Clay to speak and thereby condemn one of her sons to death. When Lincoln intervenes to protect Mrs. Clay's silence, he also assumes the power to speak for her - and to both "the law" and the film audience.24 Although Lincoln arguably does translate Abigail Clay's deepest moral convictions into public discourse, he does not, significantly, speak in the lan- guage of his profession. As in his earlier performance before the lynch mob, Lincoln eschews legal arguments. Equally important, the film's stylistic ele- ments complement its dialogue in emphasizing Lincoln's distance from main- stream legal practices. Lincoln, for example, rarely appears in the center of the courtroom scenes; usually, he is found roaming the edges of the film's frame. At one point in the trial, he wanders toward a law book; but rather than finally using textual authority to make "legal" argument Lincoln continues to clown, seemingly all to no point. Lincoln's strange relationship to his profession recalls the complex stance of other mass-cultural heroes, including those pledged to support legal forms and processes, who find that they "must sometimes be lawless in order to uphold the law."25 Numerous westerns, including those of the 1930s, highlight this theme, and John Ford himself returned to it in his many frontier epics, especially My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Man Who Shot Lib- erty Valence (1963).26 Similarly, other "legal films" of the 1930s - such as Talk of the Town (1938) and I Am the Law (1938) - also feature lawyers (indeed, law professors!) who operate outside the law in order to achieve justice. All of these films, however, still suggest that the limitations of the legal system are not systemic or insurmountable; confronting localized and particular ruptures of the legal order, a heroic individual, armed with nerve and firepower, can use regenerative violence in order to purge the system.27 Young Mr. Lincoln offers a somewhat different, more disturbing view of the relationship between "law" and "violence" than most westerns or films such as Talk of the Town. In order to introduce the film's complex perspective here, I want to suggest several alternative ways in which Hollywood might have resolved the plight of the Clay brothers. A legal advisor, seeking verisimilitude, for exam- ple, could well have proposed a filmic defense strategy based upon relatively narrow-focused arguments. Young Mr. Lincoln, for example, could have fea- tured pleas of self-defense, thereby exploring conflicting ideas about social order and the use of force. Or, as in (another Henry Fonda vehicle) Twelve Angry Men (1957), jurors might struggle with conflicting evidence; Ford's film could have showcased Lincoln cleverly raising doubts, in the minds of the jurors, about the evidence, thereby illustrating the principle that any criminal convic- tion requires a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In fact, a verdict for acquittal could have flowed logically from the film's plot: Since the camera bends (if it does not completely break) a central canon of classical Hollywood by failing to reveal crucial details of the Clay-White fracas,28 even the "ideal film viewer" remains uncertain who killed Scrub. Twelve Angry Men, which offers no view of its knife slaying, effectively uses a similar technique; in fact, it relies entirely upon subsequent legal discussions to construct the film audi- ence's picture of the initial crime scene. To consider only one more alternative, Young Mr. Lincoln might have moved decisively in a "populistic" direction. Much like Paul Newman's Frank Galvin in The Verdict (1982), Fonda's Lincoln could have urged jurors to ignore the Court's legal rulings, to uphold Mrs. Clay's moral stance, and to rebuff the arrogance of the prosecution by bringing in a verdict that, on the basis of common justice, found both boys innocent of murder charges. Recalling other Hollywood scenarios, then, I can imagine how the creators of Young Mr. Lincoln could have theoretically constructed alternative story lines that would have also led to the acquittal of the Clay boys and would have highlighted Lincoln's own prowess. But, any of these alternatives - all of which, of course, are drawn from motion pictures of subsequent, and very different, historical eras - would risk identifying Young Mr. Lincoln's mythic hero too closely with a system and a profession that were, to put it mildly, not treated with much respect, at least by mass culture, during the 1930s.29 All of these hypothetical alternatives, for instance, would require Lincoln to use legal skills in order to convince jurors that the Clay case was more complex - in terms of evidence, legal principles, and moral foundations - than it first seemed. In this sense, the film would have placed Lincoln in the culturally ambiguous role of using his professional talents to sow doubts in the minds of lay people, both the jurors in the "diegesis" (i.e. the story world constructed by the film itself) and the film audience of 1939. Lincoln's great- ness might, then, have seemed to rest largely upon his abilities to manipulate legal discourse. Young Mr. Lincoln, though exploiting the melodramatic aura that attaches to courtroom confrontations, wants to separate Lincoln's historical image from his professional abilities as a lawyer. Rather than succeeding by using legal arguments to create doubts, Lincoln triumphs by laying out a simple, certain solution, yet one that only a kind of super-hero, still in touch with the truths of nature, can recognize. Here, the Farmer's Almanac helps to signify Lincoln's unique and superior abilities that are ultimately rooted in nature rather than the artifices of the attorney. Ironically, Lincoln received both the almanac and Blackstone, from Abigail Clay, a woman who cannot comprehend the meaning of either text. And just as she naively reveres the written law, she also falls to understand (though she is also someone identified with nature) the import of this other book. Lincoln is also fingering the almanac when the trial judge, worried about Lincoln's ability to put on a good legal show, visits his office. But the judge, no more than Abigail Clay (and presumably virtually everyone viewing the film for the first time) can discern the book's relevance. When Lincoln finally reveals (to all of "us") the sig- nificance of the almanac - after pulling it out of his stovepipe hat, the consis- tent symbol of male potency and industrial society - and then using it to "break" Jack Cass, he decisively displays his unique abilities to see more clearly, and speak more powerfully, than other citizens and even his fellow profes- sionals. Ultimately, then, Young Mr. Lincoln marks its hero as someone who works within but is not really of the legal machinery. In this sense, Fonda's Lincoln bears passing resemblance to a similarly-coded "legal" hero who came to prominence in books and on the motion picture screen during the 1930s, the lawyer-detective Perry Mason.30 cinema - and in light of film scholarship - can highlight the richness of visual sources and their ability to capture the complexity of legally structured relationships and identities. Sensitivity to the nuanced representations offered in filmic texts, at the very minimum, might warn against reducing the richly- textured nature of human relationships to the narrow categories of legal dis- course.31 In this sense, the intricate representational structure of Young Mr. Lincoln has long intrigued film scholars. A collectively-authored essay by the editors of Cahiers du Cinema, for example, finds Lincoln cinematically coded as a "monstrous" figure rather than a virtuous attorney.32 According to this justly-famous essay, the head of Twentieth Century Fox Studios, Darryl F. Zanuck, wanted a movie that glorified the role of law in a capitalist society- But the process of inscribing an apology for liberal legalism into a Hollywood text, claims the Cahiers essay, ultimately undermines Zanuck's intention. Invoking the neo-Freudian psychology of Jacques Lacan, the Cahiers group sees Lincoln as a "castrating" character who runs roughshod over both legal procedures and individuals.33 He threatens physical violence and levels a fierce, "castrating gaze" on his adversaries.34 Shot in a bleak neo-expres- sionist style, the courtroom sequences feature a huge, shambling, black-clad protagonist who resembles the monster in the classic German film, Nosferatu (1922). A menacing figure, in his top hat and dark outfit, Fonda's Lincoln shuffles through the final sequences of Young Mr. Lincoln until "he leaves the frame and the film (like Nosferatu) as if it had become impossible for him to be filmed any longer ... . "35 The film's presumed ideological message about the importance of "law" falls victim to cinematic processes that highlight the power of an individual legal "genius." Similarly, further attention to cinematic style underscores the many ways in which Young Mr. Lincoln reinforces its unsettling representations of legal practice. Skillful use of lighting, for instance, gives the trial sequences a gloomy, haunting quality. Even while Lincoln is roaming the periphery of the courtroom, sometimes appearing in the film frame only as a shadow, he still eerily dominates the film's imagery. In addition, the variety of different musical motifs that run through the film - Lincoln's earliest monologues on Black- stone and law are accompanied by a melody associated with Anne Rutledge and Mrs. Clay - suddenly stop during the courtroom sequences. (Significantly, the scene in which Lincoln resolves the case of the two Mormon farmers also lacks any musical score.) Although classic Hollywood invariably employed musical soundtracks in order to punctuate dialogic and filmic points, Lincoln's legal work occurs against a backdrop of silence. Thus the film's musical score denies any lyrical quality to the practice of law. Lincoln's ambiguous presence within the legal frame is also emphasized, in both courtroom and law office sequences, by the ways in which Young Mr. Lincoln represents Fonda's physical posture. As the film scholar Marsha Kinder argues, the camera often shows Lincoln ostentatiously demonstrating his patriar- chal (and phallic) power as he abruptly "rises" from a sitting position and untangles himself "into a visual 'erection."36 Lincoln, for example, asserts his power over the quarreling farmers and Jack Cass by quickly "popping up" and comparing his physical size with theirs. When the trial judge visits Lincoln, on the night before Cass' confes- sion, Lincoln's relationship to legal authority is represented with a different posture. As the judge urges him to give way to Douglas, Lincoln remains seated; never rising to challenge the smaller judge directly, Lincoln feigns respect for this symbol of the legal order. But his remaining seated, in viola- tion of professional courtesy, also codes Lincoln as someone who is within, but not quite of, the legal machinery. Further distancing himself from legal propri- ety, Lincoln leans back, country-bumpkin style, in his chair as the judge im- plores him to withdraw for the greater good of the legal system . Lincoln finally responds, in "the most disruptive shot in the entire film," by raising a huge foot (Fonda was costumed in extra-long shoes) that "directly confronts the camera, accenting the rebellious nature of this posture and suggesting that the [film] frame can hardly contain Lincoln's coiled body which is straining to unleash its full powers."37 Lincoln, in other words, is preparing to give the law, and normal legal procedures, the boot. Cass' forcefully-extracted confession also marks Lincoln as within, rather than of, the legal process. As in the Perry Mason tales, Lincoln's in- dividual triumph hardly valorizes the legal profession or the public justice system.38 Jack Cass' confession, like those elicited by Perry Mason, prevents the legal machinery from rendering a clear miscarriage of justice. Moreover, while interrogating Cass, Lincoln reprises the power play he used on the two farmers: He interposes his own superior power so that justice will not have to rest upon the slender reeds of judge and jury. In eliminating the citizen-juror, as well as trained lawyers, from any role in securing justice, Young Mr. Lincoln again rejects the kind of stance taken in films such as The Verdict or even Twelve Angry Men. Its trial sequence ultimately trusts neither the legal system nor "the people" to render a just decision. Moreover, by symbolically linking the beginning of the Clays' ordeal and Lincoln's "test" to Independence Day, Young Mr. Lincoln also connects the growth of the legal system to the loss of independence by common citizens. As James Gordon has recently argued, works of popular culture, at many different levels, have long expressed a strange mix of respect for and concern about the powers assumed by lawyers.39 During the nineteenth century, com- plaints about the complexity of legal rules, and the subsequent necessity for speciallyy trained lawyers to translate them, fueled fears of ordinary people becoming dependent upon a self-perpetuating group of legal "experts."40 Mis- givings about the larger political dimensions of legal expertise never disappeared and, indeed, assumed considerable prominence in the popular legal culture of the 1930s.41 Young Mr. Lincoln's 1939 portrayal of Abigail Clay dwells upon a client's abject reliance upon a powerful attorney. The first several times Lin- coln and Abigail Clay meet, she is the strong "republican mother,"42 first working alongside her husband and then raising her sons both to be indepen- dent and true to the ideal of the rule of law. Tragically, the commercializing society of Springfield casually treats her as a stranger and throws her into an impersonal legal system that destroys her independence and maternal power. One film student nicely describes the representation of Abigail Clay during the trial scenes "as one of the profoundest manifestations of humanity's frightened bafflement before an inexplicable universe ever recorded by the camera."43 Although initially coded as a mother figure to Lincoln, the legal system forces Abigail Clay into silence and then into total dependence upon a young lawyer who keeps her ignorant of what he will do to save her boys. Lincoln secures an acquittal but not before asserting his patriarchal power and subjecting Abigail Clay and her sons to cruel and unusual punish- ment.44 Young Mr. Lincoln, in this sense, may play to popular fears about a legal system that usurps laypeople's ability to speak for themselves and places them in positions of dependency. The promise, offered early in the film, of a legal order based upon natural and widely-accessible ideas of right and wrong, vanishes in an age of increasing complexity and specialization. The film's persistent coding of Lincoln, as a black-clad and somewhat frightening figure, recalls popular worries about trusting the power to shape legal discourse to a special class of lawyers. In addition, Young Mr. Lincoln's representations of its hero also suggest the complex relationship between violence and law. Both the film's content and its style portray violence as an inextricable part of the everyday legal process, not simply an extreme measure for times of crisis. Young Mr. Lincoln thus dramatizes Robert Cover's thesis that violence accompanies any legal action and all powerful legal discourses. Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death LegalThus Lincoln's threat to bang the farmers' heads together, if they want to "go to law," does not so much substitute "violence" for "law" as it simply shifts the potential violence that buttresses all legal settlements from the judicial forum to Lincoln's law office. Moreover, this scene parallels the legal realist insight of the 1930s that legal coercion is not limited to state-controlled judicial institutions but also resides in quasi-private institutions as well. Young Mr. Lincoln, in this way, squarely suggests how legal coercion works in tandem with both the threats and the social practices of violence. In line with Cover's perspective, it rejects any simple, binary view - "law" as the alternative to "vio- lence" - in favor of one in which law and violence are inextricably linked, in both social and discursive practices.46 Perhaps most significant, Young Mr. Lincoln refuses any comfortable closure for the problems that it poses about law and the legal profession. After his legal triumph, Lincoln is hailed as a popular hero by an unseen crowd - standing in for us, the historical audience - and bathed in a bright shaft of light - suggesting a theatrical spotlight and reinforcing the stage-like nature of Lincoln's virtuoso performance. After sending his clients back to their farm and away from Springfield, a Christ-like Lincoln ascends a metaphoric hill; enveloped by a sudden storm, he climbs toward his appointed destiny, which the film audience has known about all along, accompanied by (the sudden return of musical) strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Fonda's Lincoln ultimately disappears from the film frame and is replaced by the marble icon of the Great Emancipator in the Lincoln Memorial. Although this closing sequence successfully elevates Lincoln into "his- tory," with its final shot of the truly "monstrous" figure at the Lincoln Memorial, Young Mr. Lincoln denies the legal system any transcendence or even any "voice." After Lincoln calculatedly stages Jack Cass' confession, he finally does use a familiar legal phrase: "Your Witness." Of course, neither the prosecutor nor the judge have anything to say. Lincoln silences them as effec- tively as they had earlier silenced Abigail Clay. Ordinary legal actors, like the populace from which Lincoln sprang, remain mute spectators to his perfor- mance and special powers. With the Clays, as with the Mormon farmers, Lincoln's "legal work" consists of using non-legal means to extract his "clients" from the legal machine- ry. Otherwise, people such as the Clays and the farmers, who are "strangers" to liberal culture, could easily be ground down by the gears of the machine. In reaching out and saving these "outsiders" from an impersonal legal system, Lincoln interposes his towering, patriarchal presence between the awesome might of the state and vulnerable members of sub-dominant com- munities. Significantly, he allows none of them to speak to the world of law. And neither does he even attempt to bring the farmers or the Clays into the new community that is being constructed and ordered by law. Seeing what others cannot, Lincoln paternalistically shepherds his clients away from the new regime of law and back to the communal worlds of nature from which they have strayed. The legal stage merely allows its lawyer hero to rehearse for his later political performances. In contrast to the hagiographic histories that it trans- forms, this film represents the study and practice of law as teaching the Great Emancipator almost nothing;47 a kind of "natural genius," he has nothing to learn.48 Indeed, everything necessary to save Matt and Adam Clay had always been there, right before the eyes of the diegetic characters and the film audi- ence. All of "us," Young Mr. Lincoln suggests, lack Lincoln's acute ability to see and his power to speak. Having demonstrated his heroic stature on the legal stage, Lincoln marches toward the wings, accompanied by the plaudits of his audience. The task of doing justice is left in the hands of a cast of dubious- ly-qualified characters. Even the lawyer-detective Perry Mason reassuringly closes virtually all of his cases in the company of his legal staff. But the lone Lincoln exits stage right, leaving the complex, and potentially lethal, legal machinery in the hands of flawed, short-sighted people. Young Mr. Lincoln thus employs the complex arts of filmmaking to explore some dark and haunting corners within law's vast empire. With its own dark lighting and its haunting courtroom scenes, the film suggests a fright- ening chasm between ideal views of justice and legal practices, and it challenges viewers to consider the costs, for lawyers and laypeople alike, of a system that reduces citizens to silent clients. |
