One Not-So-Angry Man
With a Metascore of 96, one of the top ten movies (number five to be exact on the IMDb listings of all-time greats) is Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, about a jury sequestered in a murder case. The story revolves around twelve men on the jury, already a gender-biased and racially-biased statement about the changing times, since this movie’s 1957 release. These are literally twelve white men, serving on a NYC criminal jury during the un-air-conditioned heat of a long, hot summer. The first unique thing about this film is that there are no names assigned to the roles played by these prominent actors, they are all referred to as Juror 1-12. Juror 8 is played by Henry Fonda and he is the star of the show since he is the initial verdict holdout who is unwilling to find the suspect guilty in a quick adjudication and spends the rest of the movie working to change the minds of the other eleven men as they slowly change their minds and drop their tendency towards an expectant solution to their heated and distasteful task. The other great actors in the film are Juror 3, Lee J. Cobb, Juror 1, Martin Balsam, Juror 4, E. J. Marshall, Juror 5 Jack Klugman, Juror 7, Jack Warden and Juror 10, Ed Begley. The other five jurors (John Fiedler, Edward Binns, Joseph Sweeney, George Voskovec and Robert Webber) are perhaps the angriest of these men since they did not see their career skyrocket after the film the way the other seven did.
The interesting sociological point to be made by this powerful film is that the judicial process under the Anglo-American legal system, while it may presume innocence, does not insure that racial, religious, political orientation, sexual preference and identity, national origin or gender bias does not exist in the supposed jury of one’s peers. All those things are there in the room while Lumet skillfully guides us through the thought and advocacy process of getting people to shed their biases in favor of the truth (or at least the reasonable doubt needed) to achieve an acquittal. This movie does a better job of explaining the judicial process of justice than any book or movie has ever done and at its core is the concept of the rule of law and doctrine of fairness. The concept is embodies in the many versions of Lady Justice that have adorned the various high courts of the world since Egyptian and Hellenic times and seems most prominent in places where English Law prevails like in London, Wales and Hong Kong. Lady Justice is a modern depiction of the Roman goddess Justitia, who is most often shown with a blindfold on (showing that the law is to be meted out with impartiality) , holding both a set of scales for the balancing of the truthfulness of the circumstances and a sword, for the deliverance of punishment to the convicted.
The underlying anger in this great film really emanates from three things; first there is the anger that comes with the human condition, a condition of hardship as embodied in the heat of summertime in a cloistered New York jury room. The second, underlying sense of anger comes from the attempts by the subconscious of these jurors to seek fairness and retribution for all the ills and unfairness that have been inflicted on them in their lives. Naturally, the law tries and presumes that we have all checked our baggage at the door of the courtroom and not brought those feelings into the verdict we put forth. These are the proverbial wounds of youth we all bear in some capacity or another and that seethe to the surface when we are asked or called to bring judgement against others. It goes right to the Biblical sense that we seek to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” The hard part is, of course, forgiving others that trespass, but the canon of forgiveness is vague and shrouded in plenty of Biblical retaliation as well as grace. The anger comes in the sword and sidesteps the scales of justice. The final and perhaps most righteous anger is that of the indignation of injustice. To see a wrong that should not be inflicted breeds a great deal of anger both in the mind and in the soul. To see one enforced by man (anthropomorphized into a jury of supposed peers) seems far more maddening than one randomly placed by nature, even though neither is without its distaste.
Last night, our friend Gary introduced us to the Generation War series, which is a German WWII mini-series produced in 2013 and depicting the horrors of war as seen through the eyes of five young Berliners facing the most turbulent of times in German history, 1941-1945. These vignettes take place not in a jury room, but on the battlefield, and yet they are as judgmental as anything we witness in 12 Angry Men. The acts under review by these young Germans trying to understand their own national loyalty and their broader obligations to humanity are ones of ethnic and nationalistic dominance and cruelty. It embodies the German invasion and subjugation of Poles, battle on the Eastern Front against the mighty if crude Russian army, the prejudicial eradication of the Jews (some would say this German pic does not begin to go far enough in this aspect) and the overall brutality and callousness of war and how it changes people. The heat of war is like the heat of summer in the jury room. The lashing out to save oneself that occurs in the ruins of Poland are not so different than the biases of the various jurors as they just want it all to be over as soon as possible rather than with the greatest amount of justice for all. The twinkling light of conscience and good is barely able to be survive through the maelstrom, but it remains unextinguished in first one person and then the next as the process of revelation and redemption moves forward like a half-track through the mud and snow of a late Russian winter.
We have watched two of the episodes titled Different Time and Different War and have yet to watch the third and final episode, Different Country. The clear trajectory of the series is not unlike the process of adjudication that Henry Fonda leads his eleven fellow jurors through. The five stages of grief and loss are all around with the final reconciliation and ultimate redemption still at hand. I very much look forward to how this all ends, since it can only end with a realization that even solving this one current skirmish with all-too-real life must only lead to the next case of man’s inhumanity to man (and I use the gender-specificity only evoke the familiar lexicon).
Sitting on my desk at this moment is a Federal Jury Summons which I must attend in mid-October. I have done jury duty a half-dozen times over the years, even serving on juries, but never completing the full adjudication process since the plea-bargaining mechanism is so very well-oiled in America. I consider jury duty to be one of my obligations to both my country and my fellow man, so I will comply and do as I am told when the time comes. What I hope is for the same hope that the twelve movie jurors and the five young Berliners hope for, and that is for justice to prevail. Despite all the evidence to the contrary in todays news reports of the machination of the various pending investigations and possible indictments of Donald Trump and his full array of allies, I believe in the application of justice and for that to happen, we must all, myself especially (since I can only control my own actions fully), participate in the process and render judgement as needed. I must force myself to be one not-so-angry man for the process.