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Legal Studies Forum
Volume 17, Number 1 (1993)
reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum
VISUAL LITERACY AND THE LEGAL CULTURE:
READING FILM AS TEXT IN THE LAW SCHOOL SETTING
PHILIP N. MEYER
Vermont Law School*
I have found that students better understand this new "lan-
guage" than their book-bound teachers. While legal scholars are
more adept in reading written texts than their students, we
quickly find that our video sophisticated students are much
better trained in "reading" films. Therefore, film helps to level
the pedagogical playing field to the advantage of teacher and
students alike.
John Denvir1
During the 1990 and 1991 academic years I taught a course in popular
storytelling at the University of Connecticut School of Law. The underlying
premise for the course was simple: Our popular culture is predominantly,
perhaps exclusively, a narrative culture, a technologically based oral and visual
story culture, a culture of "secondary orality."' 2 Understandings" are imagistic
and story-centered. Law students and law professors are, of course, products
of this culture. More important, perhaps, lawyers operate in a predominantly
fact-based "narrative" legal culture - an increasingly visual (imagistic) and aural
story culture - discrete from the "paradigmatic" text-bound analytic culture of
the law school.3 Films provide a unique mechanism for structured critical
reflection on the dynamics of legal cultural storytelling.
By avocation, I am a long-time film junkie and closet-screenwriter. By
vocation, I have worked with "criminals" in the prisoners' rights office of a
public defender and taught creative writing at a state psychiatric facility for
criminals. I have always been fascinated by the stories of criminals. Conse-
quently, I selected films with the theme of the outsiders' perspectives on law
and society.4 I hoped that my work experiences would provide experiential
references for meaningful discussions of the films. I also hoped the discussions
might be therapeutic, for the instructor as well as for the class.
I am employed currently as a teacher of legal writing and director of a
legal writing program. I teach law students how to "write like lawyers." My
job is to acculturate students: I help them internalize the highly structured
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analytical form necessary to succeed in law school and transfer this abstract
paradigm into articulate lawyer-like prose.
Law students must effectively identify legal issues and correctly synthe-
size and articulate the legal rules necessary to resolve these issues. Students
must learn to systematically apply these rules ("the law") to "the legally signifi-
cant facts." Unfortunately, the legally significant facts embodied in law school
hypotheticals, legal writing problems and examination fact patterns are simpli-
fied, desiccated and decontextualized; they are merely excuses for students to
state and apply legal rules. The appellate opinions studied in law school are
based on re-examinations of law; they accept the facts of the case as fixed at trial.
After graduation, however, most lawyers operate as storytellers, subjec-
tive and passionate voices advocating client stories in a predominantly narrative
oral culture. Trial lawyers, for example, are "imagistic" storytellers operating
in a factually indeterminate and interpretivist world far removed from the
legally indeterminate world of the appellate court and the law school classroom.
I hoped participants in the seminar would rediscover and develop
subjective storytelling voices in their analysis of imagistic cinematic texts. I
hoped that participants could develop vocabularies for reflecting upon a com-
plex experiential world through analysis of films. I hoped that the course
might liberate the imaginations of law students exhausted after three years spent
in the stultifying and exclusive study of appellate cases.
In this essay, I expand on the brief journal excerpts cited in previous
articles,5 and share the deep thoughtfulness of several seminar participants. I
present significant excerpts from four representative journals, abetted by my
commentary, to identify and describe certain systematic and representative
features of this new literacy.
In the first journal excerpt, illustrative of the new aural and visual
literacy, one student presents a theoretical deconstruction of the stylistic ele-
ments in Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil." In the second illustrative excerpt,
another seminar participant applies his visual literacy to Roman Polanski's
"Chinatown" and Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line" and contrasts conflicting
popular images of the lawyer as detective and truthfinder with the lawyer as
postmodern trickster storyteller. In the third and fourth excerpts, one of which
comes from my journal, participants are sensitive to mythic sub-texts and
discover gender identities in Terrence Mallick's "Badlands" and James Foley's
"At Close Range."
These excerpts reflect discrete class discussion themes, and they also
manifest a stunning new visual literacy. In my commentary I discuss the
significance of this new literacy for legal cultural storytellers.
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Visual Literacy
Popular cinematic stories are generally simple linear narratives viewed
from the fixed perspective of an omniscient narrator or protagonist with whom
the viewer identifies. The story hooks the imagination of the audience and
propels the imagination forward with a "hard" plot-line. Since the audience can
not "back-loop"6 over the text, the sub-units of the film must simultaneously
reaffirm and express the central thematic concern or vision of the story while
the plot-line moves the story forward ineluctably. Consequently, sub-units may
be "read" independently and used to decode and comprehend the story's the-
matic content. This concept of underlying "story theme" is akin to the law-
yer's notion of "theory of the case" in the trial storytelling process.
In class discussion, I used freeze-frame analysis on a four-headed tape
machine to deconstruct thematic content. Participants were remarkably adept
at "stop action" analysis of images and deconstruction of smaller cinematic
units. Many "read" visual text and "subtext" fluidly, with great sophistication,
and were conversant with cinematic story-structure although none had taken
a film course or studied film theory. Nevertheless, participants readily under-
stood that images reflected deeper structures and resonated with specific mean-
ings. Participants, sophisticated cultural consumers of stories and images,
reflected systematically on these visual stories.
The journal of Alex G. illustrates this heightened visual and aural
literacy in a critique and deconstruction of the multiple layers of Orson Welles'
"Touch of Evil." The plot of this movie is a prototypical and simple detective
story: a good Mexican cop Vargas, portrayed by Charlton Heston (plastered
with curious make-up to express apparently Mexican ethnicity) and his pretty
American wife (the extremely blonde Janet Leigh) witness a murder on the
American side of the border. Vargas and Hank Quinlan (the bad American cop
portrayed by the corpulent Welles) attempt to investigate and solve the crime.
Their respective methodologies for achieving justice differ drastically. Quinlan
attempts to frame an innocent Mexican youth, while Vargas adheres to "the
rules" and correct investigative procedures. Eventually, Vargas perceives Quin-
lan's corruption and confronts him. Meanwhile, a gang of Mexican bad guys
kidnaps Vargas' wife. There are progressive complications: drugs, more mur-
ders. Quinlan, in cahoots with members of the gang, attempts to frame Vargas
for the murder of the gang leader. In the end, of course, good triumphs over
evil: Vargas exposes Quinlan's corruption and criminality, leaving Quinlan
destroyed.
Like other seminar participants, Alex thinks imagistically. His analysis
imaginatively reinvents the story. He literally sees ideas embedded in cinematic
images; he sees far more in individual shots than I do. For example, Alex
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begins his journal with the description of frames frozen on the screen:
Struggling to lift his hulking frame Hank Quinlan (Orson
Welles) stands nearly erect and half sober in the living room of
Tanya's (Marlene Dietrich's) brothel. As the camera angle widens,
foreshadowing the future, the head of a bull, skewered with swords,
looms over Quinlan. On the same wall, in a mirror surrounded by
photographs of young handsome matadors, is the reflection of
Miguel "Mike" Vargas (Charlton Heston), Quinlan's mortal enemy.
The scene typifies not only the allegorical nature of "Touch of Evil",
but also how the director, Orson Welles, uses the film as a vehicle
for his storytelling.
Alex perceives depth in the "cinematic style" that belie "Touch of
Evil's" gangster cliches. While the text is the "classic confrontation between
good (Vargas) and evil (Quinlan)," the story is "much richer" than merely the
downfall of a crooked cop acting outside the law. The film is multi-layered,
allegorical. Specifically, the allegory is about characters searching through a
maze: Hank Quinlan searches through the maze for a murderer; Vargas search-
es for "the truth"; and "on a deeper level" Quinlan searches to retrieve his past,
and Vargas "in a Homeresque way" searches for home and for his wife Suzie.
Alex identifies story themes, developmental narrative structure and specific
architectural "turning points" in the narrative that mark the ends of three acts
that build towards "the final hallucinatory scene" where "Quinlan reveals and
confronts his dark past .... Like two parallel lines meeting at the horizon,
Vargas's search for truth and Quinlan's search for his lost past converge in the
climax."
Alex is sensitive to visual images and reads these images with great
confidence. For example, he describes Hank Quinlan as " .. . . . the corrupt
Texas cop. His fat equals only the excesses of his job and his maculate face his
stained career . . . fat not from the candy bars but from the excesses of his
abuses."
Alex observes that the characters do not tell this story, rather the
camera does:
Through light and shadow, the use of sound and space, the char-
acters and the maze in which they search are defined. As the char-
acters lose themselves searching in the maze of Los Robles, the
viewer is similarly made to feel uneasy, disoriented and frightened.
Hank Quinlan's evil is not merely heard in his words or seen in his
actions, it is felt by the viewer through the violent movements of the
camera; the piercing, discontinuous sounds of latin music; the asym-
metrical camera shots, and the disruption of time and space. This in-
tentionality of style ... subverts the "balance" of the viewer. The style
denies the viewer the ability to orient himself with any static point of
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reference. Thus, as Quinlan acts farther outside his jurisdiction and
the law, the viewer's perceptions of normality are similarly shaken
by the camera. Through this style Welles effectively tells the story of
corruption at the border; a story which the viewer not only sees and
hears but feels as well. Instead of "form over function," "Touch
of Evil" is "form as function."
In the way that many students and academics of my generation respond
to and interpret written texts, participants were sensitive to and responded to
visual and oral texts with intellectual excitement and speculation. Alex, for
example, is viscerally in tune with imagistic storytelling and observes that he
did not so much "watch" the film as "experience" it. He describes how Welles
uses light and shadow, space and sound, to shake the viewer's "sense of normal-
cy, equilibrium and faith in a 'linear progression,' just as Quinlan and the maze
of Los Robles shakes their sense of honesty, decency and faith in the law."
Alex also understands how the confrontation between Quinlan and
Vargas is framed and emphasized visually: from the first time Quinlan is seen
against a dark background, stepping out of a black car" it is "apparent" that
he is "a doomed man." He is, however, blinded by light,."always squinting
during the day and in his confrontations with Vargas." Whenever Quinlan
appears, "either darkness or shadows pervade the scene It is almost as if
Quinlan is a tumor spreading through the department and infecting 'the
good.'" The conflict between Vargas and Quinlan is emphasized by "Quinlan's
cancerous shadow" that stalks Vargas throughout the film. "Moreover, in every
scene involving Quinlan and his henchmen, Quinlan's shadow covers their faces
it or interrupts the vision of the scene in some way."
Similarly, Alex responds to how Welles uses space and sound to "draw
the viewer out of passivity and force him into the maze." In the first scene the
camera snakes its way through the streets of Los Robles ... beginning with
a closeup of the bomb being placed in the car, then panning back to cover the
city block, then closing in on Vargas and Suzie following them through the
border until the car explodes." Alex observes how this technique "subverts the
viewer's sense of linear progression and denies [the viewer] the sense of direc-
tion, depth perception." Alex documents the use of space and sound through-
out the film:
Welles further creates a feeling of imbalance through spatial manipu-
lation, by confusing foreground, middleground and background. In
the scene after the car explodes, Quinlan and four other individuals
are shown in one frame, however they are all aligned asymmetrical-
ly with no center of balance in the scene. Similarly, when Grandi
loses his "rug," in one shot he and his nephews are in the middle-
ground and in the subsequent shot they are in the foreground
with the camera
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remaining in deep focus. By stripping the "normal" film constructs,
foreground and background, of any static balance, Welles creates
the optical equivalent of moral chaos. Everything is off-center in
"Touch of Evil, " reflecting the lack of middle ground between good
and evil, and also the imbalance of the characters; the psychotic
Quinlan,the sadistic Grandi clan, the pure Suzie, the experienced
Tanya and the "hubristic" Vargas.
Alex describes how "the optical moral hysteria of the maze is reinforced
by the use of the distorted camera angles." He meticulously documents how
the director visually composes the scenes to "manipulate and disorient the
viewer's powers of concentration, visual perception and spatial organization.
While Vargas and Quinlan's worlds are being turned upside down by their own
driving pursuits, so is the viewer's world by Welles' direction."
In one excerpt, he describes and illustrates how sound dislocates the
viewer's perceptive world":
... Sound defines space .... In "Touch of Evil" the aurals and visuals
do not fit. An example of this are the "disembodied" voices after the
explosion. The voices sound as if they are they are confined to a
small room. In reality, however, the scene is in an open field. This
combined with the voices competing and overlapping with each
other within the frame builds tension as well as shaking the viewer's
perceptions of how people talking should sound.
Another way in which Welles achieves this is by separating sound
from its source and confusing it with reflections and shadows. For
example, when the Grandi clan races to the Mirador Motel, the
sound of their engines is heard as if they were six feet away, yet the
camera shows them off in the distance. And when Suzie calls to her
husband from the fire escape, the viewer hears her as if she were in
the next room, while Vargas on the street below is oblivious. Simil-
larly, when Menzies [Quinlan's deputy] and Quinlan "find" the plant-
ed evidence, the camera is focused on Vargas yet the sound is only
of Quinlan and Menzies off-screen. By the end of the film the view-
er has lost all sense of distance and direction as well as the source
itself. The most vivid illustration of this is the finale in which the
"listener" hears Menzies' and Quinlan's voices (separated from their
bodies) on the tape recorder in closeup, while seeing the two men
walk across the bridge at a distance. When Menzies is shot, the
viewer never sees the actual shooting, but hears only a closeup
of the shots fired.
Alex proves his case by systematically compiling the cinematic evidence.
As for time sequence he observes that although the narrative is "consolidated" and
the movie takes place in only a day and a half, "the viewer has no conception of
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this." The distortion of time and space is not accomplished through manipu-
lation of narrative structure, "but rather by the fragmentati6n of the viewer's
perceptions and the manipulation of his senses." It is through the stylistic
elements of "Touch of Evil" that Welles "not only visualizes the conflict be-
tween good and evil, but imposes it upon the viewer."
Initially, like other seminar participants, Alex enjoyed the class' covert
analytical enterprise but questioned the utility of this work in the context of
law school or doing lawyer-work. Perhaps the class was simply a pleasant way
to spend Thursday evenings and avoid another three-credit "overdose" of
appellate cases before having to face the pressure of graduation, loan-debt, jobs
and the rigor of the bar exam. By the end of the semester, however, the class
took on deeper significance for many seminar participants. The meaning for
each participant was different. For Alex, the class affirmed the importance of
his intuitive responses and aesthetic sensibility to his prospective work as a legal
cultural storyteller. Furthermore, in classroom discussion and in his paper, he
imbedded his creative analysis in a tightly organized, passionate, yet lawyer-like
presentation and proof. In doing so, he reaffirmed my sense that filmic text
can provide a laboratory for sensitizing students to, and for the analysis of, oral
and visual storytelling techniques in a legal culture that is, in significant part,
a subset of larger popular storytelling culture.
Skepticism
I proposed hypothetical questions to contextualize our viewing of
several films: Do trials ever reveal the "truth" of the past? Is this their primary
function? Or are lawyers merely narrativist tricksters? Is it, as one seminar
participant observed, only "God who really knows what happened?" Does the
trial serve primarily other functions, such as resolving the controversy,
releasing emotions, providing a sense of coherence - not necessarily be-
tween the event and the outcome, but between the outcome and what hap-
pened at the trial itself[?]7
Alternatively, as the cognitive theorist Jerome Bruner has argued persua-
sively,8 is the storytelling (narrative) mode discrete from the empirical (paradig-
matic) mode of proof? Are stories formed by clever and devious aesthetic
arrangements connected by the aesthetic tissue of verisimilitude? Although
events may "happen", are the causes (the hows and whys of events) ever "know-
able"? Can we, for example, ever look inside someone's mind to determine
"intent" or "state of mind"? Do rules of procedure and evidence unduly cir-
curnscribe and artificially constrain trial narratives? Are lawyers an ethnocen-
tric sub-culture of popular storytellers particularly subject to the professional
self-delusion that cognitive theorists have termed "the original attribution error."9
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In exploring this constellation of discussion questions and themes,
thoughtful participants reveal in their journals additional features of visual
literacy. Doug C. titles his exploration of the storytelling role of the lawyer
"Truth in and Out of Chinatown." The journal compares "Chinatown" and
Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line" as presenting visual metaphors for the law-
yer's role in the storytelling process. "Chinatown" is the title of Roman
Polanski's movie; it is also Doug's elliptical reference and response to conflict-
ing images of the lawyer's storytelling role.
Initially, Doug's introduction states, somewhat apologetically, that his
paper reflects a "familiar" seminar discussion theme:
... [C]an the truth of a past event be known? Is an "objective" reality
possible, or is every past occurrence only possible of interpretation
within the context of the observer's unique unrepeatable perspective
of the event?
Doug discusses this theme with a certain detachment and indignation,
reflective of the attitudes of many bright seminar participants. That is, Doug's
answer to this question is, implicitly, obvious. Stories, especially aural and
visual stories, can not and do not reveal truth. We live in an imagistic, frag-
mentary and subjective world and our "stories" are intrinsically imaginative
reconstructions.
... since there is no recount[ing] of events that we can accept
as absolutely true ...we are forced to create systems of "truth substi-
tutes" as alternatives and thus "truth" becomes definable only within
the systems that we create....
"Truth" is literally dependent upon the placement and angle of the
camera:
A popular example: last spring Tate George propelled the
UCONN Huskies basketball team into the NCAA Final Eight by a
"buzzer beating" last second shot. But was the shot "good"? The
best view provided by CBS cameras "Super Slo Mo" replays ap-
pears to indicate that Tate's hand touching the ball when the shot
clock on the same screen indicated no time was remaining .. this re-
play became the "truth substitute" to which the announcers latched
onto and their pronouncement was that UCONN stole a victory.
... But in the case of Tate's shot, accepting a camera replay as
the best "truth substitute" probably doesn't get us any closer to the
absolute truth than the version espoused by any random
ticketholders. Perhaps if God were a Husky fan, He might inform
us that two molecules that connected Tate's hand to the basketball
ceased to "touch" one another (in some atomic sense) with a
nanosecond of time remaining
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in the game. However, anything short of such a divine vision will
contain all the inherent defects that "truth substitute" systems suffer
from. That is, belief in the truth becomes synonymous with belief in
the system.
Doug's observations reflect a knowing cynicism that he shares with
many seminar participants about the nature of their chosen profession and the
limited possibilities of such a narrative-based system's providing "justice" that
is ultimately any more than narrative resolution or denouement:
As a general rule, the justice system seems to favor the "knowable"
version of the truth. Lawyers tend to believe the opposite. By their
behavior and their beliefs, lawyers view the truth as "unknowable"
and as an unapproachable ideal. Thus a lawyer might say that the
judicial system is not a search for truth but a forum for the exposition
of competing versions of what-the-hell happened in a given event.
Doug states his belief that - "leaving aside examples where it is so clear
that an account of an event is 'true' or at least so clear that no one wants to
bother arguing about it" - "the truth" is "unknowable." "Since there is no
way 'truth' can be definitively proven, the role of the lawyer is not to aid in
the search for truth, which according to him is an oxymoronic phrase anyway,
but to arrange any and all facts available to produce the story that best suits his
client's needs." Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line" is a "persuasive illustra-
tion" of how easily stories are manipulated and how readily we succumb to the
call of our own stories:
... In the movie, truth is not static or fixed, but is malleable enough
to bend according to the teller of the story .... The movie's premise
achieves the effect of creating horrible unease in the hearts of viewers.
Detective mysteries, particularly cinematic detective stories, provide an
effective visual metaphor for a contrasting idealization of how the "justice"
system (a "truth-substitute" system) supposedly works.
How do detectives fit into this scheme? ... Each is faced with a
past event that is open to dispute; a crime, mystery, or confusing or
unexplained incident. Both must "reconstruct" the event for an audi-
ence. But here the detective and lawyer part company. The lawyer's
motivation is not necessarily to find the truth; instead he is motivated
to come up with a reasonable version of a story, consonant with the
facts, that best serves his client's needs and in turn his own. In con-
trast, the . . . detective traditionally wishes to find the truth, or the
least distorted version of truth available.
Detectives can be "roughly categorized into two groups; those that
primarily ponder on the past and those that act within the present." In the
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first "genre" - akin to the way truth is uncovered in the judicial system -
passive truth-finders "parse through all available information and establish not
the best but the only explanation":
. . . an event leaves behind facts that are indelible and unique as a
fingerprint. The mere inspection of existing clues would expose a
wolf-hound, a poisonous snake climbing a rope bellringer, or a
murderous orangutan. Though cloaked in enticing packaging, this
view of the the way the world operates is mostly stage theatrics and
... borders on campiness.
A second type of truth finder is an "active participant" in the process.
Jake Gittes in Polanski's "Chinatown" is an example of a detective in this genre:
Gittes is quick-witted and bright but not of [Sherlock] Holmes-
ian intellect. Instead, Gittes' genius appears to be not in finding out
what the hell happened but in making things happen. Since the case
before him is not laid out like an intricate puzzle, Gittes must resort
to old-fashioned investigative work and during his meddling,
dames scream, punches are thrown, and guns blaze in the night.
Gittes is a human monkey wrench and despite being confused as
to what his role should be, since he isn't sure of anything including
why he was initially hired, he throws himself into a vague conspiracy
hidden against the gauzy southern California landscape .... Jake
seems to be aware that he will not always find clues merely by ob-
taining a superior vantage point but that clues must be dislodged by
his very presence ... In "Chinatown" Jake is as much a part of the
overall plot as the crime itself.
As much as "Chinatown" tends to resemble how truth is actual-
ly unearthed, the movie is still faithful to, and thus somewhat limited
by its adherence to the notion that, truth is "knowable." This com-
mitment to a clean, tidy universe is understandable in a commercial
sense, since moviegoers are unlikely to flock to see a movie with no
resolution, or worse, one whose conclusion is that truth is unknow-.
able. Although "Chinatown" challenges commercial orthodoxy
in certain ways, its iconoclasm is limited to sending the message
that the search for truth and justice is not rewarded (can it be its
own reward?) and the act of doing good will only result in getting
your new girlfried killed in the end.
Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line" presents a contrasting metaphor
about the "natureof truth" although, Doug observes, the movie's ending is "at
odds with the overall message":
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Morris sets out to show that all stories are hopelessly subjective,
and that truth cannot be found,except in the ending of the movie
Morris betrays his own thesis. By concluding his film with David
Harris's vague, ambiguous "confession," Morris has arranged the
facts and interviews to produce the inevitable conclusion that
Randall Adams is innocent and Harris is guilty. While I do not argue
with the merits of this conclusion (any one who saw the movie
would have to agree that Harris is guilty as sin), the overall point of
the movie is lost. Morris sets out to establish that all interpreters
of events rely on their particular perspective; this is why no two
accounts of an event can be absolutely similar and why the past
only exists according to the storyteller's will. But by choosing to
place Harris' confession at the end, Morris has made a conscious
decision to have the story come to a conclusion that points to an
obvious "truth"; that Harris is guilty ...
The theme of storyteller as creator of truth becomes an inces-
tuous one, as Morris appears to fall prey to the same folly as those
that he tries to expose.
Other participants, like Doug, revealed similar attitudes about stories,
particularly visual and aural stories. Participants were deeply skeptical about
the possibilities of such stories' revealing "truth" especially when these stories
were embedded in the formulaic procedural maze and evidentiary constraints
of the judicial process. This cynicism is, perhaps, partially a product of three
years of immersion in the exclusively paradigmatic culture of law school that
devalues and deemphasizes narratives. Simultaneously, participants - subjected
to a continual barrage of visual and aural stories in a popular culture filled with
advertising, television, radio, politics, sound-byte news - often felt deceived by
stories and popular storytellers. Although extremely thoughtful and perceptive,
they were sensitive to manipulation and tended to disbelieve their eyes and ears.
The heightened awareness and critical acuity of many students was often accom-
panied by a hardened detachment, cynicism and refusal to suspend disbelief.
Many participants, like Doug, are truly suspicious of all visual narratives includ-
ing "actual" video shots of such events as the Tate George shot or the Rodney
King beating. These images, often edited into fragments and sound bytes that
are deceptive and decontextualized from the events themselves, are perceived as
"truth substitutes" that do not capture or reflect externalities or totalities.
Many upper-level law students no longer trust narrative explanations; they are
frozen into narrative disbelief. The filmic texts provided an opportunity to
reflect systematically on this deep skepticism.
Passivity, detachment, cynicism and, I fear, resentment and anger, are
also deeply ingrained features of the new visual literacy.
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Hollywood Myths
The myths of our popular culture are revealed clearly in popular films.
Several thoughtful film-makers have, often self-consciously, transmuted myth
into film. These are explicitly Americanized "Hollywood" versions of classical
imaginal landscapes. The characters are archetypes; the plots provide con-
temporary spins on classical thematic patterns. These filmic texts provided a
mechanism for systematic and self-reflective analysis of architectonic story
structures.
Some readers of this article might, initially, question the relevance of
this observation for prospective lawyers. Trial storytelling, however, is a
deeply mythic enterprise: "stock" trial lawyer stories are obvious compilations
and transliterations of popular mythology. Fact-finders identify with and re-
spond to these collective aural story-structures as the mechanisms for organizing
complex stories into coherent meanings.10 Professors Anthony G. Amsterdam
and Randy Herz have documented brilliantly the mythic story-structures
underlying closing arguments presented at a criminal trial.11 The authors' tex-
tual "micro-analysis" of a transcript from a representative successful closing
argument in a murder case, for example, revealed the structure of a deeply
mythic subtext imbedded in the literal text. The audience, the jury, was en-
gaged imaginatively in the heroic myth of the search for the grail of justice.
The sources of this infra-structure were, in the authors' estimation, classical.12
The imagery and structural sub-text was, however, a "Hollywood" version of
classical themes, part of a "popularized" mythology. Professors Amsterdam and
Herz subsequently used three segments from Hollywood movies13 to identify
and illustrate three discrete lawyers' roles as dramatis personae within different
versions of a standardized popular mythology.
I sought to explore further this popular mythology. I selected two
pictures - Terrence Mallick's "Badlands" and James Foley's "At Close Range"
- that I believe reflect intentionally mythic internal landscapes through cine-
matic imaginings. Both "Badlands" and "At Close Range" are based on "actual"
stories. Both pictures possess a heightened visuality, often stunning, yet differ-
ent from the psychoanalytic internalities of film noir14 or Orson Welles's paro-
dy/exaggeration of noir elements in "Touch of Evil." The visual statements in
"Badlands" and "At Close Range" often overshadow plot. The imagery calls the
viewer's attention away from the plot to the director's self-conscious effort to
create a deeper resonance for referential images.
"Badlands" is a beautiful yet curious movie about a Charles Stark-
weather-like couple (Kit played by a youthful Martin Sheen and Holly by an
equally youthful Sissy Spacek). Kit murders Holly's father, and burns Holly's
home to cover up the crime. Holly joins Kit and the two outlaws embark on
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a romp of murder and mayhem across the plains. Holly's internal monologue
is lyrical and romantic, filled with stock excerpts from the pulp magazines,
romantic songs, and adolescent fantasies of the day - she is a travelling sidekick
on the journey through an imaginal landscape. The imagery is verdant and the
photography exquisite. Holly's monologue, an aural montage, provides coun-
terpoint to the imagery. Holly's romantic musings and justifications of Kit's
activities are, however, different from the audience's reactions. These characters
are not Hollywood's usual sympathetic variety. The audience is distanced
further from the story as Holly's self-reflective and self-consciously romanti-
cized thoughts and the events of the plot are subsumed by the intensity of the
film's cinematic beauty. (For example, Mallick presents the fire that Kit ignites
to burn down Holly's house to conceal the murder of Holly's father as epipha-
ny scored to classical music.)
In referring to the "exquisite beauty" of the images in another Terrence
Mallick film, "Days of Heaven," Stanley Cavell notes that Mallick, a former
professor of philosophy at MIT before going Hollywood, translated Heidegger's
work including The Essence of Reasons.15 Cavell cites Heidegger compellingly
in his aesthetic contemplation of the startling beauty of the imagery on the
screen (" ...the face whereby a given something shows its form, looks at us,
and thus appears . . ."). Initially, it was not apparent to me what the "face on
the screen" revealed or even why I had intuitively chosen Mallick's movie. My
confusion abated, however, when I read the participants' journals. I realized
that "Badlands" was a shared imaginal landscape rather than a literal representa-
tion of the plains of Nebraska.
James Foley's "At Close Range" is an idiosyncratic film with an exag-
gerated visuality that makes the viewer aware that this story is intended to be
about much more than merely small-time, small-town hoods in rural Pennsyl-
vania. Brad Whitewood, Sr., operates a gang of professional Pennsylvania
thieves. (Brad Sr. is portrayed by a silent, sinister and archetypal Christopher
Walken who is literally evil beyond words - so evil that he is afflicted by a
"Pennsylvania" accent that twists and distorts his speech and often prevents the
viewer from understanding what he is saying.) Whitewood's son, Brad Jr. falls
in love with sixteen-year-old Terry. (Sean Penn portrays the emotionally
seething and confused Brad Jr., who - like his father - operates in an imaginal
landscape beyond language, trapped by his father's spirit and a slow-cooked
Oedipal rage.)
Brad Jr. desperately seeks his father's love and escape from the nothing-
ness of life with his mother and an abusive stepfather. He wants to join his
father's gang and live with the alabaster-skinned Terry (a child-like yet strong
willed tomboy portrayed by Mary Stuart Masterson). Brad Jr. forms a chil-
dren's gang of outlaws Whitewood Sr. names them the "kiddee" gang - to
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emulate his father's gang. Brad Jr. proves his manhood to his father in a
robbery and moves up to Whitewood Sr.'s gang. There is a plot reversal,
however, when Brad Jr. realizes that his father is evil, after he witnesses his
father murder an informant. He wants to escape his father's grip. But it is too
late. When Brad Jr. commits a crime to get money to escape with Terry, he
is arrested and jailed. His father rapes Terry as a warning to his son about the
consequences of what happens to squealers. When Brad Jr. learns of the rape,
he comes clean to the authorities in exchange for his release from custody.
Brad Sr. systematically slaughters the members of the kiddees' gang, including
Brad Jr.'s half-brother.
Finally, Brad Sr. orders the gang to murder his son. Brad Sr. salaciously
watches a stripper at a netherworld bar while the Whitewood gang carries out
the order. Terry is murdered and Brad Jr. is badly wounded. Scored to Ma-
donna and synthesizers, Brad Jr. rises from the dead and cleanses the blood off
his body with water from a garden hose. He then confronts Brad Sr.
In reviews, critics were ambivalent towards Foley's aestheticizing of
violence, gesture and imagery, cinematically employed release the mythic ele-
ments in the story. For example, Richard Corliss observed that, "Every over-
wrought gesture, every pregnant banality, every brutal killing is elongated to
impress upon us the moment's importance and sick beauty. This fetishized
attention to detail . . . makes 'At Close Range' a sort of Atrocity Olympics
captured in Super Slo Mo.""16
Nevertheless, "At Close Range" and "Badlands" encouraged a type of
analysis that seemed prevalent in the course journals. In these journals, includ-
ing my own, the images of the characters were clearly identified as representa-
tive of archetypes drawn from stock "mythic" stories. journals attempted to
trace the structure of these stories.
In one representative journal, Christine S. uses these two films as a
mechanism for exploring a male director's exploration of (and exploitation of)
archetypes drawn from a purportedly female psyche, or at least the director's
version of this mythology, and her subjective responses to this vision.
Like Alex (and like other visually literate students) Christine herself uses
the hook of an image to capture the imagination of the reader. It is as if
participants are writing movies; they are thinking imagistically and describing
images as embodying ideas. What they see is what they think. Christine's
"hook" is taken from personal experience, rather than the film's cinematic text:
I went to school with a murderer. Two weeks before gradua-
tion, the police discovered the mother's body in the trunk of the
family car, where it rested while my schoolmate commuted to
class each day. I attended a private Catholic girls' high school. The
student was con-
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victed and sentenced to Niantic prison for Women, from whence
presurnably she received a high school diploma. My story has a
point - the only murderer I ever knew personally was female, and
very much like me, yet in the literature of criminality women infre-
quently appear as direct or deliberate, as so-called cold blooded
murderers. Those that are portrayed directly are often queens or
wariors, pseudo-males,operating in their stead. The others fall into
two general categories, both images of women from childhood
which persist in fiction about female outlaws. The evil step-
mother of infamous fairy tales,grasping and jealous, dominates the
night psyche of many a child. Eve, the primal temptress, continues
hold over theimagination of adults. Both recur too often in fiction
to be dismissed as childish remnants. This tendency is certainly not
an issue NOW will take up any time soon, but it raises an interesting
question bout the literary/cinematictreatment of women involved
in serious crime. In both "Badlands" and "At Close Range"
females were co-conspirators with their male counterparts, yet the
cinematic treatment of each reflects uncertainty about their real roles.
Like other participants, reminiscent of Hemingway's focus on sentences
as the relevant analytical sub-unit for analysis of fiction, Christine interprets
shots as emblematic of story structure, theme and character. She decodes
readily the meanings of these shots in "Badlands":
An innocent high school baton twirler in the opening shot,
Holly views life as that baton, spinning and tumbling end-over-end,
but, at base, under her control. Originally, she seems an unwitting
victim, the object of Kit's obsession. This facade fades at her al-
most stoic acceptance of her father's murder and connivance in the
the destruction of her home. Her narrated commentary shows her
to be aware of both the intentionality of her actions and a presenti-
ment of the end of her romantic adventure. She remains an elusive
character, in spite of her diary-like recollections - somewhat
unattached from Kit, his aberrant behavior and her own fate. Even
her protestations of love fall short of real commitment.... This
spree had little connection with her real life or aspirations, but
was a careless moment out of the short life of the young girl from
Texas whose father was a sign painter.
Excerpts from the journal illustrate Christine's analysis:
... As their odyssey continues, Holly becomes increasingly less
communicative with Kit and more with the audience. As an observer
to the events of the story, she uses emotionally florid language that is
sophisticated and lyrical, while her character responds to Kit in
vague, abbreviated comments. Revealing little of herself to Kit, the
persona she presents to the audience is illusory and other-worldly.
For those
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given to finding symbols in people, she becomes Kit's muse of evil,
ever quiescent but stirring violence in him. Her report of his vision
of herin beautiful white robes, but with a forehead cold to his touch,
is delivered in her childlike voice with pride.
... She parts from Kit, not because she suffers any great moral
angst, but because she has tired of the game. Perhaps she sensed his
willingness to kill had waned as he let a solitary oilman escape.
. . . The early interval in Eden, with the whispering forest
around them, forecast Holly's role as Eve, leading Kit to the tree of
evil, at once temptress and serpent, virgin and victim. The image is
repeated in Terry, the female companion in "At Close Range."
Christine compares Terry and Holly. Although Terry's role in the
triangle between Brad Jr. and Brad Sr. is somewhat different, their mythic roles
are analogous. Again, Christine analyzes thoughtfully the opening shot of "At
Close Range" as it captures and explicates the underlying mythic implications
of the filmic text:
Terry first appears offering herself for appraisal on the town
green. In her early responses to Brad's advances, she resembles
Holly - tentative and virginal. Brad is the initial pursuer, but Terry
quickly rejects her safe middle class surroundings to join her for-
tunes with him. In desertion and realliance, she encourages Brad's
growing association with his father, flirting with the evil in the
character portrayed by Christopher Walken. The director's
heavy-handed use of religious/cultural symbols throughout the movie
emphasizes Terry's unique position in the father-son conflict. It is
Terry who whispers the ultimate temptation in Brad Jr.'s ear, the
suggestion which lures him into criminality and the inescapable
confrontation with his father...
The Eve image preserves women's roles as both helpmate and
temptress. It accounts for female evilness while maintaining her dual
status as desirable and subservient. How people respond to the Eve
figure in outlaw literature and film is symptomatic of how they feel
towards criminality in general. Eves evoke the ambivalence that
marks the field, at once attractive and repugnant, compelling
a response to our very nature.
I saw the same movies as Christine. And yet, when I review my
journal, it reveals an entirely different mythology. In fact, when I recall and
describe these movies, I describe entirely different films that fit with my interi-
or stories, I literally see a different story. For example, like Christine, I begin
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my analysis of "At Close Range" with the hook of an image. My journal,
however, recalls specifically a different "opening" image that evokes a different
mythology shot on a different interpretive landscape:
The opening shot of "At Close Range" is Gatsby-esque, a deeply
romantic version of this same visual image: a teenage boy driving a car
into the center of a dream-like town, while the lights around him spin
as if a projection from inside his imagination. These lights are softly-
muted, distant. At the center of town, at the base of a monument,
there is a lovely innocent-faced barely post-pubescent girl. The boy
cruises slowly around the square. The music plays lyrical synthesizer
figures. The boy watches the girl intensely and, in slow motion,
tthe girl looks back. A deeply emotional cathexis is established
between the boy and the object of his desire .... As the title
suggests, the world is viewed "At Close Range" from the perspective
of the adolescent outlaw anti-hero, Brad Whitewood Jr ....
Romantic possibilities and interconnections are imbedded beneath
language, located in the mysteries of silence and experience.
The visual style is not a gloss over the story. Instead, the style
enables the storyteller to open up his material to deeply and darkly
resonant mythic themes (e.g., the power of good and evil, the sins of
the father visited upon the son, and search for the lost father and the
ultimate desire for atonement with the father).
These are, of course, the themes of my story - not necessarily the one
that James Foley's tells - just as Christine tells her story when she describes
the film in her journal. When we replay filmic text on the screen of our
imagination, we imaginatively reinvent the text, grafting the images onto inter-
nalized story-structures that make the story our own on subsequent interior
viewing.
In my journal I develop several themes. The first compares the stylistic
perspective of the storytellers in "At Close Range" and "Badlands."
In "At Close Range" the filmmaker's technique closely intercon-
nects his vision to the adolescent world of his anti-hero/outlaw ... The
eye" of the camera becomes the "I" of the criminal outsider .... In
"Badlands" the perspective is brought even farther inside the internal
world of the adolescent anti-heroine: the story is revealed through
internal monologue . . . .
The second develops the mythic themes of the search (specifically, the
quest for the departed father) and the dangerous "heroic" journey. These are
the themes that I uncovered in the movie. These are, of course, themes
from a traditional male mythology reflected in male journals, regardless of
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the cinematic "text." For example, Alex specifically perceives and analyzes
this theme in his visual analysis of a different movie, "Touch of Evil." Similar-
ly, Doug - despite his skepticism - specifically identifies the heroic "search"
for truth as the core story in his analysis of "Chinatown." Doug identifies a
twisted anti-theme version of this search as the core story in "The Thin Blue
Line." Likewise, Amsterdam and Herz deconstruct the macro-structure and the
micro-text of a male defense attorney's closing argument in a murder case to
reveal the identical "heroic" mythological infra-structure.17 The characters in
these mythological stories are invariably archetypal.18
Participant journals simultaneously reveal personal psychobiography
interwoven with these deeper patterns. For example, my journal and the
interpretation of "At Close Range" reveals my psychobiography: it captures
my autobiographical stories about the early death of my father and my search
for (as Doug might say) "father-substitutes" rather than "truth substitutes."
And, as I explained in a previous article,19 many of the course journals were
deeply personal.
Generally, journals cross-referenced other popular aural and visual
stories: popular music, television programs, news and sports events. There was
a new visual textual field of sources and references.
For example, my journal compares "At Close Range" to the most
popular intentionally "mythic" movies of the day, "The Star Wars Trilogy":
Like Luke Skywalker, Brad Whitewood Jr. embarks on a dan-
gerous journey to prove his manhood and fulfill his romantic longing
for sensual love, heroism and, ultimately, the possibility of transcen-
dence. Unlike Luke, however, Brad soon discovers that he is not
protected by the power of "The Force." The narrative possibilities
are dark and sinister. There is evil beneath the danger and risk-
taking rather than heroism, romance or, transcendence.
Later I note the plot point of the major dramatic reversal after Brad Jr.
witnesses the murder of Lester the informant. "Brad Sr. puts his fingers to his
lips and signals to his son, signifying silence and complicity .... at that mo-
ment Brad Jr. realizes that his father is evil." Brad Jr. tries to extricate himself
from his father's grip. It is too late, however.
Like Luke Skywalker's inevitable confrontation with Darth
Vader, the denouement comes in Brad Jr.'s final face-off "at close
range" against his father, evil personified, remarkably portrayed in
mythic shadings by Christopher Walken (who does not need to wear
a Darth Vader mask). There are deeply resonant lines here, beauti-
fully delivered with an edge of self-awareness bordering on parody.
For example, Brad Jr. retrieves the weapon that was presumably
used to slaughter the
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kiddee gang, his half-brother, and his lover Terry. He demands to
know, "Is this the family gun Dad?" This father-son confrontation is
charged with realized emotional potentialities and the intentionally
sparse dialogue is energized by the punctuation of gunfire ....
Classroom discussion of these conflicting mythologies, sources and
cross-references underlying our interpretations and understandings of cinematic
text was fascinating. Conversation was tinged with elements of personal confes-
sion. Nevertheless, participants imaginatively incorporated a collective or
shared repertoire of popular images, events and symbols. Although we recog-
nized the subjectivity of our interpretations, we shared the discovery that we
imaginatively reinvented the visual texts of the story along several common
axis.
We noted the sexual bases to the interpretive mythologies that underlay
and organized our biased viewings of filmic texts. For example, Alex, Doug
and I interpreted and organized three different movies along the same psychic
axis of the heroic search. Christine and other women in the class, however,
organized stories along a different shared axis that charted discrete and different
psychic terrain. We literally saw different movies. "Badlands" and "At Close
Range" provided imagistic keys to unlock and unpack competing mythologies.
These discussions have profound implications for popular storytellers' trying
to understand how we think today, and particularly for law students trying to
systematically reflect on their roles as popular storytellers discovering how to
use stories effectively as tools for communication and rhetorical persuasion in
an aural and visual popular storytelling culture. These mythologies underlie
and inform our understandings of lawyers' roles inside and outside of the court-
room.
Conclusion
The course in Law and Popular Storytelling scratched the surface of a
simple idea: lawyers are popular storytellers who operate in an aural and visual
storytelling culture. Lawyers tell imagistic narratives constructed upon aesthetic
principles that are closely akin to the structural principles that control the for-
mulation of plot-structure in commercial cinema. We tell stories with hard
driving plot-lines and clear themes that are readily distilled. We shoot our films
from the fixed perspective of protagonist-clients. We are simple realists who
construct our stories to hook the sympathy and capture the imagination of
audiences who think in pictures. We sequence shots on imaginal storyboards
until we establish the patterns that ultimately suit our purposes. We speak and
think filmically, We have much to learn from visual storytellers working the
same popular cultural turf.
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The course was also deeply personal. I selected films about convicts,
criminals, prisoners and outlaws - protagonists on the margins of society - as
visual texts. Because of my own work experiences, I found these visual texts
especially interesting. I also believed that my work experiences would provide
experiential references for meaningful discussions of these films.
Although I felt intuitively that the students would respond to films, I
was unprepared for what transpired. The films about protagonists on the
margins of society struck a deeply resonant chord in third-year law students.
Participants revealed a heightened and stunning visual sophistication and acuity
that I had not anticipated. journals were passionate and eloquent, more so than
my often obscure pedagogic reasons for initially selecting the movies. Likewise,
discussions often came to life with passion, humor and profound understanding.
Many students perceived far more in the films than I did. These bright students
were, apparently, versed in a new type of visual literacy. They were on the far
side of a dramatic and seismic shift in our culture.
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ENDNOTES



* I am grateful to David R. Papke, Neal Feigenson, Richard Sherwin,
Patrick Kennedy, Cam MacRae and the students in the Law & Popular
Storytelling class.
1. John Denvir, "Introduction to Special Issue on 'Legal Reelism,'"
15 Legal Studies Forum 3 (1991).
2. Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word 136
(1988)
.
3. See generally Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible World
11-13 (1986).
4. The syllabus included the following movies: "In Cold Blood,"
"The Thin Blue Line," "Chinatown," "Straight Time," "Badlands,"
"The Grifters," "Touch of Evil," "The River's Edge," and "Twelve Angry Men."
5. Philip Meyer, "Convicts, Criminals, Prisoners & Outlaws,"
42 Journal of Legal Education 129 (1992) and "Law Students Go
to the Movies," 24 Connecticut Law Review 893 (1992).
6. See Ong, supra note 2 at 39-40.
7. Gary Bellow and Bea Moulton, The Lawyering Process:
Preparing and Presenting the Case 198-199 (1981).
8. See Bruner, supra note 3.
9. The terminology is taken from lecture notes from J. Bruner,
"Lawyering Theory Colloquium," New York University School
of Law (Spring 1992).
10. See, for examples, Reid Hastie, Steven D. Penrod, Nancy Pennington,
Inside the Jury (1983); W. Lance Bennett and Martha S. Feldman,
Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom: Justice and Judgment in
American Culture (1984).
11. Professors Amsterdam and Herz presented this microanalysis of
closing arguments in a murder trial in an untitled working paper and
discussion at the 'Lawyering Theory Colloquium," New York
University School of Law, April 7, 1992. A formal version of this paper is
Visual Literacy and the Legal Culture 93, forthcoming in volume 37 of
the New York Law Review.
12. The authors identify the "classic narrative theme" of "the quest of the
hero" as "unmistakable" in the closing argument and cite sources including
Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale 92-96 (Scott, trans. 1968); Joseph
Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1968); Henderson,
"Ancient Myths and Modern Man," in Carl Jung, ed., Man and His Symhols
10 1 - 119 (Laurel ed. 1968) to trace the origins of this oral narrative theme.
See Amsterdam and Herz, note 11, supra.
13. "The Jagged Edge," "Anatomy of A Murder," and "True Believer."
14. See, generally, Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir,
Genre, Masculinity (1991).
15. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of
Film xv (1971).
16. Richard Corliss, Time, April 28, 1986, 70.
17. See Amsterdam and Herz, supra note 11.
18. See sources, supra note 12.
19. See Meyer, supra note 5.