Frontier justice - the new morality

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 10, 1997 | by Suzanne Fields

The popular culture in its many guises tells us much about ourselves, frequently offering the chicken-and-egg conundrum. Does it reflect who we believe ourselves to be, or does it push us around, manipulating minds and emotions in a certain and sometimes deleterious direction both morally and intellectually?

Such a question is impossible to answer but it's not merely academic and its worth considering in relation to the ways we view justice in America through the popular culture. Many of us, for example, were shocked when blacks around the country cheered after O.J. Simpson was found not guilty" of murdering his wife and her friend Ronald Goldman, as though O.J. had won a football game and was dancing in the end zone.

While some of these cheerleaders no doubt believed he was innocent, many did not, and large numbers didn't care one way or the other. Their rationale was that his innocence was payback for a history of court cases in which blacks had been exploited and abused by whites.

If that meant that a guilty black man went free, so be it. This was frontier justice in the courtroom, if not on the range. The community, according, to this scenario is more important than the law. In fact, the community is above the law. The issue of guilt and innocence is less significant than a certain kind of collective vengeance, a psychological, if not a poetic, justice.

Two very different movies released last year and now available on video celebrate this idea, blurring moral distinctions on behalf of lawlessness. While watching both films, I found myself rooting for the side that sets man above the law, a dangerous insight in retrospect.

A Time to Kill is based on John Grisham's first novel, written in 1984 but not published until 1989 after he was a best-selling author. The movie is set in the 1990s, although it presents the New South melodramatically and meretriciously with a vicious sensibility belonging to an earlier time.

A 10-year-old black girl is raped and tortured by two drunken rednecks in a small Mississippi town. The little girl's father, a factory worker, is devastated and decides to murder her assailants in cold blood. Not only is the murder premeditated, but the murderer tells a lawyer who ultimately will defend him in court that he's going to do it, even though he knows the rapists are in custody awaiting trial.

When the lawyer pleads temporary insanity on behalf of his client, no one in the courtroom believes that to be true. (The father himself lets it be known that he would do it again.) But the defense lawyer plays the race card with the shrewdness of Johnnie Cochran Jr.: What if this man and his daughter were white?

The all-white jury and courtroom audience (as well as the theater audience) is manipulated in such a way that only the most unrepentant red-neck-racist-Ku-Klux-Klanner wants this man tried according to rules of law. His punishment is his daughters lost innocence and her inability to have children. When a white jury finds the father "not guilty," a collective sigh of relief could be heard sweeping through the audience at my neighborhood theater. Justice is sacrificed to sentimentality and we're delighted with a happy ending, no matter how perverse.

Sleepers is a movie with a more complicated plot that requires a prosecutor cheat and a priest lie. In fact, several "good" men conspire to save the lives of two adult murderers who kill a prison guard. The guard was a savage white man who repeatedly raped and abused certain protagonists when they were teenagers in reform school.

The story is stylishly told, and we're led to believe its based on a true story, though that's not definitely established. (The best seller on which it is based was published as nonfiction memoir) We're also led to believe that personal vengeance is above the law, that even the absolute moral teachings of the Catholic Church ought to be cast aside when an evil man can be punished by vigilante justice. Dostoevski this is not. In fact, morality is reduced to a kind of white-boys-in-the-hood relativism.

The message is delivered as an upside-down morality play where we're manipulated to believe that the best men do the right thing by taking justice in their own hands -- even though we all know its wrong in the eyes of God and in light of our fundamental belief in the rule of law. The moment I felt myself rooting for the priest to lie and the prosecutor to cheat I realized how men and women who did not believe in O.J. Simpson's innocence cheered his acquittal.

Sleepers is a story set in Hells Kitchen, a rough neighborhood in New York, but the audience is treated to a metaphorical tour of Dante's Inferno, turning us all into the devils disciples. That was the scariest message of all.