STORY AND JUSTICE IN MOVIES

Moral equilibrium as audience wish, truth as story’s need.

Lady Justice stands over London’s Old Bailey (from Wikicommons).

As in life, we crave justice in a movie—unless we happen to be a sociopath or are so politically or egotistically driven that our moral compass is overshadowed by alternative considerations. Justice bestows a sense of ethical architecture, of meaning therefore. With justice in the world we feel safer. Without it we are prey to laissez-faire malevolence. The courtroom drama, the whodunit, the courageous mission to take out the evil mastermind all come with perennial appeal. The western, as it used to be (not so much in its seventies reincarnation and on), saw the sheriff defeat the outlaw, restoring the rule of law amidst the inchoate moral landscape of freshly timbered townships, and of the vistas of desert and plains in which they stood. Justice enshrines fairness. Justice betokens deserved outcomes. With justice the living can sleep easy, the dead too, their misfortunes redressed. With justice we find equilibrium, without it, disorder, or worse…

Yet at times, justice in a film gets out of hand—seeing Spotlight with an audience was like finding oneself in the midst of a mob baying for punishment. Abuse? So first nail, then penalize the perpetrators! And celebrate the restoration of moral order as their sordid conspiracy comes crashing down! No moral ambiguity. No uncertainty. No epiphany. Reassurance all round as the ancient festive spirit of the execution of those found guilty yet again finds its followers. Watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, those around me went wild when the just desserts were dished out lavishly to the Mansonian wannabe perps. When all else fails, Tarantino seems to imply, fiction is the go-to for capital punishment even before the capital crime can be committed. But capital punishment of the malefactors it is, which is what that audience wanted. It’s what it got too, and on steroids.

Everything has a price, actions as well as goods, Nietzsche tells us in his Genealogy of Morals—those who commit bad deeds might be likened to debtors, so it’s only the credit that punishment affords that can restore moral liquidity. The greater the debt, the more extreme the payback required to return the debtor to Square One. Tough, should it get them only so far as Square Zero and out for the eternal count—since those who forfeit the lives of others must have their debt wiped out by forfeiting their own. Such a penalty its said to be condign—appropriate to the measure of the crime. Then the balance sheet is clear: “Let the punishment fit the crime!” sings the Mikado, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s eponymous, orientalist comic opera, one-upping any merely condign sentencing. “And make each prisoner pent/Unwillingly represent/A source of innocent merriment!” he warbles on, moving from justice as an eye for an eye to justice as spectacle. Isn’t that what Tarantino chants too, over 130 years later? Like librettist Gilbert though, he’s being satirical, isn’t he? But whereas Gilbert’s targets were contemporary politicians, QT, crafty as ever, aims his wit at his own audiences, hankerers for ultra-violence, especially when they see it as the callous Mikado does, as “innocent merriment”. What a filmmaker like Michael Haneke delivers with a stiletto (to draw upon violence as metaphor), Tarantino delivers with all the trimmings (to draw, figuratively too, upon the less tumultuous realm of cuisine). The audiences of both are hoist by their own petard (more metaphor—a petard was a bomb) although it rarely seems to get what’s going on with Tarantino’s sly digs. There’s another difference too: the Californian cloaks bloodshed in justice, while in his Funny Games, the Austrian goes in the opposite direction. There’s no subsequent “entitlement to cruelty”, as W. G. Sebald puts it in his collection of essays The Natural History of Destruction. Haneke offers no justice, only punishment—and of the victims too, not the criminals. Not only is there no catharsis, at least in the usual purging-of-offensive-emotions sense of the concept—but there’s consequently no justification for the mayhem witnessed throughout the movie. Things do not work out to be OK by the end, the thrills and spills of the film’s journey earning themselves no excuse in the ultimate moral rectitude of a tautly calculated Tarantino extravaganza. The audience walks out of the Haneke movie theatre not feeling pure as the driven snow, or elated, as might be the case after Tarantino’s grand guignol, but vaguely disgusted with itself. 

I digress. I was talking about justice, not cruelty and its pleasures for those so inclined—even if these ingredients often go together: what would any revenge thriller be without its ultimate retribution, the twofer of justice and violence hand in glove? Revenge, I was told by my Eng. Lit. teacher at grammar school in Southern England some time ago now—revenge is a concept we find unpalatable today. Presumably she never went to the movies, because we didn’t and we don’t. Whereas the Elizabethans had their Hamlet, the topic of that year’s study, we had our Point Blank and The Killers. After John Boorman and Don Siegel have come many more filmmakers on the trail of the assailant, the betrayer, the kidnapper, the murderer—revenge as maybe the most dramatically compelling form of justice never gives up the ghost. The genre offers the screenwriter’s protagonist an objective, and obstacles forcing them to take action in order to overcome them—the ready-made dynamics of dramatic narrative. Revenge offers its own twofer of desired opposites also: transgression and decorum. In order to vanquish the bad guy and exact justice, the good guy has to behave like a bad guy, so audiences get to enjoy rooting for heroes rendered anti-heroes. “He may be a killer, but he’s our killer,” so to speak. That’s okay then… But take a look at Soderberg’s The Limey—the protagonist in that Brit-ophile movie, in arriving at the moment of his revenge, sees deep into the darkness of his own soul—the film’s moral corrective to the moral corrective of violence the character has been seeking throughout the story. Or revisit Klimov’s Come and See to discover vengeance against Nazi brutality rendered impossible to administer without the new crime of infanticide being committed by the central character. It’s as if the journalists of Spotlight, in chasing down the guilty, had in their pursuit learned something of their own shadow—as subterranean as that of the priestly predators.

Justice need not necessarily be coupled with violence of course. Humiliation can do the job just as well. Or the truth can. Scorsese exacts justice by having the Henry Hill of Goodfellas condemned to a life of humdrum suburban dailiness. Even a pardon can work wonders—Bob Woodward says that when he met Gerald Ford to discuss the pardon he granted Richard Nixon, Ford showed him a yellowed and torn newspaper article—the former president had evidently yanked it out of his wallet on many occasions—reminding its reader that in accepting a pardon, one admits to a crime. Ford had thus led Nixon to condemn himself to his legacy of guilt. 

The poetic justice of the west, now economically rendered as its eastern counterpart karma, is another narrative device for restoring moral order. Here it is as if the universe steps in to impose moral propriety on a story. (It may also derive from a character trait, but again that seems linked to broader truths of the human condition). At the end of René Clément’s 1960 Purple Noon, Tom Ripley’s final expedient homicide is revealed when Philippe’s corpse, swathed in canvas and wrapped in an anchor chain, is found attached by a cable to a propeller when the victim’s yacht is pulled from the water. Ripley, unaware of the failure of his murderee’s disposal, will now be arrested, his crimes undeniable. He will “get what’s coming to him”, courtesy of happenstance, that most mercurial character of all patient schemers. Poetic justice might result equally in a reward for the virtuous, but it is from seeing the villain get their comeuppance that we perhaps derive our most satisfying gratification. Another aspect of poetic justice, fate, also comes into play here. “We meet our destiny on the path we take to avoid it,” Carl Jung said. Fate is the cosmic leveler, and when we find Ripley helpless in the face of its merciless sway, we feel reassured. Justice lies at the heart of the universe, we discover, a universe that actively imposes it—in story if not in life, though not of course in all stories…

Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley, made thirty-nine years later, ends less unhappily for its anti-hero. Like the Clément movie, Minghella’s is adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel, the first in a pentalogy of psychopathic sagas, but unlike its predecessor holds to Highsmith’s less reassuring denouement. Ripley’s killing of Philippe is not uncovered. Like Haneke’s lethal young home-invaders in Funny Games, Tom gets away with his culling but while cinema’s moralist implicates us in the sadism of his characters, Highsmith and Minghella seem to be suggesting that our fascination for Ripley’s machinations—and his survival by the skin of his teeth by means of his tactical agility and cunning—is ample purpose for the telling of the story in itself. Let’s just enjoy—if that’s where story takes us, so be it. Reading about, or watching a Ripley narrative is like following a drama of intrigue, except that there’s just the one plotter and we can't but help want them to succeed. That’s another instinct, similar to the desire for transgression—and in Tom Ripley we have the arch-transgressor (Tom rather than Thomas, sets him upon as our pal)—one by which when a character endeavors to make something work, no matter how dark their doings, some undeniable part of us wants them to succeed. The job well done appeals. Easy to accept when the detective is hunting the criminal, or when Spotlight’s righteous journalists are exposing a corrupt cleric. Not so soothing when Ripley sets about his internecine business.

Another vehicle for the battle between our admiration for operational skill and our hope for morality is the monster-as-mentor canon. From Dr Mabuse to Hannibal Lecter, the bad-guy-as-genius has brought about the defeat of other bad guys by means of the manipulation of some subservient good guy. Clarice Starling would be nothing without Lecter, serial killers free to perpetuate their carnage. So what’s she supposed to do? Tell the devil to behave himself? Have him sent into solitary, there to languish in silence while she falters in her attempts to apprehend the culprit out there somewhere (but where?)? Because we accept that’s not an option, we get to have our cake (if not our liver) and eat it too. Transgression, wit, shocking cleverness, justice—a cake of layers too sate the filmic appetite. Lecter takes us on to noir, or neo-noir, its current manifestation—now that the endearing innocence of the forties and fifties has been vaporized by successive disillusionment over the decades. Neo-noir—a murky ocean in the plummeting fathoms of which justice swims, or drowns, alongside the sharks of moral ambiguity and cynicism. Too many injustices to mention. Too many unhappy endings. What would a neo-noir be without one? With justice imposed? If justice arrives, it must come at considerable cost. With horror, justice tends to be even more elusive. In Rosemary’s Baby, in The Wicker Man and its progeny, Ari Aster’s elegantly terrifying Hereditary, as with countless other examples of this quintessentially cinematic genre, it is evil that ultimately triumphs. Our fears win out over our hopes as order is restored after our descent into nightmare—not the order we’ve been counting on though, but the orchestrated theatre of atavistic ritual, an arena perhaps deeper in all of us than its urbane courtroom counterpart. 

King Paimon reigns supreme at the end of Ari Aster’s Hereditary (cinematography Pawel Pogorzelski).

Suspense is crucial to storytelling. The storyteller teases the listener, the reader, the audience, with their wants, fears, curiosity, emotions, empathy, longings, expectations, their respectable social selves and their stubborn interior selves. Our desire to see justice finally played out is gold for the storyteller. Along with “what is going to happen next”, moral uncertainty is one of around seven main categories of suspense. We can’t leave a movie until we know justice has prevailed. With Aster, or with the sobering… no, unsparing critiques of Andrey Zvyagintsev—Leviathan and Loveless—we may find that by the time we discover our hopes dashed, it is too late. We have stayed with the movie only to learn it is the movie that will be staying with us…

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Barack Obama quoted Martin Luther King Jr when he repeated the words of abolitionist Theodore Parker. Does the universe have an arc though, moral or otherwise? Is it indeed shored up by any teleological buttressing? Easier, maybe, to restrict our questions to cinema. Movies have arcs, we are told, character arcs, story arcs, arcs of visual language maybe, of imagery, of shot design. They may also make telling use of a moral arc, although in articulating one they might do better to avoid moralizing. Does that moral arc need to bend toward justice though? Or should that be left to the inclination we bring to the film, whether satisfied or not in the end? “A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children than writing novels,” said Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps the same applies to filmmakers. That does not mean that a writer should impose justice on a story—if the story refuses it, the writer, if they are honest, is left powerless. Story must win over worthy intention, yet the writer’s sense of justice and of injustice can survive. It’s the friction between the two, story and storyteller, that gives the story, the film, its power.

Justice yields closure but if a good story requires completion in some sense, it also requires an afterlife. When that afterlife, that resonance, is sacrificed to the cause of justice in the narrative, an injustice is done. Justice, indeed, has another meaning, and it is in that other sense we recognize the stories that do themselves justice. That’s the justice, we discover, we wanted all along.

Peter Markham  December 2020

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay (Focal Press/Routledge).

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