12 Angry Men: Care for the Agon and the Varieties of Masculine Experience

• Published in: Theory & event 2019-07, Vol.22 (3), p.701-716
• Main Author: Honig, Bonnie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Democracy; Fascism; Guilt; Juries; Masculinity; Men; Motion pictures; Political parties; Radio; Realism; Testimony; Truth; Violence; White supremacy
• ISSN: 2572-6633; 1092-311X; 1092-311X
• DOI: 10.1353/tae.2019.0040

[...]when the majority later votes to acquit the defendant on trial, an abused adolescent who appears "ethnic," in a way that could be read as Jewish, Italian, or Puerto Rican, Juror #10 yields to the rest. [...]a good hour into the film, (and the jury's deliberations) he had "forgotten" them. [...]his sudden memory not only casts doubt on the prosecution's case, which did not attend to the subtleties of switchblade use, it also casts doubt, more generally, on the validity of testimony and therefore on the intensity with which the other, mostly conviction-hungry, men have until now professed their certainty about the guilt of the accused. Birdie is empowered to do so, Connolly suggests, by the fact that she first hears Eve when Eve out of her sight, and so Birdie is undistracted by gesture; in a way, we could say, she hears Eve like radio, rather than seeing her like film. [...]Birdie not only gets more quickly to the truth but also offers a commentary on the seductive unreliabilities of the visual versus the audial sense. 12 Angry Men features audial cuts, not visual ones, and the audial has its own de-linearizing effects. Because the director here kept the frame "open to give the viewer a sense of participating in a scene that has not been closely choreographed."