Justice, Doubt, and Modern Storytelling

Clint Eastwood (director), Juror #2

Nicholas Hoult (center) in Juror #2, with Leslie Bibb (left) and Adrienne C. Moore (right)

When Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is the only juror to vote “not guilty” on the first poll, we’re clearly meant to remember Reginald Rose’s 1954 classic Twelve Angry Men. Like in that classic, Kemp speaks brave words about the meaning of justice and the importance of deliberation. Unlike in Rose’s classic, we already know Kemp’s real reason: he has doubts about the trial’s underlying premise. He believes that he, not the accused, might be guilty.

Therein lies the difference which has arisen in the seventy years between these two movies. In 1954, as America still recovered from its post-WWII hangover, filmmakers at least pretended to believe that justice existed, and humans could reach it through dialectical means. Whether audiences shared that belief, or even pretended to share it, remains debatable. By 2024, doubt and ambiguity were the presumed background of storytelling. The idea that rationality could uncover truth was passé.

Unlike Rose’s classic, which confines virtually all action to a single room, director Clint Eastwood swings the action widely throughout the Savannah, Georgia, environs. Kemp and another juror (J.K. Simmons) perform unauthorized investigations at the scene of young Kendall Carter’s purported murder. Another juror prolongs proceedings with technical maneuvers she learned from true crime podcasts. Kemp and his pregnant wife agonize over the proceedings together. He knows these approaches are all strictly against jury protocol.

Meanwhile, Kemp struggles with one secret: a recovering alcoholic, he was at the bar where Kendall was last seen alive with her boyfriend, defendant James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, The Night Agent). Kemp didn’t drink, but he wanted to. If his wife, employer, and others discover he came within inches of violating his sobriety, he’ll lose everything. But protecting his secret means concealing what came after: he definitely hit something near the spot where Kendall died.

As Kemp uses jury procedure to delay a verdict, and allows others to do likewise, his internal conflict becomes more all-consuming. He cannot confide in lawyers, jurors, or his wife. The one person he shares with, his sponsor Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), doubles as an attorney, and warns him that coming clean will create seismic legal repercussions. So Kemp suffers in silence, knowing that only bad options remain for him. The jury room becomes a battlefield.

The longer we watch Kemp struggle with his secret, the more we realize: for this movie, ambiguity is the point. We don’t watch Kemps struggle because we’re seeing the character overcome obstacles on his way to the resolution. We certainly don’t watch because today’s society acknowledges moral complexity and doubt as the normal course of events. No, rather than seeing ambiguity as something characters pass through while approaching resolution, ambiguity has become its own point.

Admittedly, Hollywood moral ambiguity isn’t novel. Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum played grim antiheroes generations before movies like Training Day and Gone Girl left audiences with no clear heroes to support. But this movie goes further. We don’t have to sort the respective characters’ loathsomeness while deciding which one is right. We simply have no foundation from which to interpret events. The script takes extraordinary steps to avoid presenting steps to a clear narrative resolution.

Kemp even manages to convince himself he’s innocent, before surrendering to doubts and re-convincing himself of his guilt. Prosecutor Faith Killibrew (Toni Collette) begins the trial absolutely convinced of defendant Sythe’s guilt, but becomes increasingly doubtful as the jurors descend into infighting. Yeah, her continued prosecution while she doubts her own case is an ethical violation. But it’s nickel-and-dime stuff compared to the wild violations of procedure that Kemp encourages to assuage his guilty conscience.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t yearn for the moral certainty of John Wayne movies, which clearly delineate heroes and villains. The only story tension comes from whether the heroes will win, which is no tension whatsoever, since outcomes are as inevitable as a medieval morality play. Ambiguity is more than just realistic, it’s a narrative motivator, as audiences seek to untangle the truth concealed behind the rationalizations which characters write and rewrite for themselves.

But this isn’t that. Though the movie implies that truth exists, it subverts every tool to discover it, leading to an irresolute “lady or the tiger” conclusion. In Gone Girl, everyone’s manifold sins are unveiled, and everyone faces consequences. Here, we just flip-flop along for most of two hours, before the final shot, a literal stare-down. Ambiguity has become its own justification. Doubt no longer motivates the story, because it apparently now is the story.

The Meaning of Life in “The Life of Chuck”

Mike Flanagan (director, from a Stephen King novella), The Life of Chuck

Albie Krantz (Mark Hamill) explains the harsh truth to Chuck, in The Life of Chuck

Late in this movie, title character Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Benjamin Pajak) has a heart-to-heart with his grandfather. Albie Krantz (Mark Hamill), an accountant, does that terrible thing adults inevitably seem to do: he urges Chuck to abandon his dreams and get a “real” job. He doesn't mean anything malign. Albie just wants the grandson he raised to have a future that doesn't include poverty and a career-ending injury.

This encapsulates the moral ambiguity underlying the movie. More than the apocalyptic opening act, in which the universe's existence balances on adult Chuck's survival, this admonition dives into why Chuck makes the decisions he does. The movie unfolds in reverse sequence, and what happens in each act only makes sense from what we see next-- which is actually what Chuck experienced previously.

Grampa Albie, whom Chuck calls by the Yiddish term Zaydie, sees accountancy as more than a job. He describes the complex numerical relationships in his clients’ finances as the distilled, clarified maps of their lives. He has the same nigh-divine attitude to bookkeeping that Galileo had to astronomy: the numbers show us how God moves in our lives and illuminates our way.

Chuck, a middle-school dance prodigy, has the power to stir audiences’ souls with his body movements. For him, dance is communication. He tells his audience a story, and dance is a conversation with his dance partner, a tall eighth grader named Cat. He became the first kid in school to master the Moonwalk because, while dancing, his body was so thoroughly attuned to his mind. A survivor of childhood trauma, Chuck only feels completely integrated with himself while dancing.

In other words, Albie sees the world as a scientific relationship of mathematical forces. Chuck sees it as emotional truth. But the joy in Albie's eyes announces an emotional bond with his numbers, while Chuck has mastered the physical calculus of dance. On some level, each understands the other's sentiments. But Chuck has only one life, and can't do both.

Every dancer, actor, musician, and author has faced the question: is this all worth it? Most of us, sooner or later, say “no.” Rent and groceries cost too much, and we're getting old. Dancers are especially vulnerable to this, because they're susceptible to disabling injuries that rock stars and novelists never face. Even those rare few working artists, who get paid for a while, quit because they can't buy a house or raise kids.

Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) cuts a rug on the streets of Boston, in The Life of Chuck

In that light, urging kids to relinquish high-minded dreams early, can feel like an act of mercy. Why let them linger in false hope when they could make a living, earn equity, and join a community? This goes double for dancers, who are about as likely to retire because of disabling injuries as NFL players. If you can spare kids from disappointment and disfigurement, perhaps you should.

Yet it's impossible to convey that message to children without telling them something else: “You're going to fail.” And because children are children, deaf to nuance and the exigencies of time, they hear that as “You are a failure.” Protecting kids from a heartless, hostile world causes them to internalize a message of self-abnegation and defeat. Parents don't mean it, but almost inevitably, they teach kids to dream small.

The movie hedges on when Chuck bifurcates into the artist and the accountant. Yet this is clearly a step on this route. At various points, Chuck re-learns the lesson that demonstrating autonomy is equal to disappointing his Zaydie. Like many Stephen King stories featuring child protagonists, this one carries the moral that becoming an adult means becoming small enough to fit this world's demands.

Except, in reverse order, it doesn't.

Adulthood, for Chuck, means accepting small, fiddling responsibility. By the time we see Zaydie warning Chuck to dream small, we've already seen that he becomes an accountant and gets married. But dance as an act of communication remains part of him. His climactic dance with Cat repeats itself on the streets of Boston when circumstances remind adult Chuck's (Tom Hiddleston) that he's most truly himself while using his brain to control his body.

Because even when adults accept small dreams in exchange for security, that dreaming child survives. Kids yearn to be artists, or builders, or heroes, not only for ourselves, but because these are social roles. Big dreams aren't selfish, they tie us to our people and communities. Chuck and Zaydie aren't really at odds, even when they disagree. They just have different routes to the same goal.

“Poop Cruise” and the Hidden Machines of Modernity

The deck of the Carnival Triumph before the nightmare began

Sometime in the small hours odds February 10th, 2013, a diesel generator on board the Carnival cruise ship Triumph caught fire. The incident caused no casualties, and the ship remained intact. But the fire consumed several power conduits, disabling main power and propulsion. Nearly 3000 passengers and over 1100 crew were adrift on the Gulf of Mexico.

Netflix has perfected a content creation system wherein they produce “documentaries” with a combination of existing footage and new interviews. This works in documentaries like Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War, where most interview subjects are historians, diplomats, and social scientists. You need specialists prepared to go beyond the obvious. That's what makes Trainwreck: Poop Cruise such a missed opportunity.

When central power failed, the Triumph's kitchen had to discard tons of perishable food, and the ship's interior became unbearably hot. But when passengers contacted loved ones on shore, another fact captured the public's attention. Without power, the ship's plumbing quickly failed. Within hours, the companionways became choked with human feces. Without anywhere to drain, the sewage clung to everyone's feet.

Director James Ross interviews several passengers and crew: a Bachelorette party, a father and daughter, a young bachelor meeting his future father-in-law for the first time. The ship's tour director and head chef. In direct narrative, these survivors describe the sensory overload of the shit-choked interior, while on deck, passengers descended into Gomorrah-like levels of disinhibition.

But at only fifty-five minutes, the documentary doesn't have room to explore beyond this surface level. Yes, being trapped in a confined space with limited food but flowing rivers of poop, sounds like a trip through the depths of squalor. But without further analysis, it becomes superficial, the sensory revulsion of anyone who's used a week-old Porta-John. We don't get much insight into how it happened, or what it can teach us.

Early on, one bachelorette party member talks about the ship resembling a skyscraper. This shouldn't go unremarkable. Smarter critics than me have observed that cruise ships produce more pollution than many cities: diesel fumes, plastic and paper waste, food packaging, and especially sewage. Solid waste gets held for disposal on-shore, but the sewage gets discharged into the ocean.

The Carnival Triumph after staterooms became too hot and smelly for human habitation

Cruise companies keep their ships glamorous and fun through an elaborate network of human and mechanical systems. The Triumph's crew complement of over a thousand included mechanics and technicians, cooks and hospitality staff, maintenance workers, and others the passengers never see. That's besides the enormous machines, which consume fuel enough to make your leafy-green Prius look paltry by comparison.

Thousands of workers and hundreds of machines means ships have countless moving parts, all prepared to break. Companies have to prepare for every eventuality, and have supplies for repair ready early, because, as the Triumph's crew discovered, resupply may be days away. The investment in human skills will also be substantial.

Extending the analogy between cruise ships and cities, the technological capacity to house and employ so many people in such proximity is astonishing. Urban designer Jeff Speck contends that cities are environmentally sound because close quarters means less energy expended in transportation and climate control. I won't disagree with Speck, as he isn't wrong. But cities require more energy to get food in, and sewage out.

Humans change the environment wherever we go. Unlike other animals, humans don't instinctively slot ourselves into our ecosystem; scholars dispute whether humans have instincts at all. We must constantly make choices about our food, shelter, and entertainment. Technology has created the illusion that we don't have to make some of those decisions anymore, but that's a phantom. We actually just don't have to see our decisions anymore.

Because it's a closed environment, the Triumph amplifies it when our choices become visible again. If sewage systems in Manhattan or Chicago collapsed, it might take weeks before residents noticed, not the hours needed on cruise ships. But sewage processes haven't advanced meaningfully since Joseph Bazalgette pioneered urban sewers in the 19th century. Researchers suffer from the “poop taboo,” making sewage research a dead-end enterprise.

Perhaps director James Ross expected audiences to draw these conclusions without being prompted. But I only caught it because I've read about urban design. When I've tried discussing the “poop taboo” with friends, they've gagged and silenced me. Creating the Triumph's sensory immersion without discussing what it means for us, lets us continue ignoring the parallels with the human environment. But as the Triumph's passengers discovered, failure to plan for disaster, doesn't prevent disaster from happening.

Food, Economic Injustice, and You

Much modern farming less resembles gardening than strip-mining

Amid all the ICE raids which crisscrossed America last week, tipping into street protests in Los Angeles, the Omaha meatpacking raids got forgotten by the national media. This perhaps isn’t surprising. A substantially industrial city with limited glamour, Omaha often gets overlooked unless something catastrophic happens, like blizzards closing Interstate 80, or local darling Bright Eyes releasing an album.

Yet this raid speaks to an undercurrent in American policy. Specifically, since the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln signed the legislation establishing the Department of Agriculture, American ag policy has focused on abundant yields and low prices. This has involved persistent overproduction of commodity crops, coupled with price supports, ever-improving technology, and efforts to create markets internationally.

As George Pyle writes, efforts to bolster production probably made sense in the middle 19th century, during a civil war, when threats to food supply were common war tactics. But conditions have changed markedly, and our central approach hasn’t kept pace. Agricultural technologies based on diesel-burning equipment and ammonia-based synthetic fertilizers have resulted in bloated yields, as Vaclav Smil writes.

Nick Reding describes how consolidation in the ag processing industry has cut wages so low, workers can only make rent by taking double shifts. Such marathon hours are often only possible when workers supplement themselves with illegal amphetamines. Though I broadly support drug legalization, amphetamines are so destructive that even I prefer they remain illegal. However, workers use them for one basic reason: to keep working, and get paid.

Nor are these outcomes unexpected. As Greg Grandin writes, President Clinton knew that subsidized American crops were artificially abundant and cheap. Before NAFTA went into force, he authorized what was, until then, the largest increase in Border Patrol manpower ever. Clinton knew that lifting trade barriers on subsidized American agriculture would cause food to hit Mexican markets below the cost of growing.

And he was right. Rural poverty in Mexico’s agrarian south quickly exceeded 70%, forcing workers, mostly men, to abandon ancestral farms and go anywhere that work existed. Something similar happened when Clinton forced Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to sign a free-trade agreement as a condition of American involvement in deposing Haiti’s illegal coup. Now, Mexican and Haitian workers comprise the largest number of America’s undocumented population.

Pigs don't live in pens anymore; this is where your pork comes from

Numerous White Americans remain invested in farming and agriculture, but primarily as owners or live-in bosses. Because much industrialized agriculture uses machine labor, full-time farmhands usually aren’t necessary. Workers remain necessary while planting and harvesting, but these aren’t full-time positions. This work mostly gets done by migrants—a condition few White workers would accept. Undocumented laborers mostly do this work.

That brings us full-circle to the meat processing plants which began this essay. Before 1990, meat processing was considered semi-skilled labor. The meatpackers in Upton Sinclair’s propaganda novel The Jungle were mostly White, first- or second-generation Eurpoean immigrants. But as Nick Redling describes, meatpacking industry consolidation after 1990 drove wages so low that workers with kids and mortgages can’t afford those jobs anymore.

Currently, America enjoys the cheapest food in world history; per George Pyle, most Americans pay more for packaging than for food at the supermarket. But food is historically cheap because it requires undocumented workers pulling abusive hours in Spartan conditions to plant, harvest, and process it. Workers with legal rights would complain to the NLRB under such conditions; undocumented workers have nowhere to complain.

Eyal Press claims that killing floor workers are among America’s most despised, doing work which consumers demand, but which offends our morals. We expect faceless strangers to kill, dress, and package our meat. Similar problems abound in related fields. Tom Russell notes that the Trump Administration wants a border wall built in regions where only Mexican migrants have the skills necessary for such epic construction.

Anecdotes of supervisors demanding long hours and dangerous work from meatpackers are legend. These demands come with the threat, either explicit or implicit, that we’ll call La Migra if you don’t perform. But like a nuclear warhead, this threat works only when unrealized. Once you drop your atomic bomb, literal or metaphorical, it’s expended, gone forever. And management is left with a vacant killing floor.

Donald Trump heard the threats of calling Immigration, and instead of recognizing them for the rhetorical device they were, he believed them. He authorized his administration to perform massive round-ups that look good on right-wing cable TV, but undercut employers’ labor pool. If this doesn’t stop, agriculture employers will have to start paying workers what they’re worth—and you’ll see it in your grocery bill.

Don’t Pretend To Be Stupid, Dr. Oz

Americans used to like Dr. Mehmet Oz

The same day I posted about Senator Joni Ernst’s faulty rhetoric surrounding Medicaid cuts, Dr. Mehmet Oz claimed that uninsured people should “prove that you matter.” The cardiac surgeon, Oprah darling, and failed Senate candidate is now Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator, meaning he administers decisions for who receives assistance in paying medical bills. His criterion for proving one matters? “Get a job or at least volunteer or … go back to school.”

Last time, I got Aristotelean and dissected Senator Ernst’s rhetoric, noting that she changed the “stasis of argument” mid-sentence. That is, she pretended to misunderstand the core dispute, sanding off nuance while condescending to her constituents.. When someone said people would die unnecessarily, Ernst pretended they meant people would die at all. She thought it appropriate to remind constituents that humans are mortal—and, in her tone-deaf follow-up, sound an altar call for Jesus Christ.

While Ernst’s constituent wanted to argue the morality of preventable death, and Ernst veered dishonestly onto the fact of mortality, a friend reminded me this argument skirted an important issue. Who will die first? When the government makes decisions about paying medical bills, the outcomes aren’t morally neutral: chronically ill, disabled, and elderly Americans stand the most to lose. The same bloc of Americans whom, you’ll recall, certain politicians permitted to die during the pandemic.

Dr. Oz said what Senator Ernst only implied, that hastening human mortality is okay for certain undesirables. This administration, and indeed conventional American conservatism throughout my lifetime, has tied human worth to economic productivity, and especially to productivity for other people. If someone needs assistance, America’s authorities won’t help you create a business, learn a skill, or otherwise evolve to benefit your community. Their imagination can’t expand beyond getting a job working for someone else.

Nor was this subtext. Oz said aloud: “do entry-level jobs, get into the workforce, prove that you matter.” This correlation between “you matter” and “you work for others” has lingered beneath much of America’s work ethic throughout my lifetime—and, as an ex-Republican, I once believed it, or anyway accepted it. But as anybody who’s faced the workforce recently knows, today’s working economy isn’t a source of meaning or dignity; it often actively denies both.

Even laying aside demi-Marxist arguments like “owning the means of production” or “the surplus value of labor,” employment spits in the human face. Minimum wage hasn’t increased in America since 2009, and as anybody who’s worked a fast food dinner shift knows, employers who pay minimum wage definitely would pay less if the law permitted. Even if the workers receive enough hours to qualify for employer-provided health insurance, they mostly can’t afford the employee co-pay.

Lest anybody accuse me of misrepresenting Dr. Oz, let’s acknowledge something else: he lays this onus on “able-bodied” Americans. We might reasonably assume that he expects healthy, young, robust workers to enter the workforce instead of lollygagging on the public dime. But even if we assume they aren’t doing that already (and I doubt that), the pandemic taught many workers important lessons about how America values labor. Specifically, that it doesn’t, except through empty platitudes.

In 2020, executives, attorneys, bureaucrats, and others went into lockdown. Americans laughed at highly skilled professionals trying to do business through Zoom, thus avoiding the virus. Meanwhile, manual trades, retail jobs, construction, and other poorly paid positions were deemed “essential” and required to continue working. These jobs are not only underpaid and disdained, but frequently done by notably young or notably old workers, disabled, chronically ill, required employment to qualify for assistance, or otherwise vulnerable.

As a result, the workers most vulnerable to the virus, faced the most persistent risk. Sure, we praised them with moralistic language of heroism and valor, but we let them get sick and die. Americans’ widespread refusal to wear masks in restaurants and grocery stores put the worst-paid, most underinsured workers at highest risk. Many recovered only slowly; I only recently stopped wheezing after my second infection. Many others, especially with pre-existing conditions, simply died.

Dr. Oz has recapitulated the longstanding belief that work is a moral good, irrespective of whether it accomplishes anything. He repeats the myth, prevalent since Nixon, that assistance causes laziness, citation needed. And despite hastily appending the “able-bodied” tag, he essentially declares that he’s okay with letting the most vulnerable die. Because that’s the underlying presumption of Dr. Oz, Senator Ernst, and this administration. To them, you’re just a replaceable part in their economic machine.