Justice, Doubt, and Modern Storytelling

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

Clint Eastwood (director), Juror #2

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.

D.P. Lyle's Frenetic Forensic Roulette

D.P. Lyle, Run To Ground: a Dub Walker Thriller

Everyone knows Walter Whitiker killed young Steven Foster. But when an Alabama judge excludes damning evidence on a technicality, Whitiker gets three years on an ancillary charge, and gets out after nineteen months. When an assassin’s bullet fells Whitiker as he exits prison, forensic consultant Dub Walker knows he has a real whodunit. But he regrets taking the case when Steven’s grieving parents become prime suspects.

Doug Lyle’s third Dub Walker novel begins with an engaging reversal: an execrable victim and touchingly sympathetic suspects. Lyle quickly establishes Whitiker as a man of low character, bad associations, and revolting habits. Tim and Martha Foster, however, prove willing to bend conventions and break laws to see justice for their son. Frustratingly, that premise doesn’t translate into a plausible story.

Lyle creates interesting characters with sympathetic motivations. Dub Lyle has multiple specialties and boatloads of guilt. His closest allies are his best friend, homicide detective Thomas “T-Tommy” Tortelli, and his ex-wife, ace TV journalist Claire McBride. This trio brings their diverse skills and connections to bear on a case so emotionally loaded that nobody could possibly emerge unscathed.

But having created such worthwhile characters, Lyle forces them into a story of such surpassing silliness that I wonder if the author was perhaps sleepy. Lyle, a cardiologist and forensic consultant, has worked with police and Hollywood. Surely an author so skilled and experienced realizes his audience reads crime thrillers every day, and knows enough to call bullhockey when the story parts company with reality.

From page one, this book relies on readers’ willingness to believe that two suburban civilians with no criminal history could not only organize an assassination, but their own subsequent disappearance, without anyone noticing. They could somehow teach themselves sniper shooting from the Internet. They could launder $500,000 into cash without ringing bells at the FDIC, DEA, or the Fed. And they could do it in absolute secret.

Not only must readers believe this, so must the cops. Because they believe such unbelievable precepts, they permit their prime suspects one full day’s head start. When Dub and T-Tommy finally decide to pursue their real quarry, they grasp at straws so desperately that they lay themselves open to barefaced manipulation. Their investigation quickly devolves into a comedy of errors.

For instance, early in the investigation, Dub squanders valuable time interviewing Whitiker’s potential prison enemies while the real trail goes cold. Wait, they let an accused pedophile walk the yard openly? Maybe it’s different in Alabama, but in most states, “short eyes” go straight to Keepaway for their own protection. In GenPop, they’d have very short life expectancy.

Then, what PD would allow a consultant they haven’t formally hired yet to take point on a high-profile investigation, essentially using his cop buddy as armed muscle? Dub shows remarkable autonomy in opening doors, conducting semi-legal searches, directing interviews, and handling evidence. It almost looks like T-Tommy wants his case ejected on some technicality. Considering his open sympathy for his suspects, maybe he does.

I repeatedly wanted to grab Dub’s lapels and shout “Pull your head out!” He transcribes multiple circumstantial interviews in which people who knew the suspects say exactly the same things—exactly, sometimes verbatim. He could afford to paraphrase for us. Meanwhile, Dub and T-Tommy ignore a red herring campaign so blatant that I remember it from an episode of Law & Order: SVU. What academy did these guys graduate from?

If this weren’t bad enough, Lyle’s prejudices dribble through his prose. Police may follow false paths occasionally, he says, but they never arrest the innocent. Cops are justified in pushing, or covertly ignoring, the bounds of legality, because criminals have no rights. Defense attorneys deserve to be shot. Any judge who doesn’t carry water for the prosecution is “corrupt.”

This might have made me less squeamish before Edward Snowden pantsed the NSA.

Dub’s confluence of weird actions, amateurish oversights, and excessive narration make this book feel really, really long. Seasoned mystery readers will recognize what Dub misses and wonder why he appears so lackadaisical about a case that could inflame public sentiment. Sporadic readers will just wonder why he recounts every single interview, even the useless ones

I wanted to like this book. I continued despite its implausible story. I persevered even when lifting the book became a Sisyphean effort. Lyle crafted a narrator and ensemble who made me care about them. But that doesn’t offset a story so implausible that it would make me laugh if it didn’t make me cry.

One More Contribution to the Season of Lincoln

Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel

Though 11th Grade History extols Lincoln as the President who won America’s Civil War, in his time, Americans regarded him as a moderate. He refused to punish Southerners who surrendered, balked at Sherman’s “total war” tactics, and greeted Lee’s surrender by ordering the band to play “Dixie.” This made him popular with the masses, but the extremists who always get elected to office couldn’t stand him, and didn’t flinch to say so.

Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter imagines a world in which Lincoln survived Booth’s 1865 assassination attempt. In 1867, the Old Rail-splitter dangles between the Radical Republicans, who want a harsh, military-based Reconstruction, and a loose affiliation of moderates, Democrats, moneyed interests, and wealthy deal-makers, who want... something. With feuding conspiracies at his heels, Lincoln has to go outside the government for his defense.

Abigail Canner has just started clerking for a Washington law firm. She hopes to be America’s first black woman lawyer, but she has to earn her stripes from the bottom up. When her boss, Lincoln’s personal attorney, is gruesomely murdered with a black prostitute, and the police show no interest in the investigation, Abigail grabs a spade and starts digging. What she uncovers shakes her faith in Lincoln, law, and the American system to her core.

Carter accomplishes a remarkable feat, creating a setting that is remarkably gripping and energetic, yet primarily cerebral. His world rides on the strength of legal argument and testing evidence. Many stereotypical components of legal thrillers put in only brief appearances: this setting is rich in harsh words, yet remarkably nonviolent. Romance is subdued, constrained by the etiquette of its day, and courtship happens from the neck up.

Yet it’s also a world in which much is at stake. America’s first-ever Presidential impeachment will inevitably have lingering consequences for the nation: executive power or parliamentary? Hard money or soft? Military payback or careful forgiveness? Most important, how will voters take what amounts to a legalized coup d’etat? These questions permit no easy answers, and Carter keeps readers guessing remarkably late in the book.

This story takes remarkably few liberties. Much of Carter’s “case” against Lincoln comes from the impeachment of his Vice President, Andrew Johnson. But Johnson was regarded as a lucky drunk, foisted into the Presidency by blind chance and someone else’s politics. When the same sectarian divides attack a popular war President, the stakes increase exponentially. A case that actually turned on one vote now spills blood and threatens to restart the war.

Carter has published several legal thrillers in which past secrets collide with present exigencies. To date, he has mostly used contemporary settings, and where he has ventured into history, he has kept it within living memory. His decision to go back nearly 150 years sets a new standard for his own work. His level of ambition comes across in his prose, which is dense and slow-moving, but well worth the investment.

We seem to be in some kind of “Season of Lincoln” right now. Considering media lead times, it can’t be collusion that caused this book to appear so close to the movie version of Seth Graeme-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Sometimes a cultural moment occurs when we all turn to face the same icon at the same time. Right now, that seems to be Abraham Lincoln.

Remember, Lincoln did more than just win the war. He held America together when Diamondbacks, Radicals, night riders, and others wanted to pull it apart. Regions of the nation were permanently at each other’s throats. Election days could often end in fistfights, and so could Congressional debates. Language we wouldn’t use on our worst enemies became the lingua franca of political discourse.

The parallel with today’s America couldn’t be any more blatant.

Maybe the nation needs a new Lincoln. Obama voters thought their candidate could fill that role, which explains the messianic tone surrounding his inauguration. But it’s hard to imagine a candidate of such restraint and discretion getting elected today, when name-calling and bald lies dominate political ads. Instead of making false promises, Carter conjures our need for a new Lincoln by reminding us who the first Lincoln really was.

This book could easily descend into either hero worship or extended silliness. It’s a testament to Carter’s legal acumen and storytelling prowess that this remains a gripping, thoughtful, exciting read. And it rewards readers by resisting easy answers and proffering food for thought which will linger long after you close the cover for the last time.