Gripla - 20.12.2016, Síða 306

GRIPLA306
Law & Order, and dozens of others, going back for decades – not to speak
of Court TV (which televised complete live trials), reality judge shows,
board games, card games, cyberjuries, courtwatching, and on and on. I
might also suggest that what Continental trial movies there are, tend to
have a different shape and a different point. they’re more likely to be
wrong-decision stories or wrong-man stories (martyr narratives of a sort),
as opposed to the acephalous combats of the standard anglo trial movie,
which is typically about outwitting and one-upping the opposition in an
effort to convince us, the jury, of one or the other position beyond a rea-
sonable doubt.
But it’s not plot types that interest me here so much as it is the fact that
the Continental trial has not been particularly generative in the entertain-
ment system, whereas the adversarial jury trial is a veritable machine for
the manufacture of popular story, throwing off shadow forms of itself
wherever it is found – notably in the u.S., something that tocqueville
would probably have related to the fact that of the world’s jury trials, more
than 80 percent are american. (actually, that figure may be growing small-
er because of the increase in plea bargaining—but that’s another story.)
* * *
I turn now from trials to the movie western. Movie westerns routinely
open with the arrival of settlers from somewhere back east to somewhere
on the western frontier – a terra nova. these settlers have come by horse-
drawn wagons or railroads, depending on when and where.
Movie westerns are about life before effective law enforcement. their
world is one of poaching, cattle-rustling, vigilante actions, and outlawry;
and of feuds that start small but grow larger, involving more and more
people. Even when there was a sheriff in the vicinity, he was usually weak.
for better or worse, the settlers tended to govern themselves. also like
other frontiers, the american west was long on men and short on women,
and this too is thematized in the films. and then there is the relationship
between settlers and the native americans — sometimes good, sometimes
bad, sometimes very bad. I never cease to be amazed at the congruence of
some of those western stories with the Icelandic tales of encounters with
the skrælingar in the new World.