The Verdict

We watched The Verdict last evening—a Paul Newman movie from the early 1980s. I haven’t read any of his recently published posthumous memoir/journals but I have seen at least two positive reviews of the publication. Somehow Newman has been in my screens for most of my life. The Verdict was directed by Sidney Lumet with a screenplay by David Mamet. The film also featured Jack Warden, Milo O’Shea and Charlotte Rampling. The Verdict is another lawyer film. In it Newman plays a down and out lawyer, Frank Galvin, who drinks too much who has had run-ins with his old law firm when they did something unsavory but made him complicit. He was almost disbarred and certainly fired. Of course, he is also divorced, so he is basically alone.  Jack Warden has been his assistant and good friend, but fed up with his drinking in the film’s opening scenes he walks out of Galvin ‘s office. But a malpractice case comes Galvin’s way, and at Galvin’s pleading, Mickey returns out of some loyalty to assist in what seems this almost hopeless and originally badly managed case, and the two alone take on what seems a dubious and doubtful medical malpractice case. Newman becomes a solitary moral fighter against a large team from a big law firm that is a led by a slimy, officious and rapacious head-of-firm. He brags that the firm’s philosophy is not about justice; it is about winning. And Concannon is prepared to do anything to achieve that goal. In that quest he hires a spy (Charlotte Rampling) to establish a romantic relationship with Galvin and then to report what Galvin is up to in his preparation for the case. When she tells Concannon that a doctor may be willing to testify against his client he purchases a week’s vacation in the Caribbean for the doctor rendering him unavailable to Newman and team.
            Newman is accusing two famous anesthesiologists of malpractice during surgery that causes aadmittance that now states that the woman ate a full meal nine hours before surgery and the requiring the use of a general anesthesia when indeed the woman had eaten a full meal only one hour before surgery and vomited into her mask and led to her unrepairable death-like condition.
            Newman wins the case under circumstances I found suspicious, and the jury seems prepared to award a large sum of money to the patient’s sister. The (corrupt) and venial judge had declared the testimony of the admitting nurse, Galvin’s only hope, to be inadmissible be stricken from the record. There is no evidence of malpractice! How the jury could find for Newman’s client seems incredible to me, but really that is neither here nor there. This is another case of the lone fighter working for justice, for his client, and a bit of redemption for himself.
            At film’s end I mentioned to E. that I no longer appreciated these films about the struggle of the powerless against the almost always corrupt and immoral power. In this film, as in other like it, the little man wins against the bigger one, but I am no longer interested in keeping company with such characters as Concannon and his law firm, with Judge Hoyle’s corrupt handling of his court and the trial, and specifically his persecution of Newman’s Frank Galvin. And I am uninterested in the mostly young (and greedy) smug associates in Concannon’s law firm who had all graduated from prestigious law schools and are now engaged in perverting justice. I don’t want anymore to be pulled into the muck and swamp of the world of the powerfully rich and ethically immoral. These hero films continue the illusion that right will eventually triumph over wrong and that the virtuous will finally achieve justice and defeat corruption and venality in life. Ha! Hasn’t anybody read the papers lately? Or the history books? The possible charges of Trump and the support that the man still maintains calls the lie to that myth.      
      The night previous we had screened The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Again, justice was the issue: was the removal of Captain Queeq from command justified. Jose Ferrer plays the lawyer, Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (Jewish??) to defend the mutineers, but his participation in that role is conflicted. He despises what they are doing to Queeq who in the past has served the Navy during war time admirably while his accusers were safely ensconced in school. But he chooses to defend them . . . for unclear motives, but Greenwald is lawyer with a conscience and a sense of justice. He despises what he will do and he despises even more what his clients have done. At film’s end he throws a glass of champagne into the face of the cowardly Keefer who has provoked the mutiny but at the trial denies responsibility for it or his participation in it. Greenwald is a lawyer with a conscience and has an ethical foundation. But he is honestly conflicted! I think the quest for justice comes always with doubts and questions. 
            

Imperialism 101

There are so many easy ways to be an imperialist without having to physically oppress and enslave  the Other. Of course, this doesn’t preclude at all the absence of physical oppression and physical violence in an imperial stance: there is inescapable violence in imperialism and I suppose it involves a physical component inevitably. But sometimes the physical oppression is not as obvious as during the era of American slavery or the practices during the South African culture of apartheid, or the events of the Nazi genocide. Imperialism occurs when one sits outside a culture and looks into it as a disengaged observer and who then makes judgements regarding that culture based on a willed ignorance of the other. Imperialism requires a particular blindness and the assumption of privilege to observe and to judge.
            On the drive to a gated resort community (already through many degrees of separation) I look out of the window of an air-conditioned van being driven by a hired native driver and I see the shops and domiciles along the side of road and I make judgement regarding the living arrangements of the local population and wonder to myself and E how these people manage to survive. The homes I see as we speed past in the rented air-conditioned van are ramshackle structures, tin-roofed and walled as fragilely as structures built of playing cards. Sometimes there is a disordered dirt yard with children playing in it. I observe schools along the road but I don’t see activity in them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there is no activity in there, just that I cannot see it or even conceive of it. But the school buildings don’t look like the ones with which I am familiar in my culture, and so I make uninformed judgements based in my ignorance.  I wonder why the children are not in school and again make value judgment based in my experience in my home country even as I learn that school here proceeds in shifts and the children I see might be scheduled for a different shift. A dog might be asleep somewhere on the property. (I am making judgements as I can only see poverty but not the life that grows in the home). There is no cultivation that I can observe: not a garden for self-sufficiency visible but then I realize, perhaps, it is in the near vicinity, in a community garden, perhaps. But from my seat in the air-conditioned van, I see only the poverty I think I recognize but I remain blind to the possibilities of the richness of life. 

            Along the sides of the road are a myriad of restaurants and mini-markets but they do not look like the establishments with which I am familiar, and I make judgement. I will not enter and purchase anything, even though I do desperately want a water or a beer. I am also unable to speak the native language and it embarrasses me to find myself mute. Yesterday our driver wanted very much to engage us in conversation, but we knew nothing of his language. In schools in the United States learning a second language is not a priority except for those coming from other countries.
            Tourism is a major component of the functioning economy here. E wonders what would happen to the country if we all stopped touring in it and spending our monies here, and I answered that I didn’t know, but I suggested that perhaps the government would have to do something to support the citizenry. The governments would have to rethink the relationship between the leaders and the citizens they lead. Countries send the wealthier populations here with money they have to spend in these foreign ports: perhaps the governments could just send monies until a vibrant economy could be established without its base in tourism. I don’t know: I’m not an economist and I would not be an imperialist. And I am thinking that perhaps I won’t leave home again to roam. I remember that it is said that one should only consume what is grown in one’s own neighborhood. I think I’ll shop from hereon in my neighborhood.

 

 

 

Detectives 1

 

In his more recent serial detective novel, A Line to Kill, author Anthony Horowitz again writes himself into the plot and plays an inept companion to crack detective Daniel Hawthorne on the trail of yet another murderer while ostensibly assigned to write a biography of Hawthorne. In two previous novels Horowitz has played Hawthorne's sidekick and in the process himself almost became a victim of murder. Many detectives require attendants, often they are sergeants, but (except for Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby in Midsomer Murders, also written by Anthony Horowitz) detectives are usually loners: divorced, widowed, never married nor presently in a relationship. In A Line to Kill, Hawthorne complains that no one wants to listen to him speak about himself and his work, but Horowitz responds, “Why do you think there are so many detective stories? People are fascinated by detectives, by what you do!” As I finish another in a long and groaning shelf of detective stories from Britain, Ireland, France, Norway and the United States, I have been wondering the same question. What is the fascination with detectives and especially those that investigate and solve crimes of murder. This post begins that investigation. It should continue. Because the enthrallment with detectives and murder tales interests me—and E, as well, who also has been adding to her groaning shelf. And I don’t forget the myriad streaming detective shows I have consumed over the past not-that-many years. Detective books and shows have not been a lifelong passion of mine, though I do remember that when I was thirteen years old I excitedly read the complete Sherlock Holmes.  When I was visited London years later I even sought out 221B Baker Street but felt as silly there as when on my journey through Italy I couldn’t find Juliet’s balcony in Verona. And of course as an English major I have read and studied the tales of E.A. Poe, some of which are detective stories. Poe's fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin, like so many detectives who have followed, is a lone character who is contacted by the police when they are unable to solve the crime. That is Hawthorne’s position; it was also that of Sherlock Holmes.

            A beginning, then, and as in many beginnings, this one will be overly simplistic. What is it that detectives do? In many of the stories, there has been a disruption in a seemingly unspoiled and uncorruptible environment. The disruption is usually a murder that unsettles the formerly pristine environment. Sometimes the location, as in Shetland, is isolated and seemingly immune from violent crime, but into which heinous crimes occur. Suspects are residents with an abundance of motives of each is made obvious. In detective stories no environment no matter how isolated and bucolic remains free from homicide and depravity; often the crime is grisly, violent of course, and inexplicable. The detective enters this scene, and in the effort to do his work struggles to remain untouched by an inevitable immersion in the sordid and criminal. Detectives do manage to maintain a somewhat strict ethical code and remain uncorrupted. I recall Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) telling Bridget O’Shaughnessy that she had mistaken his character if she thought he wouldn’t turn her over for the murder of Miles and Thursby. George Gently, Christopher Foyle, Inspector Lewis, Adam Dalgleish and Alan Grant stick to a strict moral standard. Now, this situation is not necessarily true for American detective stories where the murders take place in an environment already spoiled by murder and corruption (Los Angeles, for example) and in which the detective (again working often alone) embodies a cynicism but struggling to remain somewhat above the venality in which he must immerse him/herself in ferreting out the culprits. Finally, however, the motives for the murders are almost always relatively petty, and I guess so too must be the murderers. 
               And the task of the detective whose world had been already disrupted by death, divorce and abandonment pursues justice to set the world aright again. In Shakespeare the world is set aright again with marriage, but such is not the case in the detective stories. In detective stories the murderer must be found out and sent for punishment. Sometimes the murderer commits suicide and avoids trial and imprisonment. But murder will out, as a saying goes. And the serial volumes recounting the work of any single detective, think Poirot, Maigret, Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Adam Dalgleish and Alan Grant, et al.,suggests that there is ultimately no end to murder and no return to a safe and pristine world. It would seem to me that one attraction of these detective stories, then, is a confirmation of the world as corrupt and dangerous and of the necessity to be always on ready guard. We read to confirm our suspicions and the detective is our knight not in shining armor but coat and tie who may solve one murder but another soon awaits.! We are not saved but affirmed in our suspicions and anxieties. You see, the detective stories say, we were right all along: the world is a frighteningly threatening place and if I feel safe inside the books I am presently reading in my easy chair, there is really no safe haven from peril. The detectives tell me so.