Issue #359: Juror #2 and Red Rooms Make Their Case
Ah, the holiday season. A time for recycled, abbreviated, and self-indulgent newsletters. But it’s not all bad. You are probably sitting back with your loved ones, or alone in your room with the bright screen of a late 1990s JRPG illuminating your surroundings, eating Merry Berry Twizzlers, drinking Cometeer coffee, and wearing Knestknit socks. At least, that would be what you are doing if you bought everything from my gift guide for yourself.
I planned to just deliver some pretty standard holiday stuff, but got a little inspired by Juror #2 (2024) and Red Rooms (2023), a pair of films that make a great double feature. I also watched them with my family. Red Rooms is not exactly family friendly viewing.
But if all goes to plan, the retrospectives are coming next week. This week, you can enjoy a not very rigorous reading of these two films.
Transcendental Laws and Courtroom Dramas
Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, both the 1989 manga and 1997 anime adaptation, begin with a provocative epigraph:
In this world, is the destiny of mankind controlled by some transcendental entity or law? Is it like the hand of God hovering above? At least, it is true that man has no control, even over his own will.
The emphasis on law, written in red in the anime adaptation, provides a great theoretical blueprint for understanding law as such. In Berserk, law is never related to a judiciary. Rarely are characters ever subject to statutes and rules. Instead, the laws of the world of Berserk are like the laws of physics: inalienable, inviting of transgression but extraordinarily difficult to defy. Of course, Berserk is a story about such laws, principles that are universal — sometimes incontrovertible, sometimes requiring of once’s agency to live up to. For the protagonist, Guts, laws in the sense of what one lives by confronts Law in the sense of unavoidable imposition.
Law and laws (capital, lowercase) have their third term in the judicial function that is totally alien to Berserk. But two films from this year deal with the tripartite nexus of law’s various meanings: Juror #2 (2024) and Red Rooms (2023).
Eastwood’s Juror #2 (2024) relates law to the corollary ideas of truth and justice. Allusions to blind justice can be critical and cutting as often as they are an endorsement.1 But for Eastwood, justice’s blindness is at odds with truth. Because justice fails to live up to its complementarity with truth because of its inability to see, Eastwood sets up a film in which the refusal to look upon that which justice adjudicates produces a desirable outcome for the social order.
Working through this opposition, in Juror #2, justice is only possible because of truth’s inability to “complete” itself in discourse. What is in question is the circumstances of a young woman’s death. The truth of the matter is never articulated or entered into the record. This is true at level of form, where the cinematic reality of events are ambiguous, but also at the level of plot, where the truth is a secret between titular juror Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) and prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette). The truth does not exist outside of their relation. And though the film’s conclusion threatens the usurpation of normalcy for both Kemp and Killebrew by truth itself, the justice of maintaining familial cohesion weights heavily on Juror #2’s scales.
All of this is underwritten by a consequentialism framework. The conflict between Kemp and Killebrew is the conflict between utilitarianism and deontology. Kemp pleads the case for judging actions based on their results, while Killebrew seems to at least have the potential to act against her self-interest or, indeed, the interests of her constituents. Both parties are connected by contradictory principles. Kemp pledges to “protect his family,” Killebrew, by contrast, can only be understood as morally laudable by fully embracing a moral principle that has no social function. Her action would harm an innocent family — assuaged by a simple, untrue explanation for their daughter’s death — to say nothing of the other incidental harms that may be more or less acceptable when one acts in service of not the greater good but the greatest good, a moral law disentangled from the mess of intersubjectivity.
If Juror #2 shows how truth must be excluded for justice to be served, Red Rooms presents a world where justice is nearly impossible to achieve regardless of truth’s self-evidence. Pascal Plante’s film is one where the judiciary is totally incapable of bringing about justice because of truth’s impotence. The serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) clear culpability for the murder of several young girls is almost never in doubt. Despite this, there are those, such as Clémentine (Laurie Babin), who believe in his innocence without concern for truth. Clémentine is a foil for the high-achieving protagonist, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) an enthusiastic (but perhaps short of compulsive) gambler and, eventually, disgraced model. Kelly-Anne knows Chevalier is guilty, but presents herself as a “groupie” for his trial alongside Clémentine.
Kelly-Anne’s passionate fascination with Chevalier evinces her “edginess.” Her manager, breaking the news that she has been dismissed from an ad campaign, says to her, “there’s edgy and then there’s edgy.” Attending a murder trial for a serial killer as an ostensible supporter is a bridge too far for any level of social acceptance. Alongside with the critique of contemporary social problems like stanism (fervent, uncritical, obsessive fandom of celebrities) and “cancel culture,” Red Rooms demonstrates the conditions under which one must take the law into their own hands.
The perverse and disturbing behavior of Kelly-Anne belies her own adherence to a law of retribution. Even as she seems to admire Chevalier, she transforms herself into one of his victims like Judy Barton (Kim Novak) in Vertigo (1958). Kelly-Anne’s subject position, vulnerable, observed, and judged, aligns her with her sisters behind the screen,2 the ones victimized by Chevalier. Thus, Red Rooms is a twisted combination (along with Vertigo) of American Psycho (2000) and Hard Candy (2005). Even Kelly-Anne’s sadistic tendencies and prodigious technical talent to avoid being surveilled by panoptic security cameras can’t overcome the logic of gender that sets her apart from Chevalier. In the process of transforming into his object of desire, she embodies that object to the degree that she must take vengeance against him.
Once again, law underwrites it all. Kelly-Anne is compelled to act first by what appears to be a symptom, then by a principle. Even her symptomatic behavior, though, adheres to a principle of absolute transgression and disregard for social norms. Again, form mirrors content as Red Rooms repeatedly presents what should be boring, banal scenes (extended testimony relatively devoid theatrics, digital poker games) that unexpectedly convey the height of drama and tension.
Among Berserk, Juror #2, and Red Rooms, one consistent through line is that a human’s ability to transgress the law is only as strong as the principle — another instantiation of law — that supports their action. The hovering hand of God Miura evokes is in fact one among many hands that can move a subject. The hand that moves Guts or Kelly-Anne or even Kemp is the hand that responds to the something that one must do something about.3 These works all present a universe of contradictory laws that contravene the laws of “man” (both human and the demonstrably masculine). Whether they are the forces one is always subject to or the force — like the drive — that defies seemingly unbreakable laws, truth and justice are at their mercy.
Weekly Reading List
Until next time.
“There’s no justice, it’s just us, blind justice screwed all of us,” Victim in Pain (1984)
I’m alluding to The Big Heat (1953) here
The Maltese Falcon (1941)