CChhiiccaaggoo--KKeenntt LLaaww RReevviieeww Volume 82 Issue 2 Symposium: The 50th Anniversary of 12 Article 20 Angry Men April 2007 FFaatthheerrss iinn LLaaww:: VViioolleennccee aanndd RReeaassoonn iinn 12 Angry Men Austin Sarat Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview Part of the Law Commons RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Austin Sarat, Fathers in Law: Violence and Reason in 12 Angry Men, 82 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 863 (2007). Available at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview/vol82/iss2/20 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chicago-Kent Law Review by an authorized editor of Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. FATHERS IN LAW: VIOLENCE AND REASON IN 12 ANGRY MEN AUSTIN SARAT* Judges and lawyers, like other humans, are moved by natural sympathy in a case like this to find a way for Joshua and his mother to receive adequate compensation for the grievous harm inflicted upon them. But before yielding to that impulse, it is well to remember once again that the harm was inflicted not by the State of Wisconsin, but by Joshua's father. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, DeShaney v. Winnebago' Why do men seek unrealizable certainty in law? Because. .they have not relinquished the childish need for an authoritative father and unconsciously have tried to find in the law a substitute for those attributes of firmness, sureness, certainty and infallibility ascribed in childhood to the father. Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind2 INTRODUCTION 12 Angry Men, directed by Sidney Lumet, remains, fifty years after its debut, a classic jury film. Largely staged within the confines of a single room it raises profound and vexing questions about the nature and value of jury deliberation.3 It is, in addition, rightly viewed as a film in which some of its era's best actors came together to stage, for a mass audience, a celebration of civic virtue and the seeming triumph of reason over passion 4 and prejudice. Nonetheless, for me, 12 Angry Men is as much a film about fatherhood and law as about juries and civic virtue.5 It is a powerful * I wish to thank Xiao Huang for her skilled assistance in the preparation of this essay. I am grateful to Nancy Marder for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1. 489 U.S. 189, 202-03 (1989). 2. JEROME FRANK, LAW AND THE MODERN MIND 22 (Anchor Books 1963). 3. See Phoebe C. Ellsworth, One Inspiring Jury, 101 MICH. L. REV. 1387 (2003); see also Stephen A. Armstrong & Robert C. Berg, Demonstrating Group Process Using 12 Angry Men, 30 J. SPECIALISTS GROUP WORK 135 (2005); David Buchanan & Andrzej Huczynski, Images of Influence: 12 Angry Men and Thirteen Days, 13 J. MGMT. INQUIRY 312 (2004). 4. See Bill Nichols, The Unseen Jury, 30 U.S.F. L. REV. 1055 (1996); David Ray Papke, Law, Cinema, and Ideology: Hollywood Legal Films of the 1950s, 48 UCLA L. REV. 1473, 1483-84 (2001); Jeanine Young-Mason, The Dangers of Moral Mediocrity: Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men, 13 CLINICAL NURSE SPECIALIST 248 (1999). 5. Here I am following in the footsteps of Frank Cunningham, Sidney Lumet's Humanism: The Return of the Father in Twelve Angry Men, 14 LITERATURE/FILM Q. 112 (1986). 1 have analyzed other CHICAGO-KENT LA W REVIEW [Vol 82:2 presentation of sons subject to paternal brutality, of fathers tormented by their sons, and of the very real possibility of sons murdering their brutal fathers. This film thus deploys complex images of fatherhood, as a site and source of violence and anger. By presenting those images it reminds us of law's own complex relationship to reason and violence.6 But, it also offers up an era's image of idealized fatherhood, with its potential to redeem law itself.7 Just as Chief Justice Rehnquist's opinion in Deshaney v. Winnebago presents an image of duty triumphing over desire, of the good judge as one who does not give in to "impulse[s]," 8 so the film's heroic Juror #8 (played by Henry Fonda) earns the admiration of the film's imagined audience by enacting another kind of fatherhood as well as by scrupulously and unquestioningly adhering to law's existing rules and conventions and submitting to the image of the good judge as one who separates public and private, reason from emotion.9 I. Is/CAN LAW BE THE SURROGATE FATHER? Fathers and fatherhood have long played an important role in the way we think about law, and in exemplifying the various faces of law's power.10 Imagining law as a father or the law of the father rightly arouses both desire and anxiety, hope and fear. Here let me note just two examples, one ancient, one more recent, which capture the desires and anxieties which attach themselves to the law of the father. The first is the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, the law of the father, the Father as law in its original form. As Genesis tells it, God calls on Abraham to slay his beloved son,11 unpredictably, inexplicably directing him to renounce love for, and to law/fatherhood films elsewhere. See Austin Sarat, Imagining the Law of the Father: Loss, Dread, and Mourning in The Sweet Hereafter, 34 LAW & Soc'Y REv. 3 (2000); Austin Sarat, Living in a Copernican Universe: Law and Fatherhoodi n A Perfect World, 43 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REv. 843 (1999). 6. See Austin Sarat & Thomas R. Kearns, A Journey Through Forgetting: Towards a Jurisprudenceo f Violence, in THE FATE OF LAW 209, 268-69 (Austin Sarat & Thomas R. Kearns eds., 1991). 7. As Cunningham puts it, in this film "Lumet interweaves ... a motif of fathering that becomes an important visual correlative to the theme of the necessity for personal responsibility in an increasingly depersonalized, bureaucratized world." Cunningham, supra note 5, at 115. 8. 489 U.S. 189, 202 (1989). 9. This image is discussed in Susan Bandes, Introduction to THE PASSIONS OF LAW 1, 6 (Susan A. Bandes ed., 1999). 10. For one particularly important recent treatment of law and fatherhood, see Martha Fineman, Law of the Father (1999) (unpublished manuscript). 11. This is, as Hartman observes, surprising. "[O]ne might have expected a rebellious Isaac, say, who incurs the wrath of a father ready to slay him, and a God who intervenes to stay the father's hand." Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Blind Side of the Akedah, 16 RARITAN 28, 31 (1996). 2007] FA THERS IN LA W abandon his child to, a law that shows itself as a world-commanding will.12 Modem readers of Genesis, confronted with such law, wait for Abraham's impassioned, Job-like protest, an anguished cry of love against law, of fatherly protection against the sacrifice of innocence.13 We wait for, and want, Abraham's torment if not his rebellion.14 We expect fear, at the prospect of his impending loss, to overwhelm him. But it does not. Abraham is the obedient servant of law, compliant before its overwhelming power, who asks no questions, issues no protests,15 and when Abraham finally does speak he is as bold in asserting his presence before his son as he is meek in relation to the Law. "Behold Here I am, my son."16 This phrase, an eerie echo of the Lord's initial announcement of Himself, suggests the ability of the father commanded by the Law to become law to his child.17 In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Abraham and Isaac story is a paradigmatic exemplification of law's claims and its powers, of the 12. "The drama of the Akedah, then, takes place in the narrowest arena, between father and son, father and father, solitary and God. The call that starts it all remains a haunting fact; and where obedience seems to be purest it is also most questionable. A voice out of nowhere commands a murder it calls a sacrifice ....I d. at 35. 13. See JACQUES DERRIDA, THE GIFT OF DEATH (David Wills trans., 1995); see also Lippman Bodoff, The Real Test of the Akedah: Blind Obedience Versus Moral Choice, 42 JUDAISM 71 (1993). Genesis 22 is what Hartman calls an "ascetic narrative." As such it allows "and even compels the reader to visualize what is recounted, to supply what is withheld, to invent the absent dialogue and imaginatively build upon every sparse detail." Hartman, supra note 11, at 32. 14. Jon D. Levenson, Abusing Abraham: Traditions, Religious Histories, Modern Misinterpretations, 47 JUDAISM 259 (1998). As Kafka puts it, "I could conceive of another Abraham for myself-he certainly would have never gotten to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer-who was prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter ... Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes 41 (Schocken Books 1958). 15. Abraham passes God's test because, as the text proclaims, he has not "withheld thy son, thine only son, from me." Genesis 22:16. This reminder of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice innocence before the law is later repeated as a preface to the Lord's blessing of Abraham, his promise to "multiply [his] seed as in the stars of the heaven ... because thou hast obeyed my voice." Genesis 22:17-18. Abraham becomes a father, the father to all Semitic peoples, only as he shows himself willing to sacrifice his son. See Bodoff, supra note 13: see also Judah Goldin, Introduction to SHALOM SPIEGEL, THE LAST TRIAL: ON THE LEGENDS AND LORE OF THE COMMAND TO ABRAHAM TO OFFER ISAAC AS A SACRIFICE: THE AKEDAH, at vii (1969). 16. Genesis 22:7. The human voice that first is recorded in the text is not Abraham's. It is instead the voice of Isaac bewildered at his circumstance, "Behold the fire and the wood; but where," Isaac asks, "is the lamb for the burnt offering?" Abraham responds to Isaac's innocent question by assuring him "My son, God will provide himself a lamb for the burnt offering .... Genesis 22:7-8. His response is either the first parental lie or a reminder of the distance between his relation to Law and ours. On the importance of speech and silence in Genesis 22, see DERRIDA, supra note 13. What Abraham tells his son is a profession of faith and a prophecy. The good Father would not sacrifice innocence. The measure of the good Father is to be found in his substitution of the lamb for the child. Child becomes lamb only in the symbolic sense. 17. By becoming law to Isaac, Abraham may be said to become a father. Yet Abraham is, in one sense, not present to Isaac at all. He appears before Isaac as a servant of a law that is not his own. He is present only to God. His fatherhood fails before a law that models itself the Father. CHICA GO-KENT LAW REVIEW [Vol 82:2 presentation of law as the Father but also the father as law. It is also a story of fatherly failure before the law, of the abandonment of a child, of a father's failure to protect an innocent in the face of an arbitrary and unjust threat. As Derrida notes, Abraham is ... at the same time the most moral and the most immoral, the most responsible and the most irresponsible of men, absolutely irresponsible because he is absolutely responsible, absolutely irresponsible in the face of men and his family, and in the face of the ethical, because he responds absolutely to absolute duty .... 18 The story of Abraham and Isaac is thus enormously important for the ways this culture imagines law as well as fatherhood. The Law which we encounter in Genesis, rather than rescuing us from danger, is its source, rather than preventing loss, threatens to impose it, rather than allying itself with fatherhood, exposes the weakness and vulnerability of all fathers, and rather than providing a structure within which to order and reorder the world is itself a profoundly disordering force.19 More usually, law at least promises to protect innocent life by securing children when fathers turn cruelly against them.20 Yet, unfortunately, it often fails to tame fatherhood's brutality. This is the familiar rendition of the law of the father that we encounter in the United States Supreme Court's decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago.21 In that well-known if not well-regarded case,22 the Court rejected the claim of Joshua DeShaney and his mother that the Department of Social Services violated his constitutional rights by failing to protect him from his father's repeated and brutal violence. The Court's majority opinion, while acknowledging that the state had ample knowledge of the danger to Joshua and indeed had once removed Joshua from his father's custody, nonetheless held that it acquired no duty to provide adequate protection.23 What draws 18. Derrida, supra note 13, at 72. 19. See generally PETER FITZPATRICK, THE MYTHOLOGY OF MODERN LAW (1992). "To meet the God of whom it was said not once but several times that 'He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. ..', commanding His favorite to offer up as sacrifice that one's beloved son, is sure to produce ... fear and trembling .... Goldin, supra note 15, at x. 20. For an important discussion of the role of law in regard to paternal power, see JOHN LOCKE, Of PaternalP ower, in SECOND TREATISE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT AND A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION 27 (J.W. Gough ed, 1946). 21. 489 U.S. 189 (1989). 22. For examples of critical commentary, see Susan Bandes, The Negative Constitution: A Critique, 88 MICH. L. REV. 2271 (1990); Aviam Soifer, Moral Ambition, Formalism, and the "Free World" of DeShaney, 57 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1513 (1989). 23. It treated family violence as private and suggested that "the distinction between public and private action makes violence, on occasions like this one, beyond public control." Martha Minow, Words and the Door to the Land of Change: Law, Language, and Family Violence, 43 VAND. L. REV. 1665, 1668 (1990). 20071 FATHERS IN LA W my attention to this opinion is, however, not its oft-noted doctrinal formalism but rather its rhetorical positioning of the law as a stem, aloof father. Late in this opinion, Chief Justice Rehnquist notes that "Judges and lawyers, like other human beings, are moved by natural sympathy in a case like this to find a way for Joshua and his mother to receive adequate compensation for the grievous harm inflicted on them." But, he warns, "before yielding to that impulse, it is well to remember once again that the harm was inflicted not by the State of Wisconsin, but by Joshua's father."'24 Rehnquist's rhetoric points out the dangerous abuses that fathers inflict on their families, even as it enacts the role of the distant, restrained father unyielding to "natural sympathy," like Abraham, abandoning innocence in the face of danger.25 And, like Rehnquist, 12 Angry Men celebrates the separation of duty and desire, role and person, and positions the idealized father as distant, deliberative, strong, but slow to anger. It is the doubling of fatherly betrayals that again highlights both fatherhood's and law's power. While Genesis treats law as divine violence working its will in, and over, the world, DeShaney reverses the narrative, with law giving way, abandoning the child to the world shattering violence of the father. The former describes the impotence of fathers before the law, while the latter exposes the cruel indifference of law before the father. Together these examples, as well as 12 Angry Men, suggest that law and fatherhood are mutually constitutive; law and fatherhood are inseparable, each lives in and as the other. Moreover, Genesis, DeShaney, and the film frame our recurring doubt and ambivalence about fatherhood and law, the fears and desires that are focused on both. Just as the biblical narrative, the Supreme Court decision, and the film present fathers before the law, fathers as law, and law as the father, so too legal scholars, following Freud, have called attention to the complex associations of paternity and legality.26 They have portrayed a deep-seated 24. DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 203. 25. There is, however, another moment in DeShaney that links law and fatherhood in a different way. It is Justice Blackmun's now famous cry "Poor Joshua!" Id. at 213 (Blackmun, J., dissenting). This cry, with the biblical resonance of the name it intones, recalls the dread and dismay that one might feel at Isaac's impending sacrifice and Abraham's calm compliance. Blackmun raises his voice in pained protest just as we wish Abraham himself would have done. And as Blackmun continues, "Victim of repeated attacks by an irresponsible, bullying, cowardly intemperate father," he reminds us of the dread that fathers inspire, not just those who inflict violence on their children but also those who stand by unwilling to intervene. Id. 26. See SIGMUND FREUD, TOTEM AND TABOO (James Strachey trans., 1950). As Althusser puts it, [A]ny reduction of childhood traumas to a balance of "biological frustrations" alone is in principle erroneous, since the Law that covers them, as a Law, abstracts from all contents ... and the infant submits to this rule and receives it from his first breath. This is the CHICA GO-KENT LA W REVIEW [Vol 82:2 longing for paternal power and the overwhelming power that fathers exercise as basic to legal authority. One of the most famous of these formulations is found in Jerome Frank's Law and the Modern Mind.27 There Frank suggested that law, like religion, is a projection of a widely shared human need for certainty and security in a world of danger,28 and he invited us to think of law as the father or, more precisely, as the father- substitute.29 "To the child," Frank argued, "the father is the Infallible Judge, the Maker of definite rules of conduct. He knows precisely what is right and what is wrong and... sits in judgment and punishes misdeeds. The Law ...i nevitably becomes a partial substitute for the Father-as- Infallible-Judge. '30 Exploring similar themes, Peter Goodrich recently noted that Freud and those who follow him depict a law that is modeled upon the power of the father. They elaborate a symbolic order that is patriarchal in its norns and in its methods. To some extent that account of the legal order reflects an institution embedded in a history of homosocial power and a continuing male privilege.31 But other readings of Freud suggest that there is another side to fatherhood, and perhaps of law, a side associated with loss, lack, and inadequacy. Mythologically law is fate, an all-powerful force, operating unpredictably, incomprehensibly, unaccountably, imposing loss without explanation. This law is God commanding Abraham, for seemingly no beginning, and has always been the beginning, even when there is no living Father (who is Law), hence of the Order of the human signifier, i.e. of the Law of Culture. Louis ALTHUSSER, Freud and Lacan, in LENIN AND PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER ESSAYS 189, 212 (Ben Brewster trans., 1971) (footnote omitted). 27. FRANK, supra note 2. 28. Id. at 196-97. "[T]he psychoanalytic foundational fiction of the origin of the law and civilization is tormented by the dilemma of positing simultaneously that its origin myth 'really happened' and that its 'memory' is instituted by an unconscious explanation of unnatural restraints on individual will." See Jonathan Boyarin, Another Abraham: Jewishness and the Law of the Father, 9 YALE J.L. & HUMAN. 345, 350 (1990). 29. Fitzpatrick emphasizes that the law of the father is an "impossible joining of determination and what is ever beyond determination." Peter Fitzpatrick, 'In the Exigency of His Longing': Freud's Discovery of Law and Fiction in Totem and Taboo, 32 NEW FORMATIONS 143, 155 (1997). He reads Freud's Totem and Taboo to suggest that "The power of the primal father is complete, itis unlimited and unrestricted, yet the second father 'becomes stronger' than the first ever was.... Radically different as the second father-the father of the law-may be from the savage first father, they are hardly unacquainted." Id. at1 54. 30. FRANK, supra note 2, at 19. "The law is a near substitute for that father, a belief in whose infallibility is essential to the very life of the child." Id. at2 64. He continues, "Despite advancing years, most men are at times, the victims of the childish desire for complete serenity and the childish fear of irreducible chance. They then will to believe that they live in a world in which chance is only appearance, not reality ...". I d. at 20. "[D]riven by fear of the vaguenesses, the chanciness of life," he argues, man "has need of rest. Finding life distracting, unsettling, fatiguing, he tries to run away from unknown hazards." Id. at 210-11. 3 1. Peter Goodrich, Maladies of the Legal Soul: Psychoanalysis and Interpretation in Law, 54 WASH. & LEE L. REV. 1035, 1074 (1997). 2007] FATHERS IN LAW reason at all, to slay his innocent son; law is fate entrapping Oedipus in a tragic drama from which he cannot extricate himself. The law with which we live, the positive law, is a mere shadow of law as fate, awesome in the power it can deploy, but shackled by the need to justify the power it deploys and unable to forestall or undo fate that befalls Abraham, Oedipus, or us less storied figures. And what is true for law is also true for fatherhood. Here the so called "dream of the burning child" is instructive. As Freud tells it, a father whose child has recently died dreamed that "his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered reproachfully: 'Father,d on't you see I'm burning?", 32 The burning child in the dream plays out a traumatic repetition of the death of the child; the one who speaks stands in for the one who is forever silent. As Caruth says, this dream is no longer about a father sleeping in the face of an external death, but about the way in which ... the very identity of the father... is bound up with, or founded in, the death that he survives. What the father cannot grasp in the death of his child, that is, becomes the foundation of his very identity as father .... [T]he very consciousness of the father as father... is linked inextricably to the impossibility of adequately responding to the plea of the child in its death.33 On this reading, it is a failed grasp and a failure to "respond adequately" that makes fathers who we are.34 But perhaps this is not just another side of the law of the father. As feminist theorists like Kaja Silverman have pointed out, because the law of the father conjures a mythical fullness and plenitude, it simultaneously marks a void, an absence.35 In this sense there is no other side to the story. As Silverman notes, in going from Freud to Lacan we see that "'what might be called a man, the male speaking being, strictly disappears as an effect of discourse ... by being inscribed within it ... as castration.' 36 The phallic legacy is constituted by lack and the intense effort to avoid its 37 recognition. 32. SIGMUND FREUD, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS 547-48 (James Strachey trans., 1965). 33. CATHY CARUTH, UNCLAIMED EXPERIENCE: TRAUMA, NARRATIVE, AND HISTORY 92, 103 (1996). 34. While this failure is particularly important to the constitution of the identity of fathers, it is not exclusive to fathers. For an important treatment of this same theme in regard to the mother, see IRVIN D. YALOM, LOVE'S EXECUTIONER & OTHER TALES OF PSYCHOTHERAPY 118-43 (1989). 35. See KAJA SILVERMAN, MALE SUBJECTIVITY AT THE MARGINS (1992). 36. Kaja Silverman, Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity, in PSYCHOANALYSIS & CINEMA 110, 110-11 (E. Ann Kaplan ed., 1990). 37. 1 am indebted to the work of Silverman and others, who by moving feminist scholarship from sex to gender, have pointed out how the social construction of maleness elides this recognition. CHICA GO-KENT LAW REVIEW [Vol 82:2 While Silverman's invitation to rethink male subjectivity is helpful for what it can tell us about the fragility and vulnerability of both law and patriarchy,38 it neither denies, nor apologizes for, the power and privileges of men or the significance of the symbolic equation of law and the father. Instead it demythologizes and humanizes men and their power. It opens a conversation about the symbolic processes through which the phallic legacy is conveyed and through which processes of adequation occur. 12 Angry Men is itself a symbolic process as well as a film about symbolic processes. It provides images of fathers as dread-inspiring presences and yet fragile beings,39 as likely to feel fear as to inspire it, as likely to suffer loss as to impose it. It dramatizes both the aspirations of 1950s manhood as well as what Silverman calls "the vulnerability of conventional masculinity .... ,,40 This film creates a juridical space in which fathers are cast in the role of jurors and in which law of the father can be subject to judgment. It puts law and fatherhood on trial and invites its viewers to participate as judges 41 and jurors. This film also offers viewers the chance to contemplate the plight of "lost" children, or of childhoods that are lost, and, at the same time, to occupy a childlike identity. Sitting in a darkened room the spectator is herself another lost child.42 By helping us take on this identity, 12 Angry Men exposes the complex structure of desire and anxiety that is attached to law and fatherhood.43 In it we see our continuing search for good fathers and good law as well as our fear that we will find neither, our hope that the 38. "Male subjectivity," Silverman suggests, "is a kind of stress point, the juncture at which social crisis and turmoil frequently find most dramatic expression." Silverman, supra note 36, at 114. 39. In this it provides an important contrast with film's more traditional portrayals of fatherhood. See Donald Lyons, The Long Goodbye: Fathers and Sons and American Cinema, FILM COMMENT July-Aug. 1998, at 54. 40. SILVERMAN, supra note 35, at 53; see also MALE TROUBLE (Constance Penley & Sharon Willis eds., 1993). 41. What Clover claims is true of much cinema is, I am arguing, also true of 12 Angry Men. Carol J. Clover, Law and the Order of PopularC ulture, in LAW IN THE DOMAINS OF CULTURE 97 (Austin Sarat & Thomas R. Keams eds., 1998). Clover says that "the plot structures and narrative procedures... of a broad stripe of... popular culture are derived from the structure and procedures of the Anglo-American trial; that this structure and these procedures are so deeply embedded in our narrative tradition that they shape even plots that never step into a courtroom .... ." Id. at 99-100. 42. See Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in NARRATIVE, APPARATUS, IDEOLOGY 198, 201 (Philip Rosen ed., 1986). 43. Silverman surveys a number of films which, in her words, "attest with unusual candor to the castrations through which the male subject is constituted .... " SILVERMAN, supra note 35, at 52. While she focuses on particular historical moments as being particularly conducive to such representations, it is my contention that continuing anxieties about law also provoke them. On the theme of ambivalence about law portrayed in popular culture, see Anthony Chase, Toward a Legal Theory of Popular Culture, 1986 WIS. L. REV. 527. 2007] FATHERS IN LA W law of the father will be a protective one as well as the worry that it will not be.44 We love the protection fathers and law sometimes provide, but fear the power that lies behind it. As Freud puts it in Totem and Taboo, speaking of the attitudes of the sons who, by slaying their father, bring a new law into the world, "The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model .... -45 Each of the sons, Freud says, "hated their father, .... but ... loved and admired him too."'46 Living with images of fathers like Abraham and Randy Deshaney, and of a law that endangers as well as protects us, we all may derive some satisfaction from seeing the vulnerabilities and occasional inadequacies of both fathers and law. 12 Angry Men delivers such satisfaction for its viewers. That this film was written and directed by men and contains no female characters is of no little significance. There is no doubt that, from one angle, it can be read as both an idealization of masculinity and the whining of the privileged since it is preoccupied with not only the vulnerabilities of children to their fathers but also the vulnerabilities of fathers in relation to their children. Yet by focusing on these subjects it first registers the loss, dread, and mourning that is inevitably and inexorably attached to the law of the father. Second, it speaks to our anxiety and conflicted desires in the face of paternal power,47 and it uses fatherhood to express similar ambivalence and uncertainty in our desires and anxieties about law. And, third, it exposes the diverse and contingent possibilities of law and of fatherhood, the different ways that both exercise power and deal with loss, dread, and mourning. 44. "[W]hen we watch a film it is as if we were somehow dreaming it as well; our unconscious desires work in tandem with those that generated the film-dream." Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television, in CHANNELS OF DISCOURSE, REASSEMBLED: TELEVISION AND CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 203, 211 (Robert C. Allen ed., 1992). And as Goodrich notes, "Images ... are distortive forms both of recollection and representation; they are the affects, the symptoms, the intensities or condensations of the desire that law hides .... " PETER GOODRICH, OEDIPUS LEX: PSYCHOANALYSIS, HISTORY, LAW 33 (1995). 45. FREUD, supra note 26, at 142. 46. Id. at 143. 47. See LEONARD BENSON, FATHERHOOD: A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE (1968); ROBERT L. GRISWOLD, FATHERHOOD IN AMERICA: A HISTORY (1993); THE FATHER FIGURE (Loma McKee & Margaret O'Brien eds., 1982). It is only, Silverman claims, "through imaginary inscriptions.., that we can come to believe in male lack .... [Such inscriptions] dismantle[] the defensive mechanisms upon which conventional male subjectivity depends, [and] provide[] us with images in which we recognize- misrecognize male castration .... SILVERMAN, supra note 35, at 74.