12 Angry Men

I caught the end of Twelve Angry Men again last night. It's a wonderful movie, with a great cast (Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Ed Begley, Jack Klugman, and so on), an intelligent script, and enduring relevance.

More to the point, it's second only to To Kill a Mockingbird as a film articulation of liberal values. Henry Fonda's character is the lone holdout on a jury (the value of dissent in a democratic society) the rest of whom are voting to convict a young man of murder (the fairness of the process is paramount). Remaining calm and polite throughout the often fractious deliberations (the value of civility), battling race-, class-, and age-based biases against the defendant (prejudice is bad), he wins over the other jurors one by one (the power of rational persuasion) until Lee J. Cobb's character is left as the only juror in favor of conviction. And in the end, Lee J. Cobb gives in, after a breakdown in which he reveals his own personal reasons for wanting to convict. The system proves fair after all, but only because Henry Fonda's character is there to keep it fair.

Aside from articulating liberal values, though, it's also the ultimate liberal fantasy: rational argument wins over the other side, and liberal values prevail. We know that the real world isn't like that. We know that in the real world, Lee J. Cobb would never change his vote--and the same is true of at least another two or three of the characters. In the real world, people who have irrational and ill-founded beliefs don't give them up just because they're shown to be irrational and ill-founded; more often, they retreat further into those beliefs. In the real world, being right isn't enough.

But I can hardly fault the filmmakers for indulging in a little fantasy. Look at the timing: it was released in 1957, just after Adlai Stevenson's second crushing defeat at the hands of Eisenhower. McCarthy was gone, but HUAC was still active and the blacklists continued. Things must have looked as bleak for liberals then as...well, as they do now.

At the time, of course, Kennedy was just around the corner. I don't know what we have coming; it could still get a lot worse before it gets any better, and the damage done this time is far greater and longer-lasting than that under Eisenhower, who now looks positively benign. What remain are the fundamental values that define us--values that don't ensure victory, that more often than not handicap us in a fight, but that remain every bit as necessary as they ever were.