The politics of law and film study: an introduction to the symposium on legal outsiders in American Film.

• Author: Silbey, Jessica
• Position: LEGAL OUTSIDERS IN AMERICAN FILM

The articles collected in this Symposium Issue on "Legal Outsiders in American Film" are examples of a turn in legal scholarship toward the analysis of culture. The cultural turn in law takes as a premise that law and culture are inextricably intertwined. (1) Common to the project of law and culture is how legal and cultural discourse challenge or sustain communities, identities, and relations of power. (2) In this vein, each of the articles in this Symposium Issue looks closely at a film or a set of films as cultural objects which, when engaged critically, help us think about law as an evolving web of social and political connections and, in light of those connections, about its capacity for justice. Each article differently imagines the legal outsider and the community against which the outsider is positioned. And yet each article similarly asks the fundamental question of law: is justice for all possible when exclusion and dominance appear as inevitable features of law's application?

Law and cultural studies can be too easily marginalized by the legal academy. (3) This is because of an omission on the part of some law and cultural studies scholarship and a mistaken understanding by others of the import of cultural analysis. Cultural studies scholars tend to divide their analysis into the study of production, reception, and representation. (4) We may investigate the means by which a cultural object is produced, the ways in which an object is perceived by its audience, and the manner in which it may be interpreted based on its particular formal structure. (5) Too often, the cultural analysis of law omits the analysis of the subject of law: the citizen on whom the law acts and who acts on behalf of it. Locating the construction of that citizen in the text (as an effect of representational practice), through the text (as a result of reception theory), or as an origination of the text (a means of its production) emphasizes the political nature of all cultural production. (6) Attending to the social subject and her community at the center of a text goes a long way to answer the cynics who ask "so what" when legal scholars write about film or literature.

The articles in this Symposium Issue are examples of law and film studies, itself a sub-discipline of law and cultural studies. (7) "Doing law and film" usually takes one of two paths. There is the "law-in-film" approach, which is primarily concerned with the ways in which law and legal processes are represented in film. (8) The "law-in-film" approach considers film as a jurisprudential text by asking how law should or should not regulate and order our worlds by critiquing the way it does so in the film. (9) There is also a "film-as-law" approach, which asks how films about law constitute a legal culture beyond the film. (10) This approach pays special attention to film's unique qualities as a medium and asks how its particular ways of world-making shape our expectations of law and justice in our world. (11) Writings in the "film-as-law" vein explore the rhetorical power of film to affect popular legal consciousness. (12) They also may look closely at film's capacity to persuade us of a particular view of the world, to convince us that certain people are good or bad, or guilty or innocent, by positioning the film audience as the judge or jury. (13) This "film-as-law" scholarship explains "how viewers are actively positioned by film to identify with certain points of view; to see some groups of people as trustworthy, dangerous, disgusting, laughable; to experience some kinds of violence as normal; to see some lives as lightly expendable." (14) In this latter approach, film and law are compared as epistemological systems, formidable social practices that, when combined, are exceptionally effective in defining what we think we know, what we believe we should expect, and what we dare hope for in a society that promises ordered liberty. (15)

The articles in this Symposium Issue engage in both the "law-in-film" and "film-as-law" approaches. They are heavier on the "law-in-film" method--extracting the stories of the films and analyzing them for what they say about our laws and the society they seek to regulate. (16) All of them explain how film convinces us of certain things about the world, whether true or not. And in this way, each of these articles emphasizes the power and preoccupation of film that has been at its core since its beginning: it is a formidable teaching tool, for good or for ill. (17) Each of these articles also explores the subject of law--the advocate or the citizen--as located within the film's story and as embodied beyond it, living in our cultural imagination.

Professor Taunya Lovell Banks, in Outsider Citizens: Film Narratives About the Internment of Japanese Americans, examines the development of film narratives about this particular part of American history from 1942 until 2007. By tracing the development of the historical representation of the internment camps, Professor Banks demonstrates how there is a master narrative of internment. This dominant narrative explains the outsider status of Japanese Americans during and after World War II as an incident of the bombing of Pearl Harbor rather than, as Banks would contend, as a by-product of preexisting anti-Asian racism in the United States dating from the early nineteenth century. (18) Moreover, Banks shows how the dominant narrative highlights the injustice of the internment camps, but not by focusing on Japanese Americans. Instead, the film stories are told through the eyes of sympathetic white Americans and serve as vehicles for redemption of white Americans who understand the injustice of the camps but also are convinced of their necessity.

Banks examines all sorts of films to show how this narrative remains constant until fairly recently. She examines a documentary film, Japanese Relocation, made in 1942 by the U.S. government to justify the internment camps. It depicts Japanese Americans as either loyal to their ancestral home (Japan) or as "model minorities" in the United States who uncomplainingly remit to the camps as an acceptable incident of war. Beginning with this government documentary, Banks reminds us that documentary filmmaking has a history as a genre as advocacy on behalf of state power rather than, as it has come to be understood today, as a tool for the downtrodden to expose injustice. (19) Banks also explores commercial films that span the post-war period: Daisy Kenyon (1947), Go for Broke (1951), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Hell to Eternity (1960), Come See the Paradise (1990), Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), Worlds Apart (2004), and American Pastime (2007). In all of these films, familiar themes of a white male overcoming his racial bias, or of a Japanese American who must prove his loyalty to the United States, serve to explain the internment as momentary "racial prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership." (20)

Banks's critique of these films is acute and insightful. She shows how the pathology of the master narrative has infected even those who tell the story of internment from the perspective of the Japanese Americans. Moreover, she explains that none of the films provide audiences with "sufficient context through which to understand the magnitude of the wrongs and prerequisite conditions" in the United States of "deeply embedded notions of all Asians as perpetual foreigners and thus outsider citizens" that made the internment appear inevitable. (21) Banks cautions that these films as a whole form a cohesive narrative and thus are "a potentially powerful educational tool," but because of their flaws are "only as effective as the stories [they] tell[]." (22) Even the recent documentaries that counter the earlier government propaganda films

ignore or minimize the extent of resistance, anger and fragmentation in the camps.... Instead, the counter-narrative is of a hyper-patriotic but mistreated loyal citizenry. [T]he persistence of this narrative reflects ... Asian Americans' continuing fear that their Asian ancestry will be used again by the government as the basis for differential and negative treatment irrespective of citizenship status; the fear that Asian Americans remain outsider citizens in the United States. (23) Only one film, Rabbit in the Moon from 2004, is a "slightly different documentary" that explores not only the resistance within the camps but long-term consequences of internment and the ill-treatment of Japanese Americans prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. For Banks, the exception proves the rule. Her reading of this collection of films depicting Japanese Americans as outsiders for only a short time in our nation's history is a stinging critique of the legal system's incapacity for self-reflexivity...