Framed: Women in Law and Film.

• Author: Johnson, Rebecca
• Position: Book review

FRAMED: WOMEN IN LAW AND FILM. By Orit Kamir. Durham: Duke University Press. 2006. Pp. xi, 283. $23.95.

INTRODUCTION

"Strong texts work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists. They could not do this if they merely reflected what already exists."

--Jeanette Winterson (1)

Cultural critic bell hooks says, "Movies make magic. They change things. They take the real and make it into something else right before our very eyes." (2) Movies do not, of course, have an exclusive hold on this ability to change one thing into something else. Law, too, possesses this power. Certainly, one must acknowledge some significant differences in the "magic" of filmic and legal texts. For the most part, as willing consumers of cultural products, we "choose" to subject ourselves to the magic of film. We sit in a darkened theater and let ourselves be taken away to a different place. Or, we sit in the darkness resisting the film's attempts at enchantment or provocation. Law, on the other hand, works its magic notwithstanding the resistance of its objectors. Through judicial and legislative pronouncements, law changes "the real," and declares that something once named thus shall henceforth be named otherwise. With the flick of a pen, transformation occurs before our eyes: the hiring of a white woman by an Asian man is a punishable offense; (3) a First Nations woman marries a white man and is "an Indian" no more; (4) women are "persons" capable of sitting in the Canadian senate; (5) marriage is no longer an exclusively heterosexual institution. (6)

One might, of course, protest the use of the word "magic" to describe such modifications of "the real." Law can both change the world and prevent it from changing, situated as it is between the demands of stability and change. (7) But, the skeptic might assert, law's ability to bring about and resist change is a product of democratic mechanisms and judicial decision-making (albeit supplemented by relations of force). "Magic" may not be the most apt descriptor.

And yet, there is something in the comparison. Reflecting back on the experience of first reading and then teaching Orit Kamir's (8) book Framed: Women in Law and Film, I am reminded of Robert Gordon's comment that the true power of a legal regime lies less in the relations of force it inscribes and brings to bear, than in "its capacity to persuade people that the world described in its images and categories is the only attainable world in which a sane person would want to live." (9) In law, as in film, persuasion matters, enchantment matters. The most powerful legal texts capture us not at the level of force, but at the level of conviction, at the level of judgment. (10) They "work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists." (11) They construct a world, encouraging us to bring our own lives into alignment with it. (12) We are invited into community, invited to be in certain ways, to understand others in certain ways, and to feel in certain ways. This is magic indeed.

In 1986, Anthony Chase challenged critical legal studies' concern with ideologies that he felt narrowly focused on "high culture." He argued instead that popular culture's images and ideas exposed the legitimacy--or lack thereof--of the legal order. (13) In the twenty years since Chase made that claim, theorists have increasingly made "the cultural turn." (14) Legal academics are using film in their classrooms, and there has been a marked upswing of literature produced at the intersection of law and film. (15) Some look to film to learn the way law, lawyers, and legal officials are represented in popular culture; (16) some to assess the impact of the moving image on legal institutions and legal procedures; (17) and still others to engage the moving image as another domain of legal life, with its own jurisprudence, treating movies as legal texts. (18) While it may yet be too early to speak of law-and-film as a discipline, Framed makes a most welcome addition to an emergent field. The book, a "strong text" by any account, is a delicious mixture of theory (legal, literary, film, feminist, race, postmodern), critical engagement, and pure reading pleasure. Part I of this Review describes the analytical structure and insight of the book. In Part II, using the chapter on Death and the Maiden as an example, I turn to my own experience of reading Framed, and reflect on the unexpected ways the book has worked its magic on the edges of my own thinking.

1. FRAMING FRAMED

   One of Kamir's central assertions is that we can profitably study the intersection of law and film to learn more about what we, as legal actors--lawyers, judges, law professors, law students, "ordinary" citizens embedded in the legal order--do when we engage in acts of judgment. Indeed "the study of cinematic judgment may help expose structures, techniques, and mechanisms that operate in real-world legal judging, yet are more difficult to discern and identify in the less coherent texts of lived lives" (p. 5).

   For those accustomed to seeing film primarily as an instrument of entertainment, this may seem a rather bold claim. But the magic of this book lies in Kamir's ability to persuade us of both the claim's simplicity and its power. She has written the book with readers firmly in mind--readers with a variety of intellectual, political, and disciplinary backgrounds. She neither presumes too much in the way of theoretical or ideological orientation, nor talks down to her audience. Rather, she walks with the reader down sometimes unexpected paths and allows the journey to unfold in a manner that is both measured and full of moments of discovery and delight. Her argument about the mechanisms of judgment, unfolding against the rich tapestry of concrete experience provided by a set of films, is persuasive precisely because the reader is provided with a set of theories with which to elaborate the argument, a workable method of approach, and the embodied experience of using those theories and methods to work through concrete moments of judgment.

   Kamir's analytical framework is firmly grounded in three approaches to the intersection of law and film: "film as paralleling law," "film as judgment," and "film as jurisprudence" (p. 1). According to the first approach, some films' modes of social operation parallel those of law and the legal system. Here, one focuses on law and film as two related discourses--discourses that reflect and refract the multiple dimensions of any society, participating in the construction of identity, memory, gender, justice, and truth. Using such an approach, one explores how law and film work similarly to construct the normal family, (19) or considers the relationship between contemporary anti-stalking legislation and the filmic stalkers memorialized in films like Taxi Driver or Fatal Attraction. (20) A "film paralleling law" approach focuses on points of continuity and disjuncture, and the unacknowledged dialogue between the two social discourses, making it possible to see moments when "film imitates law," when "law imitates film," and where a series of feedback loops result in mutual projects of construction.

   Kamir's second approach, "film as judgment," holds that filmic texts not only participate in the constitution of subjects and communities, but they also teach those subjects to judge the world in certain ways. Film is one of the vehicles through which we learn how to judge. We can look to film to understand the processes of legal indoctrination. To return to the Robert Gordon point above, (21) texts attempt to involve their readers in moments of judgment, to persuade them of the justice (or inevitability) of the sentence pronounced. In this approach, one studies the ways that we are positioned (both in film and law) to practice "appropriate" forms of judging. One can do this by asking how the text directs our attention to certain questions and away from others. One might, for example, consider how a film positions us to know whether we are supposed to be celebrating or grieving a particular death. (22) As viewers, we are positioned to identify with certain points of view, to see some groups of people as trustworthy (or dangerous, disgusting, laughable), to experience some kinds of violence as normal, and some lives as lightly expendable. (23) Taking this approach, one can ask how a film leads us to judge not simply a given character or event, but also the cinematic social or legal system in which the action is embedded. One can address how the film positions us to make judgments about justice itself. (24) Though there are some elements in the filmmaker's toolbox that are unavailable to the legislative or judicial scribe, the two discourses share many mechanisms of judgment. (25) The heightened visibility of these filmic mechanisms can open space for their reconsideration in the design of legal texts.

   The third approach looks to film for jurisprudential insight. A prevalent approach, current scholarship uses it with topics ranging from gender roles, familial structures, and human relations, to memory, tragedy, and truth. Such an approach, Kamir asserts, is often highly robust and creative (p. 3-4). For instance, a work like The Sweet Hereafter offers space for thinking about law and fatherhood, (26) Chocolat for theorizing about alternative dispute resolution, (27) It's a Wonderful Life for thinking about constitutional theory, (28) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for considering the jurisprudence of difference and desire. (29) The "film as...