Strange encounters: Exploring law and film in the affective register

• Pages: 33-60
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000046002
• Published date: 2008--
• Date: 2008--
• Author: Ruth Buchanan,Rebecca Johnson

STRANGE ENCOUNTERS:

EXPLORING LAW AND FILM IN

THE AFFECTIVE REGISTER

Ruth Buchanan and Rebecca Johnson

. . . thinking is periodically nudged, frightened, inspired, or terrorized into action by

strange encounters. (Connolly, 2002, p. 94)

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (1994) compellingly argued that

a culture’s stories participate in creating (what Raymond Williams referred

to as) ‘structures of feeling.’ Focusing on the 19th century novel, Said laid

bare the political dimensions of popular culture, showing how these texts

(and their structures of feeling) supported, elaborated, and consolidated

practices of empire, and the production of colonial subjects. In 1986,

Anthony Chase bemoaned the propensity of critical legal scholarship to

neglect the place of popular culture in maintaining (and challenging) the

legitimacy of legal ordering (Chase, 1986). But over the past 20 years, legal

scholars have taken up the challenge, increasingly making ‘the cultural

turn.’ There is a rich and growing body of scholarship located at the

intersection of Law and Film (Bergman & Asimow, 1996;Machura &

Robson, 2001;Sarat, Douglas, & Umphrey, 2005;Moran, Loizidou,

Christie, & Sandon, 2004). This scholarship is wide-ranging, touching on an

astonishing number of topics and filmic texts. As one might expect, much of

the scholarship explores films with explicit connections to law. Trial films,

lawyer movies, and police dramas provide the sites for exploration of a wide

range of legal topics: crime, punishment, divorce, child custody, property,

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 46, 33–60

Copyright r2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000046005

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tort, environmental law. But there is also evidence of an increasingly

expansive approach to the question of ‘what is law,’ of ‘where’ and ‘how’

law functions. Scholars are working within a range of less expected genres

such as the Western, sci-fi, romance, and horror to consider how structures

of feeling sustain and constitute law and contemporary legal subjectivities.

Law-and-Film scholarship is founded on a variety of different premises.

Kamir (2006) explores three that have been particularly influential. One is

that film parallels law. Scholarship here explores moments where ‘film

imitates law,’ where ‘law imitates film,’ and where a series of feedback loops

result in mutual projects of construction. Using such an approach, one can

explore how law and film work similarly to construct the normal family

(Johnson, 2000), or consider the relationship between contemporary

anti-stalking legislation, and the filmic stalkers memorialized in films like

Taxi Driver or Fatal Attraction (Kamir, 2000). A second premise is that

films are jurisprudential texts. Here, scholars use film in robust and creative

ways to explore topics ranging from gender roles, familial structures,

and human relations, to memory, tragedy, and truth. For instance, a movie

like The Sweet Hereafter offers space for thinking about law and father-

hood (Sarat, 2000), Chocolat for theorizing about alternative dispute

resolution (Schulz, 2006), It’s a Wonderful Life for considering constitu-

tional theory (Denvir, 1996), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for exploring the

jurisprudence of difference and desire (MacNeil, 2003). A third premise

links film to processes of indoctrination and judgment. Here, scholarship

explores the ways that filmic texts teach us to judge the world in certain

ways, participating in the constitution of subjects and communities.

Whether in Unforgiven (Miller, 1998), Minority Report (MacNeil, 2005),

Disney movies (Giroux, 1996), or filmed criminal confessions (Silbey, 2004,

2006, 2007), scholars show 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.

The breadth of approaches, premises, and directions in the scholarship

reveals something about the incredible variety of concerns and questions

operating for legal scholars who engage with film (Johnson & Buchanan,

2001;Johnson, 2006). But even in the face of this richness of questions and

approaches, it seems clear that when legal scholars turn to film, there is

frequently much in the encounter that is familiar. Both ‘Law’ and ‘Film’ are

meaning-making institutions, sites for the circulation of the stories society

tells about itself (Buchanan & Johnson, 2005). These legal and cinematic

stories participate in constructing as well as in reflecting upon our nomos

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