Post-Truth in the Courtroom Drama
The Use and Abuse of Narrative in Anatomy of a Fall and Anatomy of a Murder.
THE COURTROOM DRAMA
The courtroom drama is a prime vessel for dramatic storytelling. In addition to providing the quintessential backdrop for performance set pieces, its formal adversarial proceedings – the penetrating cross-examinations, objections, ambivalent key witnesses, and closing arguments – lend precious subtext to the otherwise mundane pieces of exposition that compose the skeleton of its story. The promise of the genre is, so long as these expository elements have been arranged just-so (and requisitely draped in the flesh of movie stars), one can count on moviegoers sitting in rapt anticipation of the jaw-dropping revelations buried deep within the final act. This is the bet Justine Triet and Arthur Harari made when they wrote Anatomy of a Fall, and boy did it pay off: the adoration of critics worldwide, a Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, three Oscar nominations, and a win for Best Original Screenplay.
The film follows Sandra Voyter, a successful fiction writer accused of killing her husband, Samuel, given the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death: a fall from the top floor of their Swiss chalet and blunt force trauma to the head (possibly from collision with the shed near the site of his fall, possibly from an assault with a blunt object that preceded said fall). Triet and Harari keep the truth of the incident a secret from the audience so that, in the midst of the trial, every performance, camera angle, line of dialogue or deposition, is fraught with the tension of uncertainty – much as it would feel if one were a juror in the French courtroom making judgments under the perfectly ambiguous conditions of Sandra’s case.
I saw the film with some friends and, in the immediate aftermath of the screening, felt it held up under the high expectations critical consensus set. We discussed it over drinks, admiring the writing and directing that had kept us utterly absorbed in the moment-to-moment unfolding of the evidence whilst praising the performances by Sandra Hüller and Milo Machado Graner as her blind son, Daniel. In fact, we were all so busy riding the dramatic high, that none of us bothered to offer an answer to the movie’s tantalizing, unresolved question. So, crassly, I posed one: “She did it, right?” There was a moment of awkward silence, then everyone broke into laughter as if my remark could only be read for dry humor. To my surprise, they were all convinced of Sandra’s innocence. So we started trading theories based on our respective interpretations of various scenes.
For me, the family border collie, Snoop, was the symbolic key to the whole case: the figure Sandra uses to bolster her narrative of Samuel’s depression and the one who ultimately convinces Daniel that his mother is telling the truth. This is how I accounted for the final image in the film: Snoop and Sandra snuggled up on the daybed in her office. It was an ending that called into question many past scenes in the film and, for me at least, suggested Triet and Harari were gesturing towards Sandra’s guilt all along.
The narrative theorist Gérard Genette would call this structure of interpretation, “the determination of means by ends,” a common storytelling feature in which the events in a narrative leading up to a conclusion are weighed against one another in chronological order up until the concluding event, wherein everything is reinterpreted in light of said ending. In other words, to understand a film in its entirety, one begins at the end.
I thought there was plenty of support for this interpretation, but everyone at the dinner table begged to differ. There were plenty of other ways to interpret the movie, although none based on solid evidence of Sandra’s innocence or guilt, which allowed our debate to continue, on-and-on, until our glasses were empty and the waiter made a final gesture towards the bill.
In retrospect, I realize this dynamic is exactly what stirred up so much buzz about the movie in the first place. It was fun to debate. A rorschach ink-blot whose reception did not threaten to spill over into tense, politically-charged discourse like so many other topics of conversation in American life. In fact, the more we spoke about the film, the more I realized we had all understood the scenes more or less the same. I’d simply placed emphasis on certain details and come to my own conclusion. In other words: nothing that would hold up in court.
As I continued to dwell on the movie, it was hard to wrap my head around all the animated conversation it sparked without feeling tricked by the design of the movie itself. Besides, my friends and I had all agreed on the fundamental thing: that there was not enough evidence to convict Sandra beyond a reasonable doubt. Had we been deliberating as a jury of peers, like the jurors of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, we would have come to a fairly prompt and uncontroversial conclusion. So, at the end of the day, what was all the hubbub about?
THE USE AND ABUSE OF NARRATIVE
In his book Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, Peter Brooks interrogates our cultural worship of narrative and examines how its logic has come to play a role in every aspect of civic life. He argues that, as a trend, it has yielded a culture precariously dependent on the belief that public debate is all narrative and that the best story wins regardless of the factual basis or logical structure of the arguments supporting it. Nowhere is this belief more apparent than in the courtroom drama, in which questions of truth are frequently presented as a battle of opposing narratives, and no film portrays this structural aspect of the genre better than Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the canonical courtroom drama that the American Bar Association ranks fourth on its list of the top twenty-five legal films of all time. Preminger’s film is an indictment of the narrative bias that informs the adversarial system in America, a bias revealed not only in the mechanisms of courtroom narrativizing, but in the theatrics and rhetorical devices deployed to shape the evidence at hand to one’s agenda. The film most prominently explores this bias through its hero, Paul Biegler.
Biegler’s objective in the film is to convince a jury that his client, Lieutenant Manion, was in a state of temporary insanity when he murdered the victim, Barney Quill. To prove temporary insanity, he must broaden the court’s narrative of the murder to include an essential event that preceded it: the rape of Manion’s wife, Laura, by Quill.
In one scene, near the beginning of the trial, Biegler makes his first attempt to expand the narrative by drawing the court’s attention to the spermatogenesis section of the coroner’s autopsy report. The prosecution objects to his mention of spermatogenesis, insisting the focus of the trial be restricted to the murder of Quill and not the circumstances leading up to his death. But the judge overrules this objection, allowing Biegler to lay the foundation for his defense.
This exchange is par for the course in courtroom dramas where the boundaries of narrative truth are constantly renegotiated. (I’ll allow it, but you better be going somewhere with this counsel!) But what differentiates Anatomy of a Murder is how the more untamed elements of the adversarial process – the extrajudicial elements – disrupt the otherwise orderly proceedings of the court.
Take the sly move Biegler makes moments later: a question regarding the absence of a detail in the autopsy report, namely, a determination as to whether the victim achieved sexual climax shortly before his death. The coroner admits said determination would have been possible had it been requested, to which Beigler responds,“So you were only asked to make such examination that might be useful to the prosecution, none that might help the defense?”
The insinuation sparks another objection from the prosecution, which the judge sustains. “Mr. Biegler, you must be aware that the question is improper.” In response, Biegler politely withdraws his question and apologizes. The judge announces the question is to be stricken from the record and tells the jury to disregard it.
Biegler returns to his seat, satisfied with his performance and the foundation he has laid for a narrative of temporary insanity. Then Lieutenant Manion leans over to him and whispers his famous line.
Manion: “How can a jury disregard what it’s already heard?”
Biegler: “They can’t, lieutenant. They can’t.”
THE CHARISMATIC ATTORNEY
Paul Biegler is played by the great Jimmy Stewart whose stardom lends levity to the moral agnosticism that underpins his character’s view of the court, as do the simple pleasures we see him engaged in. One moment he’s a charming small town fisherman bringing the day’s catch into his office, the next he’s delivering impassioned metaphors in the courtroom. (Eventually, he’s playing jazz piano alongside Duke Ellington.) On the page, these biographical details earn him sympathy from the audience, but it’s Stewart’s starpower that comes in handy when Biegler, the character, drops the charm and engages in more calculated acts of disobedience before the court.
Consider a more jarring moment when the prosecuting attorney (played by George C. Scott) stands between him and a witness. Biegler accuses the prosecution of blocking his view of the witness. Scott steps aside, “Any other requests, Mr. Biegler?” Stewart responds, “You do it once more I’ll punch you all the way out into the middle of Lake Superior!” The courtroom roars with the delight of a live studio audience.
I too find myself smirking at the audacity of Biegler’s courtroom antics – the tame precursor to Better Call Saul’s Jimmy McGill – I can’t help seeing Biegler as the stand-in for a toxic American fantasy: the anti-establishment establishment figure who works on behalf of the common man. One roots for Stewart because he embodies a charisma that allows him to game the system in his favor, often in ways we feel justified, given our understanding of the broader circumstances surrounding the case. In his voice these offenses to basic norms are somehow more palatable – especially compared to the performances by Scott and Brooks West (his fellow prosecuting attorney) who project conservative alpha and beta male energy as a counterpoint to Stewart’s progressive, everyman posture. We are never inclined to doubt Biegler is the hero of this tale. But without Stewart’s starpower, what is there to admire about a character who is simply more adept at bucking the system than his counterparts?
This is a far cry from Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch whose mission is righteous, grounded in the belief that the moral quality of his defense will triumph over the evils of American racism in the Alabama court room. For Biegler on the other hand – a comfortable semi-retired lawyer, enticed only by the technical challenges presented by Manion’s case – there is no moral underpinning to this work. From the beginning, Manion’s guilt is an established fact. The defendant has no regrets about his actions and believes he will get away with the murder because, as he puts it, he has the “unwritten law” on his side. But, as Biegler reminds Manion, the “unwritten law” isn’t a thing. However, he believes the written law might possess enough interpretive wiggle room for a defense that excuses Manion’s crime.
This is where Anatomy of a Murder’s courtroom cynicism comes through: it recognizes both the potential abuses of narrative in the adversarial process and the theatrical manipulations that aid it. Before the trial even begins, the facts are settled. Everything that follows is just a game – one in which the most dazzling narrative wins.
POST-TRUTH
There is another word one could ascribe to this phenomenon in which narrative prowess overrides other heuristics: “post-truth.” In 2016, following the election of Donald Trump, the Oxford English dictionary named “post-truth” the word of the year – an adjective for describing situations “in which objective facts are less influential than appeals to emotion.” That is to say, since the ex-president’s arrival on the political scene, many narratives of American society have not arisen from a logical accounting of mutually acknowledged facts so much as they have from an emotional reality that gives form to narrative content, which exists only to justify the incipient emotional reality.
In his New Yorker piece “Who are All These Trump Supporters?” George Saunders observes as much of the “Make America Great Again” crowd, pointing to a tendency “to conflate things that, to a non-Trump supporter, might seem unrelated.” He provides the example of a supporter who relayed the tragic story of her son Brandon’s death – a drunk-driving incident caused by an undocumented man – before an uproarious crowd at an Arizona rally. The significance of this specific event, in the context of promoting a mass deportation policy, seems tenuous at best. But it’s how the supporter concludes her story with the provocative line “Brandon’s. Life. Matters.” that strikes Saunders as the real narrative leap:
“What was the connection between her son’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement? Couldn’t a person be against the killing of innocent black men and against illegal immigration (or drunk driving, or the lax enforcement of existing laws, etc)?”
As Brooks argues, this tendency to conflate one event with another, without satisfying some burden of proof as to their relation, is symptomatic of a culture dominated by narrative reasoning. In his words: “The ‘facts on the ground’ are not cognizable at all until we make them into a narrative, and that narrative and its meaning are not determined by the facts but shaped by our expectations of narrative coherence and meaning, which in turn can derive from our preformed beliefs about human behavior, motivation, morality, gender identity, and so on.”
Thus, the point of these allusions is not to draw a logical connection between one event and another, but to use the pathos generated by said allusions to generate more emotional solidarity around a greater MAGA narrative (and its Biegler-esque hero). Appropriately, Saunders locates the narrative expectations of Trump supporters in their propensity for “indulging the fearful, xenophobic, Other-averse parts of their psychology and reinforcing the notion that their sense of being left behind has no source in themselves.” To put it more bluntly, in place of self-reflection, Trumpism offers a narrative of America in which upward mobility for a privileged white majority, and systemic inequality for everyone else, was a “great” time in the nation’s history.
This is a narrative that has won over a sizable number of Republican voters. One contingent less concerned with policy details than with the preservation of a white protestant culture and the marginalization of any narrative that contradicts it (especially those that ask for reflection on systemic racism, sexual harassment, or the socially constructed concept of gender) and another contingent who, while skeptical of Trump, were willing to overlook the indecent and unsavory elements of his narrative for political gains (i.e. tax cuts for the wealthy and a more conservative Supreme Court).
The flaws in this narrative, and its more conspiratorial offshoots, are obvious given any logical accounting of its factual basis, which cries of “fake news” and “deep state” malice have sought to dull with blunt force ignorance. But this is the “post-truth” reality many Republicans live in today – a radical embrace of skepticism, a skepticism that readily dismisses any point of view that disrupts the MAGA narrative universe.
It is important to remember that we do not all share this reality. While to some extent we are all stuck in our own narrative universes, there are overlapping elements of these narratives that are based in empirical facts, shared history, and democratic values that reject extremism, dehumanization, and the exclusionary orientation of far right agendas. It is these values and heuristics that transcend individual narrative explanations that allow us to come to collective agreements and make progress as a society.
For this reason, the praise and popularity surrounding Anatomy of a Fall has always felt out of place to me, especially in the supposedly left-leaning realms of film criticism and Hollywood award ceremonies: it embraces a post-truth framework rather than posing a challenge to it at a time when the very notion of post-truth threatens the foundations of democratic societies across the globe.
THE ANATOMY OF ANATOMY
As the allusion in its title suggests, Anatomy of a Fall assumes a similar point of view to Murder and escalates it for the post-truth era, beginning with a slight change in setting: the French courtroom, in which defendants play a more active role in the proceedings. Throughout the trial, Sandra is permitted to butt in when she feels it necessary to correct the record, often in the middle of witness testimonies. Although Vincent technically drives the proceedings, it is clear that Sandra is in charge of her narrative throughout the film, which is duly emphasized in her professional training as a novelist.
So, whereas Stewart’s case is more about the theatrical components of narrative bias, Sandra’s case is wholly bound up in the logic that underlies her narrative. This makes sense given Hüller’s star power is fundamentally different from Stewart’s – especially in the eyes of American viewers conditioned to the charismatic presence of stars possessing similar warmth and good humor. Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor. Not one of these actors could play Hüller’s character, but I imagine several of them could stand in for Stewart, which reveals a stark contrast in what the films are trying to accomplish.
As a performer, Hüller comes across as intelligent and calculating, like a Bond villain (i.e. not warm and charismatic) so that even when she displays emotion one can reasonably doubt the sincerity of it. Activating that skepticism in the viewer is essential to Anatomy of a Fall’s entire dramatic premise. Whether one is inclined to believe Sandra or not, one’s whole investment in the drama depends on understanding that her guilt or innocence is not at all obvious to the jury given her disposition.
Thus, Sandra’s success is not dependent on her theatrical prowess; it is dependent on her skills as a novelist. This means, despite all the debate the film generates around its dramatic question – did Sandra kill her husband or not? – the film is really about the role narrative plays in determining truth and suggests, in the absence of clear evidence pointing in one direction, that the truth is simply what we decide for ourselves. But this post-truth notion is not arrived at honestly. To accomplish it, Triet and Harari devise a pseudo-omniscient perspective that allows for the semblance of many perspectives whilst cutting out an essential piece of information solely for the purposes of elevating the drama. That is to say, like any rote mystery novel, the writing is designed to artificially separate the viewer from the truth in order to make a statement about epistemological certainty, which is actually a result of formal manipulations rather than some claim substantiated by the meaningful unfolding of the narrative. But, to quote Paul Biegler, “That’s like trying to take the core from an apple without breaking the skin.”
A bolder choice would have been to end the film with a flashback to the fall itself, revealing the truth of Samuel’s death to the audience so that it could have assessed its own bias for or against Sandra despite the lack of evidence to support it in a court of law. Perhaps it would have been even bolder to begin the film with the full knowledge of the incident, then examine how that shared truth plays out in a courtroom dependent on an adversarial system that is insufficient for determining truth.
This is essentially the direction Alice Diop took the genre with her film Saint Omer in 2022. Her film follows Rama, a literature professor writing a book about outcasts and shame culture titled Medea Castaway. As part of her research, she attends the trial of Laurence Coly, a Senegalese woman put on trial for the inexplicable killing of her fifteen-month-old child. Over the course of the film Coly recounts pivotal developments in her life leading up to the horrific act to provide context for her actions to a courtroom that seems designed to deny her lived experience as a Senegalese woman. Her defense, like Manion’s, is insanity (although in her case as a result of prolonged isolation from greater French society).
What is unusual about Diop’s courtroom drama is how it refuses to engage in the genre’s trademark feature: adversarial conflict. In fact, the film cuts away the moment the trial verges on the theatrical; when a self-righteous prosecutor stands to make his impassioned closing statements, Diop silences him as if to say, “we all know where this is going.” The real drama Diop is interested in is Rama’s relationship to the trial itself. Rather than participating or opining on the courtroom proceedings, she sits in the public gallery and listens, just as Diop did when she attended a similar trial in 2016, from which the film takes much of its dialogue and premise. We see how the trial affects Rama at the end of the day, when she retires to her hotel room, exhausted. All of her internal conflict is communicated in little glances, gestures, and memories of childhood depicting her relationship with her mother.
There is a big difference between this approach and the one on display in Anatomy of a Fall. One has been crafted to deceive the viewer for the sake of artificially elevating the dramatic stakes; the other not only does not withhold information from the viewer, but instead contextualizes that information through a specific and grounded point of view. The narrative in the courtroom centers on Rama’s relationship to truth, to motherhood, to the legal institution itself. It locates the drama in a specific perspective rather than in some false omniscience that uses these elements for the sake of raising the viewer’s heart rate.
If any genre could make an audience seriously consider its relationship to truth, or how truth is determined in the public sphere, the courtroom drama ought to be the one. But more often it has the same ideological orientation as any other blockbuster fare: entertainment for its own sake. This is our task as moviegoers though: to see through the spectacle of star power, plot machinations, and accolades, and into the substance of the film itself.
Oftentimes, the courtroom drama, for all its excitement, comes up empty. That is a shame, because if the courtroom drama is a symbolic register for speaking truth to power, then there is a real world political resonance that results from the truth decided upon in these trials, even if the truth of the case itself is not the central question.