12 Angry Men PDF

## Introduction Our greatest American Philosopher, to my mind, was Eric Hoffer. He was an immigrant kid. He never spent a day in school. He roamed the country during the Depression as a hobo and migrant worker. He wrote that some fellow from the Works Progress Administration rode into his hobo camp...

## Introduction Our greatest American Philosopher, to my mind, was Eric Hoffer. He was an immigrant kid. He never spent a day in school. He roamed the country during the Depression as a hobo and migrant worker. He wrote that some fellow from the Works Progress Administration rode into his hobo camp sometime in the thick of the Depression and said: "Who wants to work?". The volunteers were put on a flatbed truck and hauled some miles up into the mountains in California. The WPA boss gave one man a compass and a map and said: "Build a road. Your road is to start here, and in three months I will meet you over there. Here are the specs. Take the tools off the truck and get to work." Hoffer wrote that that is just what they did. There was enough talent and know-how on the truck, he wrote, to’ve built not only that road, but to have built America. For that, he said, was quite exactly how America was built-a group of reasonably intelligent workers took a simple plan, formed an ad-hoc group, and used their common sense and group spirit to execute it well. There are, I think, two Americas. There is that which we decry on reading the newspapers. "Those fools," we say, of the group not of our political bent, "how in the world can they believe the nonsense they are spouting? How can intelligent people act that way?". This is the America of "them." And then there is the America we participate in-that fairly friendly and reasonable group of diverse interests and talents, happy to pitch in, the America of "us." We see and participate in this group at the Little League, the Rotary, the Shul or Church, the block party, the sports bar-we speak its language in the conversation we strike up with the stranger in the airline departure lounge, in the chat with the other parents on the way to school, in the office jokes we share. This nonabstract, this real America, is a rather pleasant place. When we are not being actively divided-by religion or politics-we rest here in the default position of unity. Over time, we see, the reasonable often find a way to unite the seemingly irreconcilable claims of passion. This process is the essence of our system of jurisprudence. The jury trial enshrines our belief in and our experience that the multitude of the wise is the treasure of the land. Most people, I believe, initially shun jury duty. The summons always seems to come at the least opportune time, and one might go kicking and screaming. Once empanelled on the jury, however, one is subsumed by what one realizes is the essential component of American Democracy. On election day we vote, inwardly or openly maligning the other half of our society, those idiots who will not see the light. In the jury room we are humbled by the realization that there is no one home but us. Here there are no hucksters, spending hundreds of millions on advertising, no stick figures throwing their jackets over their shoulder and grinning at the camera just like normal folks, no ginned-up controversies to enflame us against our neighbors. In the courtroom we see a poor man or woman-perhaps a criminal, perhaps a victim-caught in the awesome engine of the State, and we are told that, for the period of our service, we are the State. The lawyers can and will lie, elaborate, attempt to distract, embellish, and confuse; and nothing stands between the person in the box and the horror of an unchecked government except twelve diverse, reasonably intelligent people. The jurors have been wrenched from their daily lives, and made to swear a terrible oath. This oath is of such strength that it makes that taken in the marriage ceremony seem-as indeed it may, sadly, generally prove-conditional. The Bible abounds with adjurations against perjury. A vast amount of the Book of Proverbs deals with the Lord’s horror of false witness. "Partiality in judging is not good. He who says to the wicked ‘you are innocent’ will be cursed and abhorred." "Witness not against your neighbor without cause," "A false witness will not go unpunished," "Do not favor the rich in judgment neither give preference to the poor." Sitting in the jury box we console ourselves for the loss of time and income, thinking, "Before God, that could be me on trial. If that were so, God forbid, I would want those in the jury to be as responsible as I pledge to be and as terrified of error as I am." The jury is that same group of individuals who can, through divisive words, be congealed into a mob; who can, through persuasion or art, form itself into an audience. The audience suspends its disbelief in order to receive entertainment. As, curiously, does the mob-which is merely an audience enflamed, and moved by its righteous wrath, to crime. But the jury sets aside its prejudices, to aspire to the highest state of humanity: the capacity to use reason to overcome animal passion. They are instructed to apply the standard of "reasonable doubt." Each member will, of course, interpret this finally indefinable notion in his or her own way; and this is the genius of the jury trial, that these idiosyncratic understandings and applications of this abstract notion must each be defended to the group. The untutored, diverse group must then apply its own communal understanding of an abstract concept to a set of debatable facts and conflicting presentations, and arrive at a unanimous conclusion. Here the mega-state, outrageous in its multiplicity, absurd in the distance between manufacturer and end-user, between politician and voter, between entertainer and audience, is reduced to the size of a primitive clan. The drama this clan acts out is immemorial. The clan asks: "What shall we do with X?". And the elders reply: "Hold him here, while we retire and deliberate." The protagonist of a drama is caught in circumstances not of his own making. The hero of a tragedy discovers, at the play’s dénouement, that the affective circumstances he thought external to himself were actually brought into being by flaws in his own character. ## Tragedy Tragedy is the more difficult form to write, as it is a closed system. The tragedy must resolve (both for the hero and for the viewer) in revelation that the answer was before them all the time. This revelation, then, must be both surprising and inevitable. Any attempt by the author to mitigate the inevitable closed progression toward knowledge will weaken the tragedy. (The writer of the tragedy can not bring in conflicts and resolutions not brought into being by the hero’s character defects. He cannot advance the plot by whim.) The writer of the drama, on the other hand, has a wide license. He or she may introduce, at will, external circumstances to beat the band: the hero may be assigned a physical illness, a rotten set of parents, the antagonist of an evil government or employer, or a socially precarious status. As these states are not of the hero’s own device (they are merely assigned), the tools to be used in their vanquishment may be more or less arbitrary. Similarly, the very setting of the drama may be used for convenient effect. (Set Hamlet in a castle, a pawnshop, or a submarine, it’s the same play. The setting has no dramatic weight.) Writers of the drama, on the other hand, may, to provide a catalyst, moor or abandon their protagonists in that space the very egress from which provides dramatic fodder. (The proverbial example being the group of snowbound travelers stuck in the inn or its equivalent, e.g., Bus Stop, The Petrified Forest, Dead End, Truckline Café, The Waters of the Moon, and, to stretch a point, The Cherry Orchard.) These plays are all, generically, "gang dramas. That is, formally, they do not differ from their (generally coeval) counterparts on the comedy side, the films of the Marx Brothers. In the gang drama the protagonist or hero is split into many parts, each part (or character) standing for a different aspect of the hero’s consciousness. These warring factions (as the opposed factions of the consciousness in the individual) must work from their initial irreconcilable positions, to find unity where none could have been suspected. (They may be aided in the struggle if "snowbound at an inn," as they have conveniently been provided with "no way out.") At the end of the gang drama, the individuals (the play and, thus, the audience) have seen unity established and, so, are made more whole. In the bad version of this gang drama the audience is given the gift of a predictable ending: "Black people are people, too," "Gay people are people, too," "HIV-positive people are people, too." This foreseeable, universally accepted message is a sop to the self-esteem of the audience, which has been deprived of the experience of revelation. Self-congratulation sends the audience out into the night in a state of euphoria that will not last past The end of the block. But the good drama (e.g., Twelve Angry Men) leaves the issue in doubt. It enmeshes the audience in the problems of the protagonists so that they may consider the arguments, now one, now the other, until, when hope is gone, persistence (of the author and of his or her creations) brings revelation, and the audience may leave the play surprised by the discovery of the possibility of peace.