Case Envy
Seems to me, sometimes, that we - in all our thrashings after something fun to do - actually do have access to some simple, quirky, meaningful interests that lie outside of what we are supposed to do for engagement. It may be odd, but I think of Ruth Gordon’s character in Harold and Maude. The woman who, with a spined sense of humor, regularly goes to strangers’ funerals.
The interest is very serious, obviously, and may even lie outside of what might legitimately be labeled fun, but I think her sincere curiosity is really livened and engaged, and I think that’s what I am actually after all those times when I am trying to find something to do - a search that can sometimes carry far too much gravity. I think it should be as easy as asking yourself what fascinates you - and then putting yourself in the way of its happening.
The funeral thing makes me think of social institutions and reminds me that I have always been fascinated by courtroom cases. Some of the older movies that pull me to the edge of my seat (To Kill A Mockingbird, Adam’s Rib, I Confess, 12 Angry Men) do so because they make me feel like the logic of a society is being anatomized, whittled down to fundamentals and put into motion through the process of the lawyers’ deliberations. A fate is being determined - for everyone to see - in a theater of language where competing values are made uncannily plain. Because I am a writer, that’s the plain draw: in a legal case, the art of language clearly matters.
Yesterday, I was talking to Beth on the phone, and we were having some inconsequential difference of opinion. At one point she yells, “Withdrawn!” and starts laughing. It cracked me up. She explained how that was her favorite bit of melodrama from any courtroom drama - the tactic of making an emotional, propagandistic statement to negatively characterize a witness, pause (calm but evil grin), wait for the “Objection!”, then breezily say “Withdrawn!” and walk back to the counsel’s seat. It’s sneaky and it’s routine. In our conversation, she wanted to rib my character, let me know that I wasn’t allowed to take it seriously (I was obliged to strike it from the record), and still remind me that there was a grain of truth in it. I laughed my ass off! Exactly! Don’t we all need that function? But it also pisses you off when the situation - to you at least - is really … important.
When I taught ESL in East Tennessee, there was a capital murder case being tried in the tiny county where I taught, an anomaly for the state, much more the county. I and another teacher packed up our students - college-aged Japanese, Koreans, Colombians, Panamanians, Venezuelans, and Yemenis with limited English abilities - and walked over to the courthouse. The lawyers were bumpkin and absurd. You couldn’t believe a man’s life and another’s justice were being handled by two suited fellas in suits and bad thinking-acting. Our students looked in horror or amusement at us teachers, understanding through the skein of a second language that what they were seeing was reason as hallowed circus. We put our index fingers up to our mouths, thereby not endorsing the circus itself, but the collection of its details. When the orange-suited defendant was taken away on the last day, he unbelievably-predictably tried to lunge in his chains in the direction of his prosecutor. My draw dropped. Just like my students’. Roles were being played - hard to tell, though, if they were being played too well or horribly.
Even my own hometown - backwater bilge it is - was similarly exposed on 20/20 in a school shooting case. Two highlights: 1) the way the teenaged girl, when on the stand, licked her braces and confessed that she may have contributed to the murderer’s and the victim’s heightened emotions the day of the crime when she slept with both multiple times in the same day, maneuvering around a meeting at Wal-Mart with her ex and a date with her boyfriend and 2) how the prosecution denied the claim that the defendant’s suicidal depression was a factor and asserted that something far more insidious was behind it, something “We in Lincoln County know as ‘senioritis’”. Wha?! I was appalled-transfixed.
These cases are examples of the most vocal way we police ourselves. And that fascinates me. I wonder why I can’t - outside of an official function - visit other cases. I imagine driving to some burg where they are hearing a custody case, a property dispute, etc. Maybe it’s off-color to call this entertainment, but I have to say it charges my noodle, keeps my curiosities sitting up, and puts me marginally in a “”know”. Some day, then, I might do it, on a weird day off.
If Ruth Gordon was prepping for her own death, maybe I’m fingering my own guilt.
The interest is very serious, obviously, and may even lie outside of what might legitimately be labeled fun, but I think her sincere curiosity is really livened and engaged, and I think that’s what I am actually after all those times when I am trying to find something to do - a search that can sometimes carry far too much gravity. I think it should be as easy as asking yourself what fascinates you - and then putting yourself in the way of its happening.
The funeral thing makes me think of social institutions and reminds me that I have always been fascinated by courtroom cases. Some of the older movies that pull me to the edge of my seat (To Kill A Mockingbird, Adam’s Rib, I Confess, 12 Angry Men) do so because they make me feel like the logic of a society is being anatomized, whittled down to fundamentals and put into motion through the process of the lawyers’ deliberations. A fate is being determined - for everyone to see - in a theater of language where competing values are made uncannily plain. Because I am a writer, that’s the plain draw: in a legal case, the art of language clearly matters.
Yesterday, I was talking to Beth on the phone, and we were having some inconsequential difference of opinion. At one point she yells, “Withdrawn!” and starts laughing. It cracked me up. She explained how that was her favorite bit of melodrama from any courtroom drama - the tactic of making an emotional, propagandistic statement to negatively characterize a witness, pause (calm but evil grin), wait for the “Objection!”, then breezily say “Withdrawn!” and walk back to the counsel’s seat. It’s sneaky and it’s routine. In our conversation, she wanted to rib my character, let me know that I wasn’t allowed to take it seriously (I was obliged to strike it from the record), and still remind me that there was a grain of truth in it. I laughed my ass off! Exactly! Don’t we all need that function? But it also pisses you off when the situation - to you at least - is really … important.
When I taught ESL in East Tennessee, there was a capital murder case being tried in the tiny county where I taught, an anomaly for the state, much more the county. I and another teacher packed up our students - college-aged Japanese, Koreans, Colombians, Panamanians, Venezuelans, and Yemenis with limited English abilities - and walked over to the courthouse. The lawyers were bumpkin and absurd. You couldn’t believe a man’s life and another’s justice were being handled by two suited fellas in suits and bad thinking-acting. Our students looked in horror or amusement at us teachers, understanding through the skein of a second language that what they were seeing was reason as hallowed circus. We put our index fingers up to our mouths, thereby not endorsing the circus itself, but the collection of its details. When the orange-suited defendant was taken away on the last day, he unbelievably-predictably tried to lunge in his chains in the direction of his prosecutor. My draw dropped. Just like my students’. Roles were being played - hard to tell, though, if they were being played too well or horribly.
Even my own hometown - backwater bilge it is - was similarly exposed on 20/20 in a school shooting case. Two highlights: 1) the way the teenaged girl, when on the stand, licked her braces and confessed that she may have contributed to the murderer’s and the victim’s heightened emotions the day of the crime when she slept with both multiple times in the same day, maneuvering around a meeting at Wal-Mart with her ex and a date with her boyfriend and 2) how the prosecution denied the claim that the defendant’s suicidal depression was a factor and asserted that something far more insidious was behind it, something “We in Lincoln County know as ‘senioritis’”. Wha?! I was appalled-transfixed.
These cases are examples of the most vocal way we police ourselves. And that fascinates me. I wonder why I can’t - outside of an official function - visit other cases. I imagine driving to some burg where they are hearing a custody case, a property dispute, etc. Maybe it’s off-color to call this entertainment, but I have to say it charges my noodle, keeps my curiosities sitting up, and puts me marginally in a “”know”. Some day, then, I might do it, on a weird day off.
If Ruth Gordon was prepping for her own death, maybe I’m fingering my own guilt.