Chenxi Shi Prompt #3

 After a long trial process, a boy was accused of stabbing his father to death. His life was in the hands of the jury. If they cannot raise a reasonable doubt, the boy would be convicted as a murderer and sentenced to death. Fortunately, the final verdict of the jurors must receive the unanimous approval of 12 men with different jobs and backgrounds. That was a hot day, with fans broken, impatience seemed to inundate everyone in the meeting room. The anxiety in air suggested that they were all about to tacitly agree that the boy was the murderer. The only exception was a man who stood silently and contemplatively by the window, Juror 8.

This is the beginning of a classical American drama film Twelve Angry Men premiered in 1957. It tells the story of how Juror 8’s suspicion topples over the authenticity of “flawless” evidence and changes the mind of the whole jury. After numerous queries of morals and justice,  all 12 jurors voted for the acquittal of the defendant in the end. Over 50 years later, a Chinese director remade this courtroom drama movie in 2014. With clever manipulations of backgrounds and plots, this new version is generally considered to be a successful local adaptation of the original film, bridging the gap between two completely different cultures. The story starts when one of the famous local law schools organized a mock trial. Students were asked to invite their parents from all walks of life to play the role of jurors and deliberate the conviction of a 18-year-old boy for murdering his father.

In the original film, the audience could easily find countless stereotypes in the quarrels between different jurors. When every juror was asked to demonstrate why they believed the boy was guilty, some of them referred to the testimonies and the movies, while the reason given by Juror 10 was simply the identity of the defendant — a boy from the slum. “They are born liars,” he asserted with a casual yet weary tone. His word precisely exemplified the stereotype that drew power from the essentialism, which reduced people to their “nature” and restricted them by a few, simplified characteristics (Stuart, 1997, p.249). Despite that Juror 9 immediately stood up and refuted him, his gloating eyes made the whole scene look a little satirical. Though people from different classes were presented in the screen, there was a huge imbalance in their power dynamics. A random thought or prejudice of the white, decent man might deprive the life of the slum boy. Trial of jury, the representative of a sound democratic system, suddenly began to resemble the mouthpiece of men who dominate the right to speak and vote. The message carried by the firm became even more chilling when the audience found out that this difference was “naturalized” in this setting (Stuart, 1997, p.245). When people triumphed for the verdict of acquittal, they ignored the fact that the whole film portrayed exclusively on the story of white men. Their intelligence was implicitly connected to the wisdom of the democratic system in this context. The audience in the past time would probably absorb this idea without any doubt.

Many interesting conflicts in the original movie have completely changed their meanings in the new 2014 Chinese version, as the aura of the original movie diminishes seriously in the reproduction. After all,  “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition (Walter, 1935, p.52).” One of the most crucial changes was the identity of the defendant. He was no longer a slum boy but a student from a rich family, a move from the marginalized side to the dominant side. In this context, the ironic contradiction between democracy and unbalanced power relationship had almost lost its value, since upper-class man were considered to be those who control wealth, education, and political power. The remake portrayed the struggle between the resistance of subordinate groups in society and the forces of incorporation operating in the ingests of dominant groups in society (John, 2006, p.10), which was, in other words, a proletarian trail of bourgeoisie in collectivist background.

There were a few more important changes that deviated the remake from the core of the original film. First, Juror 8 was supposed to be a person with random jobs in America of the 1950s, but the end of the remake endowed him a new identity, a real prosecutor. Second, we never knew whether the boy committed the crime or not in the 1950 version, while the remake reveals that the police finally found out the boy was “not guilty” in this case. Beside, the name of the remake was changed into Twelve Citizens. All these elements indicated the intervention of a new power, the government. It catered to the propaganda in current China. Those small changes combined together to show that different political and historical contexts can transform the ideology of the whole show.

Though the 2014 remake of Twelve Angry Men presents an almost untouched reproduction of how the jury trial progresses and ends, small changes in seemingly unimportant details can asunder the values that the original film intends to convey. With similar names, the two shows reflect two completely different political ideologies.

Reference
Storey, J. (2006). Cultural theory and popular culture: An introduction.
https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/john_storey_cultural_theory_and_popular_culturebookzz-org.pdf

Benjamin, W. (1935). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction
https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

Stuart, H. (1997). The spectacle of The “Other”
https://seminar580.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/hall-the-spectacle-of-the-other-pdf.pdfS