Juxtaposition
September 14th, 2006 | by Craig |As most of you probably know, at one point in my academic “career,” I was an English major.
For those of you who weren’t English majors, it basically involved reading a lot of stuff, then writing papers on what the story you just read was about, which was most often something not even related to the story. You could make the best points by making the most outlandish parallels. You could say that The Old Man and the Sea wasn’t about a guy who caught a fish that got eaten, but rather the oppression of the masses in South American countries by strong arm dictators propped up by right-wing fanatics in the US. Plus they hated women. Did I mention patriarchal oppression?
But you know, having said all that, quite often stories and literature do have real-world parallels, and good literature has parallels that are timeless.
I did have one teacher, though, who I think really taught me how to read. One quarter, his assignments consisted mainly of us reading a story, then interpreting it two ways, citing only the text as evidence. The one I remember most was that we had to read “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” then spend half of the paper arguing that Dr. Jekyll was guilty of being Mr. Hyde (which we all “know” to be true), then the second half arguing his innocence.
It was an exercise I thoroughly enjoyed, being an argumentum gratia argumentum type of person. (Made-up latin alert.) It also made me start thinking of things in a “what if we switched that around” manner. That’s why you’ll find me re-writing things and substituting terms such as man for woman or black for white, just to see how it sounds, and what kind of reaction it provokes.
Which starts to bring us to the point I wanted to make. (Yes, I do have one.)
In 1988, a movie called “The Accused” came out, which was based on a true story.
If you’re not familiar with it, the movie basically starts out with a graphic and disturbing gang rape.
A young woman, Sarah Tobias, with a history of promiscuity goes into a rough bar dressed provocatively, and gets raped violently and repeatedly. Tobias is played by Jodie Foster who won her first Oscar for the performance.
The rapists are given a light sentence due to Tobias’ sexual history, which is so offensive to Tobias that she decides to also go after the men who stood by and did nothing.
In the end, the bystanders were held accountable for what happened, and the viewer is left feeling that justice was served.
The question at the heart of the defense was, “Wasn’t she asking for it?” After all, she had a history of promiscuous behavior, and was obviously dressed to provoke, so maybe she’s not all that innocent after all; maybe she had it coming. Maybe she deserved it.
Hopefully that line of thought offends you; it does me.
I have some thoughts on this that I’ll address in the comments, but I’m curious to know: Does someone deserve something horrific because they have done something horrific in the past? And what example would you use?
7 Responses to “Juxtaposition”
By rita on Sep 14, 2006 | Reply
Hmmm. I had a cousin who was, for the lack of a better description, a sociopath. Among his many bad deeds was suspecting of killing at least 2 people, though he was never convicted. (He had a tendency to try to beat people to death who had pissed him off, for whatever reason.)
He was found shot to death one day, a suspected drug deal gone bad. I’m not sure if that qualifies as horrific, but I think it was probably deserved.
Generally, I think folks like that deserve to stop wasting our oxygen, but we’ve no right to execute them with the same cruelty they’ve shown others. That would make us no different from them.
Those who fight monsters should take care that they do not become monsters.
By Shane C. Mason on Sep 14, 2006 | Reply
I’ll agree with rita on this one. There are a lot of bad guys in this world. If you do the same things to them that you accuse them of doing the line gets really blurry.
That does not mean that you can not punish or seek ‘retribution’, you just have to be damned careful becuase there is a very thin red line and once you cross it you have lost all your ‘riteousness’ as a punisher and have become the ‘monster’.
Think of old prisons in the deep south. You have seen the movies. Many of the folks that went there likely were monsters. What do you think of though? You think of the guard with the mirrored sunglasses and the look of Satan beating a ‘helpless’ prisoner down with his club. We forget that the prisoner was there for committing a crime (could have been serious) and we start to hate the guard even more. Why? Because he is a worse monster because he is the monster with power, and you forget about what the bad guy may have done.
Apply this today. What did you feel when you looked at the pictures from Abu Ghraib? I am sure that some of them really were bad guys, but do you think of that when you see the photos? When you see those photos, who do you think of as the ‘bad guys’?
By Wulfgar on Sep 14, 2006 | Reply
The whole situation gets dicy when you take the word “deserves” at face value. It assumes a standard of justice that can be agreed or disagreed upon, without ever being expressed overtly. And here’s where the dicy part comes in: “deserving” is an appeal to the emotions of the subject and will be filtered through those. “That guy deserves ‘it’ because he’s mean/black/wears ugly pants, and I don’t like that.” I’d like to think we have fewer forms of justice out there than those implied by every individual’s emotions (and it would certainly make things easier to discuss).
By Weapon of Mass Disturbance on Sep 16, 2006 | Reply
If you openly legitimize the behavior of a criminal or blame the vulnerability of its victim, it becomes easy to attract the attention of a sociopath.
By MLU on Feb 25, 2007 | Reply
Legally, no.
Practically, sometimes. We contribute to the situations we are involved in. We are co-creators of the world that emerges.
There are rights and laws and all that.
But there is also wisdom.