‘I Just Want to Talk…’: Liberalism, Generative Unanimity, and Post-sacrificial Scapegoating in 12 Angry Men

Sydney Lumet’s film 12 Angry Men (1957), arguably the greatest legal drama ever made, is deceptively simple, a colossal exercise in cinematic mis-recognition. Predictably, the film ends with an unconditional affirmation of the secular liberal State as a post-sacrificial society through the jury’s unanimous verdict to acquit the accused. Examined more closely, however, the film possesses an added depth of meaning: the control of the scapegoat mechanism is the primary means of determining the nature of social order. 12 Angry Men expressly portrays scapegoating as not merely a necessary but a sufficient condition for the creation of generative unanimity. It is the decision not to scapegoat, or condemn to death, that is the transformative event that causes all members of the jurors to undergo the conversionary experience of metanoia and reassemble as an interpretive community of readers empowered to secure the foundations of a liberal, secular, and apparently anti-sacrificial nomos. Here I follow closely the short but brilliant exposition of the film provided by Peter Biskind who views it as a microcosm of the wider debate among liberal, conservative, and radical approaches to social issues in the American films of the 1950s. Biskind’s insights are only strengthened with the realization that virtually all of Juror Number Eight’s arguments for the innocence of the accused are factually erroneous and legally invalid. What matters to Lumet is the jurors’ conversion to liberalism as the only legitimate form of constitutive rhetoric which, ironically, rests upon the sacrificial expulsion of all speech that is illiberal. 12 Angry Men transcends its banal status as an anti-capital punishment film and in a truly subversive act unveils the scapegoat as the master sign of political ontology within an ostensibly post-sacrificial secular nomos.