‘You Must Always Point…’: The Post-heroic Lawyer as Scapegoat and Scapegoater in Presumed Innocent, The Verdict, and Cape Fear

This chapter develops the argument in Chap. 6 regarding the scapegoat by analyzing the way in which three films and two novels—Presumed Innocent, The Verdict, and Cape Fear—widen the category of the scapegoat to include not only the accused-criminal but the accuser-lawyer. These three texts make up a series of counter-intuitive lawyer dramas that undermine the reader’s meconnaissance of the similitudes between criminal prosecution, which is a profane activity, and the scapegoat, which signifies the sacred. In the first two texts discussed—Presumed Innocent and The Verdict—the lawyer-accuser is himself subjected to the scapegoat mechanism by assuming the ritually prescribed role of martyr, or the one who performs an act of auto-sacrifice in pursuit of a sacred objective. In both cases, the sacred cause is the redemption of law itself; both texts frame the drama of the scapegoat in terms of professional practice and the schizophrenic divergences between the nature of legal knowledge and professionalism (esotericism) and its largely negative representations within popular culture (exotericism) that corrode the legitimacy of the justice system. Both Rusty Sabich and Frank Gavin sacrifice themselves in order to mediate the rift between the two conceptual frames by effecting a dramatic reconciliation between law and justice. In sharp contrast, Sam Bowden in Cape Fear enacts an antithetical drama of his own within the private crypto-legal spaces of the lynch-mob: if Sabich and Gavin embrace their ‘inner Christ’ Bowden responds by embracing his ‘inner pagan’ with equal enthusiasm, effecting an even stronger act of mediation between law and justice by apocalyptically revealing the true identity of the lawyer as the fully self-aware executioner of scapegoats, in his case serial rapist Max Cady, his double.