In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

151  CHAP TER SEVEN Dead Animals Ravit Reichman No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity . . . like a dog. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace I do not like your utopia, if there be no dogs. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia In its very title, To Kill a Mockingbird announces a broad concern with animal life, and, more precisely, with the human relationship to animals.1 It is not yet a fully realized statement—not yet a command about how to kill or not to kill,nor a description of where or why one might see such killing or how to prevent it. One has to wait to see this relationship articulated, and the enigmatic phrase hangs over the film until Atticus Finch explains to his son, Jem, the proper targets for shooting a gun. Recalling the time when his father had given him his first gun, Atticus reflects: “He told me that I should never point at anything in the house, and that he’d rather I shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later, he supposed , the temptation to go after birds’d be too much. And that I could shoot all of the blue jays I wanted, if I could hit ’em. But to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.” When Jem asks why, Atticus, seeming a little unsure himself, muses: “Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don’t do anything but make music for us to enjoy. Don’t eat people’s gardens, don’t nest in the corncribs. They don’t do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.”2 The preciousness and precariousness of a being that serves a singularly ornamental purpose furnishes the film (and the book) with a model for 152 Ravit Reichman a life that is sacrosanct, one that must be kept outside the bounds of violence not only because it ushers beauty into the world but also because it does not figure in any causal chain. It threatens neither livelihood nor life, and so does not need to be anyone’s object of redress or retaliation. And this retaliation, the question of just deserts and what does or does not count as just violence, constitutes the film’s driving force, a logic under which it operates and that extends from its depictions of struggles in the courtroom to those on the playground. Embedded in this logic is that of cause and effect: every action in the film might be seen as producing its equally unsettling and tragic reaction. Thus Mayella Ewell’s unfounded charge of rape against Tom Robinson leads to his wrongful conviction in court; Robinson’s attempted escape from prison ends with his being shot and killed; Atticus’s confrontation with Bob Ewell spurs Ewell’s attack on Jem and Scout and precipitates Ewell’s own death. For every action, a reaction. The novel’s opening (in contrast to the film’s), too, asserts this logic as the very basis from which the grown Scout narrates these months of her childhood. She begins by insisting that everything that happened had been, first and foremost, the Ewells’ fault; Jem objects, locating the cause in Dill’s insistence on seeing the reclusive, terrifying Boo Radley. Sensing the bottomless search for the story’s prime mover, the grown Scout ups the ante: “I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn’t?”3 The story of these crucial months in Scout’s and Jem’s lives thus emerges against the more epic backdrop of a family’s American story, a history of slavery and power (Simon Finch was a successful fur trader) and the violent elimination of an indigenous population at the hands of white settlers. Such causal chains, however, are not always portrayed directly in the film, where instances of physical brutality—the effects of injustice, the causes of more injustice—most often occur offscreen. Given this tendency , the most explicit scene of violence in To Kill a Mockingbird is not what viewers might expect. In a film about racial violence and racial injustice culminating in the tragic death of Tom Robinson, depictions of violence remain largely outside the cinematic frame. This is not to say, of course, that To...

Share