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16  CHAP TER ONE Temporal Horizons On the Possibilities of Law and Fatherhood in To Kill a Mockingbird Austin Sarat & Martha Merrill Umphrey To Kill a Mockingbird, the Oscar-winning 1962 movie based on Harper Lee’s novel, is a classic American law film.1 Its central character, Atticus Finch, an iconic citizen-lawyer in a southern town during the Great Depression ,is called on to defend an African American field hand accused of raping a white woman.Indeed some claim that Atticus is popular culture’s leading embodiment of lawyerly virtue. “No real-life lawyer has done more for the self-image or public perception of the legal profession than the hero of . . . To Kill a Mockingbird,” writes Steven Lubet. “For nearly four decades, the name of Atticus Finch has been invoked to defend and inspire lawyers, to rebut lawyer jokes, and to justify (and fine-tune) the adversary system.”2 Although scholars have criticized Atticus for being too accommodating to the segregated world in which he lives and practices law,3 many nonetheless acknowledge that he is an antidote to much common criticism of law and the legal profession. As Lubet writes: “Lawyers are greedy. What about Atticus Finch? Lawyers only serve the rich.Not Atticus Finch.Professionalism is a lost ideal. Remember Atticus Finch. . . . Atticus serves as the ultimate lawyer.His potential justifies all of our failings and imperfections . Be not too hard on lawyers, for when we are at our best we can give you an Atticus Finch.”4 To Kill a Mockingbird is, however, not just, or not primarily, a law story.5 Scout Finch’s portrait of Atticus as a father is regarded by many critics as Temporal Horizons 17 the key to the film’s cultural resonance.6 Told as a daughter’s memory of her father, her brother, and the town in which she grew up, the film focuses on Scout’s childhood exploits. Without a mother (though partially raised by an African American maid, Calpurnia), Scout, her brother, Jem, and their friend Dill have enormous freedom in the small world of Maycomb , Alabama. Yet Atticus is a powerful presence in their lives.Scout’s memory of him, as she reveals it over the course of the film,is highly idealized,even heroic. As she says of him, “There just didn’t seem to be anyone or anything that Atticus couldn’t explain.”7 Scout’s reflective voice-overs invite viewers to accept her idealized perspective and to take a child’s view of the events portrayed in the film. Scout’s dual position as main child protagonist and post hoc narrator also alerts us to the complex temporality of the film, both in its narrative vision and in the social landscape of its reception.8 That the film, set during the depression, was released in 1962 locates its earliest viewers in the midst of the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s, after Brown v. Board of Education but before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They were, and in a different way we are, situated in the future that the film imagines. In 1962, the conflicts of the 1930s that are represented in the film remained palpable, as did its portrait of the South’s hotly contested visions of justice and injustice. Today, some fifty years after its release,9 viewers know that Atticus’s cause will be substantially, if not completely, vindicated, though with much difficulty and long after the period in which the film is set.10 In contrast to those who interpret To Kill a Mockingbird solely as a lawyer film and those who see it primarily as a fatherhood film, we suggest that it is the conjunction of lawyer and father that gives To Kill a Mockingbird its appeal and importance. Scout’s reflections on her father render the two roles—father and lawyer—inseparable,fusing what she represents as almost magical parenting with Atticus’s profound integrity and sense of justice. Many are the moments in the film when Atticus tries to teach Scout how to live a principled life in ways underwritten by his own ideals, which are equivalent to the ideals of liberal legality itself.11 He lectures Scout, a tomboy who relishes fighting, on the need to restrain herself and avoid violence; he enjoins her to respect everyone, even in the depressionera South’s highly stratified society, by imagining living life in another person’s shoes; and he offers himself as a role...

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