Putting things in perspective

One of the most powerful scenes that I have ever experienced in an American movie is from the 1996 adaptation of John Grisham's 1989 novel, A Time to Kill. Jake Brigance, a white lawyer played by Matthew McConaughey, is giving his closing argument during the trial of Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel Jackson), an African American man whose ten-year-old daughter had been raped by two white supremacists in 1980s Canton, Mississippi. Hailey, driven by the thought that the rapists may not be convicted, had shot the two men dead and was now on trial for their murder, with Brigance as his lawyer.

In his closing argument, Brigance starts addressing the all-white jury by saying, ‘Now I wanna tell you a story. I’m gonna ask y’all to close your eyes while I tell you this story. I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to yourselves.’ He goes on to describe the rape of a ten-year-old girl, in reference to what happened to Hailey's daughter: ‘This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon,’ he says. ‘I want you to picture this little girl. Suddenly a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her.’ He goes on to describe in ruthless detail what happened to the little girl. Choked up, he wraps up with: ‘Now imagine she's white.’ He wins the case, and Carl Lee Hailey is found not guilty.

This last directive, Now imagine she's white, instructs the jury to look at the tragic incident from a different perspective. It instructs the jury, the rest of the people in the courthouse, and even the viewers of the movie to attend to the tragic story in a special way, through a specific filter. In Verhagen's (2005; 2010: 9–10) terms, the directive functions as a perspectivizer via which the lawyer and the jurors engage in cognitive coordination in an attempt by the former to influence the latter's ‘thoughts, attitudes, or even immediate behavior.’ The perspectivizer renders the rape story a perspectivized thought. A perspectivized thought is not only informative but also argumentative (see Verhagen 2010).