james r. elkins

personal reflections

My father was a hard working man who lived within his means and wanted little. The one thing he did want was a new car. I was six years old, my mother acquiesced, and my father bought a sleek new green ’51 Pontiac with an ember-colored Indian hood ornament. So, the year, 1951, turned out to be memorable: I started first grade. We got the new car. And we began to frequent the local drive-in theaters. (Keep in mind that these were the days before we had our first television.) My favorite outings were the all-night shows, the first movie beginning at dark, with the movies presented non-stop ’till daybreak. To get through a night of movies required a cooler of RC cola and sandwiches, popcorn and pillows. We brought the evening’s snacks from home; we were frugal and stayed away from the snack bar. It was at local drive-in theaters that we saw The Robe (1953), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), and The Ten Commandants (1956), movies selected not because we were so deeply religious but because these Biblical epics were lavishly produced dramatic stories, stories which happen to have Biblical settings. Westerns were also popular — High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) — appeared at the local drive-in theaters and were so popular that we had to get to the drive-in early to get a decent parking place.

Finally, in 1954, I managed to see a film in a real movie theater. My uncle, Barney Thweatt, who everyone in western Kentucky knew as a member of the Brewers, Kentucky basketball team that had won the State Championship in 1948, was sporting my brother and I to a visit with his barber and after our haircuts treated us to a movie. Even now, I have a distinct memory of the velvet darkness in that Murray, Kentucky theater and then, the lush violet curtains were pulled aside to reveal the screen, and a growing sense of magic in feeling so perfectly small and so fully alive as that new/other world — a world both fictional and real — began to unfold before me. In the fifty years that have followed that magical afternoon watching Johnny Guitar (1953) (starring Sterling Hayden & Joan Crawford) the world — phantastical and real — has continued to unfold before me.

A graduate of drive-in theaters, I became a regular film-goer about the time I set out to become a lawyer. This was at a time — the 1960s and early ‘70s — when the only way to see a movie (other than what was routinely offered on television), was to attend a real movie theater. And so, in Lexington, Kentucky (where I attended undergraduate and law school); Greensboro, North Carolina (during my Army days); and then in Washington, D.C. (where I was a lawyer at the Department of Justice); Newark, New Jersey (where I was an Assistant U.S. Attorney), New Haven (working on an LL.M.); and Chicago (where I had my first teaching gig), and then later in the '70s in Morgantown, West Virginia (where I settled in for the long haul), with my summers spent in San Francisco and Berkeley, I watched films, hundreds and hundreds of films.

But with all this film going, I never considered myself a film buff. Though it seems clear now that watching so many films — like reading books (or sailing, gardening, cooking, painting)(whatever it is that we do intently and with so much pleasure) — becomes a deeply embedded part of a man’s life. For reasons that lie deep, these enterprises provide anchors for inspiration and survival, and they emerge, not so thinly disguised, in the teaching we do.

So I begin to teach lawyer films, but I did not do so with the idea that they constituted a pedagogical “innovation.” Certainly, I did not decide to teach lawyer films with the idea that I had chanced upon the "texts" by which I might, finally, magically, have found the alchemy that would make study an adjunct of entertainment. With lawyer films, with texts chosen for my other courses, all I wanted to do was to see if we could use lawyer films to better understand ourselves, the work we do as lawyers, the meaning we give to that work, and the way we carry our work beyond the law office.

There is, of course, the frequent suggestion that teachers might better connect with their young students, and the way students learn by way of film and the new media culture. But the buzz of revelation here turns out to have more intuitive appeal than practical significance. In the late 1960s, Marshall McLuhan noted that:

The young today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information–subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture.

[Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message 100 (New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1967)]

As an amendment to the observation, I’d say we (old and young) have always lived mythically, and must continue to do so. There is little to suggest that the “young” live, experience, and know the world more deeply or mythically than do their elders.

I wish it possible to report that in teaching lawyer films I have found — finally — a way to teach while entertaining my students. It hasn’t worked out that way. If the medium is the message, the message is easily misunderstood; films are no easier to “read” than any other text. Teaching lawyer films, I’ve relearned a lesson I should never have tried to forget-- that learning, serious learning, comes as second nature and with graceful ease only to the few. But in this, no great secret is revealed, nor is it occasion for despair.

I did not, after watching many movies over many years, with memorable and intense pleasure, set about to teach lawyer films with the idea that I knew how to talk about films, or the lawyers portrayed in them. In teaching lawyer films, I set out upon a pedagogical adventure; I had no idea what was to be done, how to do it, or how students might respond. My assumption was rather simple, and I continue to subscribe to it: We can learn something about ourselves watching lawyer films. What we are to learn and how we are to go about learning it are open to question.

Notes:

<1> A different version of this personal statement appears as the introduction to, James R. Elkins, Reading/Teaching Lawyer Films, 28 Vt. L. Rev. 813 (2004)

<2> It was Marshall McLuhan who reminded us that “[t]he business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by typography and film. That is so obvious, and happens so completely, that those undergoing the experience accept it subliminally and without critical awareness.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 285 (New York: McGraw-Hill Paperback ed., 1965)