Interpretive Appraoch Gatson

The movie “A Time to Kill” is a family favorite.  I’m not sure if that is normal or not but nonetheless we love it and I was excited to watch for homework!  In the movie Jake Brigance a.k.a Matthew McConaughey us a white lawyer in Clanton Mississippi who takes on a high tension case involving a lower class black man Carl Lee Hailey played by Samuel L. Jackson who is on trial for killing two white men who raped his 10 year old daughter.  “A Time to Kill” is an amazing movie to use to Interpretive Approach on.  It deals with a lot of cultural patterns such as race, gender, etc, and it also shows how culture is created through communication.

Race is the biggest issue in this film, without it the plot is lost entirely.  The people in Clanton have very subjective views for each other and they let that dictate justice.   Clanton is a very racist town where whites stick with whites and blacks stick with blacks and pretty much try and avoid whites.  After Carl Lee Hailey kills his daughter’s rapists it seems as though it will be next to impossible to get a lawyer not only because he murdered the men in front of hundreds of people, but because he was black.  When an unlikely Jake Brigance comes to Hailey’s defense the town is in a racial uproar.  The men that Hailey murdered happened to be member of the KKK.  This puts Jake Brigance in a dangerous spot because the KKK wants to scare him off the case, throughout the film he is under current threat of being killed.

Sandra Bullock plays Ellen Roark, who is Jake Brigance’s unofficial assistant.  She is a tough character who is well educated and comes from an upper class family. Though she is well rounded and strong the fact that she is a woman is a big issue for some of the men in the town.  Some of them think that just because she is a woman she is sleeping with Brigance, inadequate, and easy to intimidate.  All of their assumptions are false and heavily based on her gender.

The KKK is the ever prominent and looming threat that sticks through the whole movie.  You can really see how communication shapes culture by examining the generations that were consistently taught how to hate other races.  This kept the KKK alive and thriving in the town, which jaded everyone else’s views towards the blacks, which is why there was so much controversy and so many threats throughout the trial.

In conclusion I think that the Interpretive Approach proved very useful for this assignment and in analyzing “A Time to Kill” because cultural patterns are learned through communication and they are subjective.  It helps you get a better understanding of groups like the KKK and racism.  

This clip is the best part of the movie where Matthew McConaughey gives his closing argument.

Grisham, J. (Producer), & Schumaucher, J. (Director). (1996). A Time To Kill  [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros.