To Kill a Mockingbird handles and presents violence in ways I had not previously noted in other works of cinema. During the film’s dramatic climax, in which Gem and Scout are attacked by Bob Ewell and subsequently rescued by Boo Radley, the film limits the horror of the attack while simultaneously subverting the society’s racist, ruling stereotype of black male sexual violence towards white women.
The specific sequence under examination begins at 1:52:10 when Gem and Scout are walking home through the woods from the Halloween pageant. A detail of the staging that demands attention is that during medium-close shots, both children are isolated in their respective frames with one notable exception. While Gem is shot wholly on his own during coverage, Scout’s close-ups are instead formally dominated by her brother’s hand, which rests on the top of her costumed head. This kindly touch serves as a reassuring point of contact to Scout, whose vision is sorely impaired by her ham-shaped suit, and is juxtaposed by the ensuing violence, whose presence is first visually announced by a pair of hands flying at Gem into the tight frame. Here we see a direct thematic contrast between the gently innocent hands of a protector, and the raging hands of brutality. The reason for the hands’ disembodiment here is that the camera is mirroring Scout’s view of the events. This continues as the second man enters the scuffle. Instead of using a camera masking effect to attain the same cinematographic goal, the director chooses to stage the fight within the unimpeded shot so that it occupies the entirety of the frame while still limiting our, and thereby Scout’s view of the events. This choice unsurprisingly results in furthering our suspense because the viewer cannot tell who this assailant is due to our limited vantage point, but more importantly, by staging the blocking in this way without masking, the hands become a dominant feature of the mise-en-scene. Additionally, there are many quick shots in this sequence that are constructed with at least one adult male hand in the foreground, and thereby while enacting violence on the characters in the story, the hands also present a visual violence by disrupting and overpowering multiple shots. Often the hands enter the shot before any other part of the body, which we see both in the first attack on Gem, and later at 1:55:15. This helps create an effect of fetishization, while additionally endowing the hands with a sense of autonomy, for according to our view, they are literally leading the charge on these two children.
Through the hands of two mystery men dominating the shots in the fight scene, a new and subtle effect is achieved. Here the hands are presented as the perpetrators of violence, in place of the men themselves. Their hands are fetished and become stand-ins for male violence in general. This may seem like a bold claim when taken without contextualization from the rest of the film, so allow me briefly to refer to prior events in the story. In the courtroom, when a black man, Tom Robinson is tried for the alleged rape and assault of a white woman, Mayella Ewell, a great point of focus for the legal arguments is whose hands could have possibly hurt her. Therefore, that scene too presents hands as being intrinsically tied to violence, but instead the narrative at play here is the supposed violence of a black man towards a white woman. This ideology of hatred towards black men as being predisposed to evil lust for white women is subverted by the structure of the later fight sequence, because while the hands are almost all we can see of the two adults fighting, we can clearly tell that both pairs are Caucasian, not black.
This set up an interesting contradiction for me in the film’s content. The crime Atticus is charged with defending is based upon societal racism which mythologizes the lusty black man as a dangerous animalistic figure who must be confined in order to protect the white woman’s honor. However, the only violence the film actually shows is perpetrated by white men, most notably in this fight scene, but also when Atticus shoots a rabid dog and when the lynch mob attempts to enact vigilante “justice” upon Tom. Black male violence doesn’t even exist within the film itself, while white male violence is pervasive. However, the film’s refutation of the mythology of violent black men comes at the cost of perpetuating the idealization of white female purity. In the fight scene, Scout is sheltered from the sight of violence and its physical perils by her brother’s heroic efforts, and then by Boo Radley’s intervention. She is never hurt at all, despite a few tumbles, and escapes entirely safely. The struggle centers around the attempts by white two white males (both an adult and a child) to protect a white female from harm. I thought this was an interesting thematic decision by the narrative’s author, which only slightly undercut the otherwise incisive dismantling of racist mythologies.
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