Zha Scapegoat - Assignment Example

Scapegoat in ‘The Wrong Man. Introduction The film ‘The Wrong Man’ directed by Alfred Hitchcock tells a story of Balestrero Emmanuel, who was arrested for a crime that was committed by his physical double. This paper scrutinizes scapegoat theme in the film. The paper also argues on how the film portrays in miniature what René Girard a theorist labels as a mimetic crisis. As a result of the desires, mimetic fears, and conceits of the members of the society that accuses him, the predicament of the central character in the film is portrayed as a blind chance. The fate of Balestrero in the movie discloses the operation of a particular kind of scapegoat mechanism rooted in mimetic desire. René Girard’s theory of scapegoat is a theory based on the origins of sacrifice. The theory advocates that historical collective murders arise at the commencement of primitive ritual sacrifice. Rituals and myths memorize and disguise these distressing, violent origins (Girard 92). A fundamental concept in the thought of Girard is that of contagion. Markedly, both the mythic falsification of collective murder and contagious transfer are well illustrated in Girard’s scrutiny of the symbol of Oedipus. According to René Girard, the attribution of evil and crime to an innocent individual is neither motiveless nor arbitrary, but is a reaction to the actual social risk. However, in the collective murder, the instantaneous cause is the breakdown of the social order. The breakage is provoked by famine, war, plague, or any other major social disaster. During this situation, every person turn out to be the enemy of all: the rich against the poor, neighbour against neighbour, brother against brother. According to René Girard the scapegoat comes in as a safety value in the condition of spiralling violence whereby every person resorts to retribution so as to attain what is rightfully theirs. The conflict of all against all, the violence that looms to pouch the community, is revolutionized to a war against one person. René Girard denotes that with the death of the scapegoat, the violence cycle ends. Scapegoat Theme in ‘The Wrong Man. The title of the film ‘The Wrong Man’ recognizes one of the main persistent themes in Hitchcock’s work that is the theme of the innocent man or the mistakenly accused. The film tells a story of the erratic arrest and incarceration of Balestrero. This occurred after he was wrongly identified as the thief of an insurance company office aside from other several stores. The basis of the film is on a true story, the factual life case of Christopher Balestrero. As evident from the film, the effects on Balestrero are shattering. As a result of Balestrero’s arrest, his wife loses her lucidity. In The Wrong Man, Hitchcock reveals the phenomenon of scapegoating and the predicament of the scapegoat not at the margin but at the heart of the film. However, Girard’s observation of scapegoating are opposite in this film. Even though Balestrero appears a casualty of chance and the automated and impersonal police investigation procedures and the court system, the film proposes that Balestrero is perhaps predominantly a victim of vengeful and violent desires of others. The film does reveal how sometimes human beings react to chance and hardship by scapegoating. Hitchcock displays this mechanism at work not in modern culture and not in aboriginal, whereby the court system has long contained and modified the hypothetically violated outbreak of never-ending retribution. In the film, Hitchcock’s camera placement and shot selection accentuate the immanent experience of Balestrero, whose viewpoint becomes the fundamental bloc of the film. Just as René Girard denotes in his book, the biblical perspective incited mindfulness of the predicament of the casualty of sacrifice, Hitchcock similarly does the same for the wrongly accused victim. Hitchcock positions the viewer in the viewpoint of the victim. Hitchcock invites the audience to share the horror of Balestrero as he agonizes scrutiny, confinement, and unfortunately, exoneration (Truffaut, Helen, and Alfred 102). Balestrero is not only a casualty of chance but also a victim of a queer form of institution violence, a judicial and legal process that sanctions the vehement interference of his private life. However, the process is an intervention set in motion by fears and existential suspicions of his fellow citizens (Truffaut, Helen, and Alfred 103). The violence Hitchcock gives rise is neither personal nor mob violence. But the legitimate, rationalized, and socially accepted violence of the law enforcement and the courts. As argued by Robert Cover the judgment and the decision of the judges and the courts cannot be distracted from the danger of the violence that they cause (1607). The decisions of the judge set in motion a process through which force is smeared to the human object of the judgments. The normal procedure of the court conceal the point that the threat of death and pain stands in the background of the authority (Cover 1607). Similarly, René Girard argued that the court is not only a rational mechanism but also a social and practical authority that stands in the position of arbitrary retribution or traditional vengeance. For this reason, like the declarations of the magistrate, it still stays an aura of the sacred. As per Girard, the judicial system contains the marks of its violent origins. Just like sacrifice, the judicial system reveals and obscures its semblance to vengeance (Girard 22). When looking at the film ‘The Wrong Man’, one can see the claims put forward by both Cover and Girard. Hitchcock reveals without any evasion that from outset the experience of the convict is an experience of being brutally subjugated coloured from the beginning by the fear of being treated violently. The grounds of retribution both personal and legal are proposed in an imperative sequence. First, Balestrero visits the robbed insurance office. Balestrero comes to the office to see if he can borrow in his insurance policy so that he can pay his wife’s dental bills. This scene in the movie addresses a critical question of the reasons behind the repetitively misidentify a guiltless man as the perpetrator in a crime by not one but a group of eyewitnesses. One of the reason is that Balestrero resembles a robber physically. However, in the end of the film, Hitchcock reveals that the resemblance was not handy enough to be the only reason. It is sensible consider the assumption that the bank-employees fear a rerun robbery and the destruction it includes. The bank workers reaction to Balestrero’s presence and their discussion to concerning his identity clearly etches fear on their faces. Moreover, Hitchcock does show how fear intensifies and how it rises from one individual to the next contagiously. Perceptibly too, is the equally infectious desire, with the boost of others, to take necessary action in finding the culprit. Furthermore, the fear towards the robber that the women feel is balanced by the probable accomplishment of finding and capturing the culprit (Truffaut, Helen, and Alfred 112). Hitchcock confidently solidifies this contagious fear and the corresponding desire for reprisal in a subtle series in his shots. Balestrero is first seen by the teller over the grating of her cubicle. From the teller’s look, it is clear that she made out Balestrero in a way, and she feared him. This look sets off a sequence response of desires that discovery the criminal in Balestrero. When the teller reports that there is a possibility of the presence of a robber, she informs one of the co-workers who looks over the shoulders of the first teller anxiously. This anxiety spreads to almost all individuals in the bank. This scene in the office is not sufficient to suggest Hitchcock’s mindfulness of the scapegoat mechanism. However, this scene does propose his awareness of the probable for atavistic victimization and violence, not to remark the profound probable for social disorder even in the boring blank wall of an office, and this is by a contagion and imitation process. The young woman in the office becomes a small-scale version of the society, the fear of the social disorder aroused by unsolved crime and apprehensive to find the culprit so as to restore its equilibrium (Cohen 128). Responding to this fear, the woman in the office keys out the wrong person and the police are conveyed. Out of pressure from their superiors, or the public, or duty, the police similarly appear constrained to misidentify the perpetrator. Alliance of this assertion is found in the progression in which two officers arrest Balestrero. After Balestrero is arrested, he is directed to the police vehicle by the two policemen. The policemen grip Balestrero tightly on either side of his arms. When Balestrero enters the police car and sits between the two officers, he induces a tense and claustrophobic atmosphere. The officer’s determination of finding Balestrero guilty is articulated in the causal mockery in the car. At one point, the officers proposed that Balestrero is living an expensive life in the club, and he may have had gambling debts that drove him to steal. Hitchcock distils the aspect of violence and draws it to the sacred. Where violence is more powerful is in the sequences that Balestrero follows through questioning, prosecution, and incarceration. This reveals that the experience of the convicts from outside is an experience of constantly being violently subjugated and is stained from the start by the fear of receiving violently treated (Cover 1608). The detectives’ provenance of minor depravities to Balestrero is not charged of parricide or incest, but the detective’s determination to attribute prurient and anti-social tendencies to Balestrero in the comparable territory. Remarkably, the pressure to catch a culprit and the fear of crime is the modern form of the sacrificial catastrophe, which all too frequently engrosses public outcry for punishment, wrongful incarceration, and false conviction on the leanest of evidence (Wood 17). When Balestrero is unconfined from temporary confinement in prison on bail, crisis breaks out new in the relationship between him and his wife. A happy and harmonious family is shuttered as Rose suffers from a mental breakdown. The crisis initiates where their hopes for a justifying alibi are crumpled. Two important witnesses of the whereabouts of Balestrero on the night of the robbery yield to be dead. This shows that the full reach of conflict of all against all in which family members are dragged in the sequence of retribution, where no one is above suspicion, and a scapegoat is unsystematically selected. Lashing out of Rose against Balestrero is not far-flung from the reaction of the women inside the office, but it is ultimate and disastrous echo in the inner lives of both Balestrero and Rose. After facing many hardships, Rose realizes that not only does Balestrero’s situation become unsettling but many people are enthusiastic to assist in the fall of Balestrero. Irrespective of justice, one can be selected randomly for persecution. Rose’s personal guilt out of all proportions to her obligation is the innermost psychic mirror image of the limitless unreasonable violence she observes in the eyes of the prosecutors. It is from this vision that the infinitude of victimization and violence destabilizes her. She begins not to care at all, and whenever she speaks, her voice and tone is fairly unrelated ordinary life (Wood 29). Rose gives an exact description of the unexpected situation of sacrificial crisis that matters in the selection process of a scapegoat. This can be told from the viewpoint of the victim of the crisis who is after looking at her sees that not a single person guards her from the crowd. Without the moral or the intellectual resources to challenge it, it is not astonishing that Rose turns all the hostility of the mob upon herself in the form of remorse, and then towards Balestrero. All the animosity she perceives from the people around her is now bowed to Balestrero. Not only does Rose begin to blame Balestrero for their family’s victimization, but she also envisages their family’s complete end at the hands of the persecutors (Cohen 156). Rose’s vision of metaphysical violence is compelling in the sense that she is no longer in a position to respond or recognize to her own people. Notably, the sequence of retribution has been assumed, and she carries the pressure of violence in the wounds suffered by her psyche. Conclusion Hitchcock’s use of viewpoint perspective in ‘The Wrong Man’ is founded on his strength of mind to place his viewers in the character of the victim. Hitchcock cinematically repeats what René Girard suggested in his historical input of Christianity itself. Girard’s suggestion brings to consciousness the viewpoint of the victim of persecution and reveals its sources in the scapegoat mechanism. In the end of the movie, exasperated by his bad luck, Hitchcock shows Balestreto facing Christ’s image silently praying. Transition from a zoom on Balestrero’s expression to a street scene where the real robber appears follows. In a lap dissolve, the face of the real robber emerges from Balestrero’s. However, this dissolve happens moments before the real criminal, Balestrero’s double is caught up with while committing another crime. As a result of a lucky apprehension, Balestrero restores his true identity and his connection with social order. Even though Balestrero is relieved, his later encounter with his wife Rose in the asylum where she had been placed retells him that the blemishes of the incident are still there. Balestrero’s difference is reinstated but Rose’s sanity is not. Rose remains mind-numbingly unresponsive even when in the presence of his husband. Hitchcock shows a victim at his most defenseless, when he stands helpless and trembling before an irresistible force. Notably, both Rose’s and experiences facsimile the predicament of the scapegoat before a crowd, which René Girard assets that it stands at the violence origin of procedural and by lineage, the court system. In other words, what was present during the birth of the holy in the setting up of ritual sacrifice is still existing in the outrageous let-downs of justice when a guiltless man is wrongly accused. Hitchcock’s knowledge of scapegoat is not conjectural, but jumps out from the inherent aptitude of an artist who acutely observes the human’s inner workings of passions and portrays them spontaneously. In accepting the unescapable presence of scapegoat mechanism in culture of humans, René Girard also affirms the historical exceptionality of the intuition into the scapegoat mechanism yielded by the Biblical perspective. The victimized Balestrero is similar to Christ’s victimization. However, Hitchcock seems to advocate that Balestrero is as accountable as his accusers to respond to fate and chance, but also that morality took place by an exchange, in this situation between him and his mother. Through his action, Balestrero is in a position to break the sequence of mimetic contagion and he declines the desolate response that has consumed his wife’s mind. Work Cited Cohen, Paula M. Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Cover, Robert M. "Violence and the Word." Yale Law Journal (1986): 1601-1629. Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Print. Truffaut, François, Helen Scott, and Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. Print. Wood, Robin. Hitchcocks Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print. Read More