To capitalize on that suggestion / reminder that we could and should use the blog as a format for dialogue about the films we see, here are some of my thoughts on "Capturing the Friedmans" that just resurfaced after coming across an article about the Duke lacrosse team trial...

(The specific article I read can be found at http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/04/11/duke.lacrosse/index.html, though I'm sure there are more current and complex articles out there on this...)

The film really wound up leaving me with more questions to ask. Which, as Andrew said in class today, is kind of the point. So thumbs up there... Anyway, many of the bigger questions I kept coming back to were about memory. The argument that a lot of the kids who testified against them had been hypnotized in order to recall memories that they had forgotten about or buried or were ashamed by is incredibly interesting. Especially in this case, employing hypnosis seems absurdly problematic. Does anyone know about this way of inducing memory recall? Is hypnosis a widely administered and respected way of recovering repressed memories? What's the deal with repressed memories anyway? I'm simultaneously intrigued, skeptical, and afraid of the notion.

Another bigger issue that the film kept bringing up and never even attempted to resolve was the issue of the fairness of large institutions (like law enforcement) that we don't seem to question until we are confronted (most often very personally) with what seems to us like an incredible injustice. Here's where the connection to the Duke lacrosse thing comes in. In that article, one of the accused (and today found innocent) players stated that "This whole experience has opened my eyes to a world of injustice that I never knew existed." Indeed, a person (especially an upper-middle-class white person, as all these accused people, in both the Duke and Friedman cases, are) can go through their entire lives not even thinking that things like law enforcement and media coverage can contribute and even entirely comprise a "world of injustice."

Which leads me to my last thought (at least for now, hopefully people will respond), which is that class (often indirectly) came up a lot in the film. All the time-elapsed images of that fancy town clock and all the images of excessively green, over-watered lawns really hammered home the point that the people suffering this particular (potential) "world of injustice" were of a demographic that we're used to seeing in power, not suffering injustice. Does that make their role as potential victim more powerful? (This is a topic that comes up repeatedly in the Duke case articles...)