viz. - religion

One-Dimensional Issues and Characters In Orange Is the New Black

clsloan — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 14:21:01 +0000

Image credit: Orange Is the New Black Wiki

Remember when I said there weren't many things about Orange Is the New Black that made me cringe? Well, I recollected one. The show's ability to construct multi-dimensional, psychologically complex, believably flawed characters is one of its primary successes. One of its primary problems, however, manifests when the show occasionally forgets just how well it does create dynamic characters.

Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett, for instance, gets humanized very seldom. From the get-go, her overt racism, homophobia, zealotry and ignorance neatly label her villainous, imminently mock-able and nearly impossible to sympathize with. Now, I'm certainly not arguing that there aren't people out there ready to make life absolutely miserable for others, but Orange Is the New Black so beautifully emphasizes basic humanity in order to point out the cruelty of stripping it from incarcerated individuals. A brilliant friend of mine who has the uncanny ability to pick up precisely on what movies, shows and books want their consumers to feel told me that she positively rejoiced when Pennsatucky was placed in solitary. “Pennsatucky just makes the other characters' lives a living hell,” my friend confided. “She's really horrible.” I was shocked to find that I agreed. After the poignant Thanksgiving episode that worked so hard to establish the horrors of being placed in solitary confinement, I felt like I was being asked to celebrate a really wicked inmate getting her just rewards. Maybe I'm simply a terrible person and the situation actually boasts some complex layers. Rooting vindictively for Alex to take vengeance on Pennsatucky didn't precisely feel consistent with the other thematic points of the show, though.

I'm also a little antsy with how the show handles abortion, and I would love feedback from others about this. Given America's contemporary political climate, I'm highly interested in the way our culture's fiction handles the topic. I remember being genuinely shocked when an anti-choice group I ran into on the street a few years ago used Juno as an example of why we shouldn't worry about coercing teenage girls into carrying unwanted pregnancies through. Ever since then, I've been on the lookout for how abortion comes across in film and television shows. I was a bit taken aback when Orange Is the New Black felt the need to suggest that one of Pennsatucky's psychotic tendencies was seeking abortion after abortion. In a flashback, she sounds so horribly callous when she rejects her lover's suggestion that she should maintain one of her pregnancies. Pennsatucky also isn't the only one who confronts the decision about whether or not to have a baby. After accidentally getting pregnant in prison, Dayanara asks Mendoza to help her have an abortion. Dayanara's mother, however, conspires with Mendoza to sabotage the process. I was immediately outraged that Dayanara's response to this trick was to sympathize with her mother and agree to have the baby. Does this show vilify abortions and the women who undertake them or am I just far too sensitive?

Negotiating Modesty: Reading Mormon Fashion Blogs as Visual Rhetoric

Laura Thain — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:22:32 +0000

Image Source: Clothed Much

Fashion blogs have proliferated the internet since its inception; the rhetoric of the genre is as multifaceted as its participants, most of whom are women. Daily fashion blogging, in which the blogger takes regular photos of the outfit she assembles each morning, is a popular iteration of the genre. Obviously much of the blogger’s value systems is exhibited through the personal ethos she cultivates on these blogs; the way the blogger frames the narrative of the outfit in terms of its relationship to her day-to-day activities reveals much about these value systems, as well. An interesting subculture has received a substantial amount of attention in the fashion blogging community recently, and that is modesty blogging. All the modesty blogs I’ve come across are motivated by religious restriction; the vast majority of these base their definitions of modest clothing upon the tenets of the Mormon church. Of course, the situated ethos of modesty blogging must negotiate an inherent contradiction between two competing definitions of modest: the function of modest dress as a physical representation of religious belief and the concept of modesty as the quality of being unassuming, scrupulous, and free from presumption. What does it mean to take pride in modest dress, to wear it as a badge of individualism and difference? And how can we read these modesty blogs in terms of visual culture? Join me as I take you on a journey into another strange corner of the internet: Mormon fashion blogging.

Image Source: Cats and Cardigans

We might make a few generalizations about popular fashion blogs: most successful blogs attract their audiences with an ethos that exhibits an internally consistent personal style (what we might call a “style narrative”) that is accomplished by innovative pairings. Thus, the blog initially attracts an audience with the familiar—a “style narrative” of, for example, grunge, retro, hipster, or editorial—and keeps their interest with the unfamiliar—a scarf made into a bolero or a vintage headband woven into a punk outfit. We might, then, loosely read the ethos of these blogs as “text” in terms of Barthes’ conforming/cutting edge dichotomy in The Pleasure of the Text. This makes the case of modesty fashion blogs especially interesting, because the “cutting edge” component of these blog’s ethos is, in fact, a conservative reaction to counterculture—it operates on the fantasy of return to a dress standard of the past (although its location in the past is certainly ambiguous). The familiar, plagiarizing edge is, in fact, the way that these modesty blogs attempt to participate in mainstream discourse—a discourse that is often countercultural (hipster, grunge, retro). Their popularity comes in large part from the way these blogs resemble in their formal elements many other successful fashion blogs, but are able to translate their audience’s desire for surprise and innovation into a restricted code of dress.

Image Source: Cotton and Curls

Most Mormon fashion blogs define immodest clothing as anything low-cut, sleeveless, backless, or too short—some combine a series of positive descriptions along with the negative (for instance “long skirts” or “skirts below the knee” rather than “no skirts above the knee”). Most do not address fit but instead warn against “revealing” clothing. Concrete restrictions almost always regard coverage, rather than the tightness or fit of clothing. This ethos in general is oriented around fulfilling a minimum requirement of modesty, and the boundary of that minimum requirement is represented physically by the temple garment, an undergarment standardized and manufactured by the central Church. Women begin wearing this garment daily when they receive their endowment, which for most coincides with their marriage. We can reasonably assume that most of these bloggers wear temple garments, as they advertise their status as Temple-married women, but it is worth mentioning that almost none of these bloggers mention the temple garment or the way it might restrict their code of dress; rather, these women speak of their restricted dress as a lifelong commitment predating their temple endowment, and a code of modesty that is self-defined and self-enforced. (Many of these blogs begin their "about me" with some variation of “Modesty means ____ to me…”).

The deferral of the issue of temple garments is not only a reflection of their sacred status among church members (it is in general considered inappropriate to speak about temple garments to non-members, and is considered offensive to display visual representations of them)—it is also indicative of these women attempting to find a place in mainstream fashion discourse; to not be noticed for their wardrobe restriction but for their good sense of style. The rhetoric of these blogs might be condensed as such: “I am reflecting an internal commitment to God in my physical appearance, but I do this so well that you would not notice unless I told you explicitly.” This rhetorical mechanism seems to operate to ease the tension between competing modesty discourses I have outlined above: these bloggers can take personal, inner pride in their commitment to modesty without bringing attention to their difference (and thus translating pride of self into the public sphere). Counterintuitively, this is accomplished by assimilating successfully into the fashionable discourse of the mainstream.

Image Source: wearing it on my sleeves

But there is a way in which this attitude can be read as subversive in terms of Church doctrine, especially when one considers the history of sumptuary laws in the Mormon Church. (There is a useful article in the Mormon periodical Dialogue that outlines the subject in more detail.) Though we might imagine the discourse on modesty to call back to the conservativism of the Einsenhower era, this is not the locus of the nostalgia for modest behavior—it is, in fact, its origin. The first explicit call to modest dress occured in 1951, when Church authority Spencer W. Kimball extolled young, unmarried Mormon women to distinguish themselves from their non-member peers explicitly through a more conservative code of dress:

"There is no reason why women need to wear a low-cut or otherwise revealing gown just because it is the worldly style. We can create a style of our own."

It is important to note that this address, given at a BYU devotional, was aimed mostly at unmarried young women. As Kimball argues,

"We knew of one mother who remonstrated with her lovely daughter who intended to buy a modest evening gown. The mother pleaded: 'Darling, now is the time to show your pretty shoulders and back and neck. When you are married in the temple that will be time enough to begin wearing conservative clothes.' What can be expected of the new generation if the mothers lead their own offspring from the path of right?...The fellows could show courage and good judgment if they encouraged their young women friends to wear modest clothing. If a young man would not date a young woman who is improperly clothed, the style would change very soon."

Kimball assumes that women who are married are already living the law of modesty because of the nature of their temple garments; here, as in most of the discourse that follows, the concern is that unmarried women might delay that sense of responsibility until after they take their temple vows.

The loose standards that Kimball sets out are a reaction against, rather than a return to, the styles of the 1950s—in fact, his distaste for revealing clothing resembles a return to the fashion of the 1910s, before hemlines were raised and bustlines lowered in the so-called Roaring 20s. And it is certainly of some significance that Kimball himself experienced adolescence in the 1910s—he is demanding, to some extent, a return to the conceptions of modesty that existed during his own days of courtship.

Yet Kimball’s call to arms is all very general. The restrictions that modesty fashion bloggers set out above—specific prohibitions against revealing this part of the body or that—are simply not extant in this early discourse. In fact, the next significant prohibitions against immodesty among LDS youth are even less specific than Kimball’s address above. Let us examine the 1965 iteration of a pamphlet still published today called “For The Strength of Youth,” which serves to outline the standards which young Mormons are expected to uphold.

Image Credit: Barncow

Note the text’s deferral of specific criteria (“it is difficult to make an over-all statement concerning modest standards of dress, because modesty cannot be determined by inches or fit since that which looks modest on one person may not be so on another…”). Instead, the text chooses to deliberately define modesty against the standards of the countercultural movements of the 1960s. It warns against “grubby” fashion, implores women to maintain traditional mores of femininity in their dress, and considers androgyny to be the greatest threat to the modesty of young women.

Image Credit: Barncow

The pamphlet also extols young women to “dress to enhance their natural beauty and femininity…Few girls or women ever look well in backless or strapless dresses. Such styles often make the figure look ungainly or large, or they show the bony structures of the body…Clothes should be comfortable and attractive without calling attention [to the body].” It is also careful to warn women against wearing pants outside of athletic activity: “Pants…are not desirable attire for shopping, at school, in the library, in cafeterias or restaurants.”

Thus we can see that in the 1960s, second-wave feminism and androgynous dress were the chief modes of discourse that the Church set to dress its women against. The letter of the law in these pamphlets is far less respected than the spirit of the law, and the “law” is an attractive but non-sexualized, and therefore sanitized, femininity. Counterculture was at the top of the immodest hierarchy.

Image Source: Haircut and General Attitude

Not so today. Mormon women increasingly define modesty in terms of explicit clothing guidelines (inseam lengths, coverage) rather than cultural association; no longer is clothing a statement of conservative reaction to the styles of counterculture but instead a playful interpretation of them. Cultural associates of modes of dress cease to be called into question within this dialogue; instead, the temple garment becomes the silent marker of how much skin is “too much.” Anything that covers these undergarments constitutes modest dress.

I see the discourse on modesty in the present day taking place, then, in two separate spheres. On the one hand, church-sanctioned periodicals continue to emphasize the function of modesty as a marker of difference against counterculture, although this is a trope that has all but lost its meaning. Meanwhile, fashionable young Mormon women often embrace an identity that is countercultural—they embrace their ability to participate in cutting-edge fashion while still adhering to the explicit restrictions of their faith.

It seems to me that one significant effect of this is, in fact, a return, in a sense, to Kimball’s initial exortations to unmarried women. To the insider Mormon community, these young married bloggers are in a sense instructing their younger or unmarried peers how to live the letter of the law of modesty before they take their temple vows and don their temple garments. For the fashion blogging audience at large, these women express their identity through their commitment to modesty by showing how easily the rhetoric of modesty can fit into the tenets of mainstream fashion; the commitment to coverage exists as a challenge or unexpected element in this endeavor that only enhances their ethos, rather than undermining it, in the mainstream. Modesty then ultimately exists as a function of creativity rather than restriction. And though most of these women are probably unaware of the complex rhetorical history that makes such an ethos possible, they are nonetheless operating in a space in which the definition of modesty has drastically shifted over time, making it possible for these women to, as Benjamin Franklin might say, take pride in their humility—to have no reservations in being immodest in demeanor about their modesty in dress. I will at the very least claim this: that the function of modesty as difference has taken a countercultural turn, and, if a woman being refused entry to a BYU testing center for wearing skinny jeans is any indication, the rhetoric of modesty within the Mormon community is very much a battleground in which the rules of engagement are still being hammered out.

Reading Religious Monuments

Todd Battistelli — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 22:07:05 +0000

Image Credit: Department of Veterans Affairs

The religious meaning associated with the above symbol seems hard to miss. Different denominations may favor different variations, but the Latin cross is inextricably associated with Christianity. Yet, in the context of legal arguments over the separation of church and state, some suggest that the cross conveys a meaning other than an identification with the Christian religion. Oddly enough, these arguments for a non-Christian Christian cross often come from those deeply invested in preserving the presence of crosses and other ostensibly religious symbols on government property.

Image Credit: Joe Crawford

Since 1954, the Mount Soledad Easter Cross, the original name of the monument pictured above, has looked out over San Diego. Since 1989, litigants have participated in a decades-long struggle to challenge or defend the structure on state-church separation grounds. Generally speaking, government can neither inhibit nor support religion, such as by providing a city park as a site for a permanent religious display and worship. However, the question of where to draw the line between constitutional and unconstitutional religious displays has proven difficult both to resolve and to discuss in a productive matter.

In the Mt. Soledad case, for instance, the site had been used for Easter worship services. Once litigants filed a complaint that the religious symbol should not sit on government property, defenders of the cross' position redefined it a veterans' memorial instead of a worship site. The courts were not persuaded by this redefinition, ruling against its continued presence. At that point, defenders worked with the city to sell the land immediately surrounding the cross to a non-governmental third party in an attempt to get around state-church separation concerns.

A less prominent, more remote cross that sat on government-owned land in the middle of the desolate yet stunning Mojave desert has faced similar legal challenges and received similar support from those who try to re-define an iconic image to mean something other than its iconic meaning.

Image Credit: AP Photo/The Press-Enterprise, Carlos Puma

Unlike the Mt. Soledad cross, the Mojave cross was originally created as a war memorial in 1934, not as a worship site. The Mojave cross sat on a wild rocky rise, unlike the well groomed park at the top of Mt. Soledad, though both look out from prominent positions. The more primitive construction of the Mojave cross and its more remote location seem to enhance its iconic imagery (regardless of what meaning one reads into the icon), standing as a lone symbolic structure in nature, as opposed to the Mt. Soledad cross that stands a few minutes travel from the hustle and bustle of San Diego.

Image Credit: Stan Shebs

The early legal challenges to the Mojave cross resulted in it being encased in a plywood box. As with the Mt. Soledad case, a land-transfer was made to move the Mojave cross off government property. Litigants challenged the transfer, but the Supreme Court ruled that it was an acceptable solution to the state-church issues and sent the case back to a lower court to rule. Soon after, the cross was stolen.

Image Credit: Ken Lund

The Mojave case raises difficult questions about the meaning of symbols in a diverse society. Those who objected to the cross, saw the cross as exclusionary. For example, the Freedom From Religion Foundation said, “Sectarian symbols such as the Latin cross sanctioned by government as war memorials neglect the sacrifices of our non-Christian and non-believing veterans.” Some of those defending the cross denied the religious meaning of the cross, such as American Legion representative Mark Seavey who said, “The cross is emblematic of sacrifice, not religion.”

The Supreme Court justices were also divided on this question of whether a symbol that has religious meaning can serve as a symbol of sacrifice for all regardless of their religious beliefs.

Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, argued:

But a Latin cross is not merely a reaffirmation of Christian beliefs. It is a symbol often used to honor and respect those whose heroic acts, noble contributions, and patient striving help secure an honored place in history for this Nation and its people. Here, one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten.

Kennedy, unlike Seavey, does not dismiss the cross's religious meaning. Instead, he suggests that a meaning of sacrifice overrides the religious meaning at least for constitutional purposes. Writing in his dissent, Justice Stevens says:

I cannot agree that a bare cross such as this conveys a nonsectarian meaning simply because crosses are often used to commemorate "heroic acts, noble contributions, and patient striving" and to honor fallen soldiers. The cross is not a universal symbol of sacrifice. It is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith.

Image Credit: Marco Chiesa

Justice Kennedy invokes images of European cemeteries from World Wars I and II, and the cumulative effect is a moving reminder of sacrifice. Though, as Justice Stevens suggests later in his dissent, remembrance does not depend on the symbols being crosses, and, indeed, crosses were not the exclusive symbol used to mark grave sites. In the above picture one Star of David marker is visible among a multitude of crosses. Nevertheless, given the normative value of Christianity for American identity in those historical eras, it isn't surprising to see nearly all graves in a given view marked with crosses.

Image Credit: Prashanth Raghavan

Unlike the cross-shaped markers in the European cemeteries that Justice Kennedy mentions in his opinion, markers provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US indicate religious preference in a different way. The upright headstones or flat markers all share the same shape, though next of kin can elect to have an “emblem of belief” engraved onto the face of the stone.

Image Credit: Department of Veterans Affairs

There has been some controversy in getting the VA to accept certain symbols, but the Department currently hears applications for new emblems of belief in addition to the fifty-plus emblems already approved. In most photos, the dominant emblem remains the Christian cross, yet a wide range of other emblems bear witness to the diverse worldviews of veterans, ranging from atheism to Wicca.

Image Credit: John Hamer

Blogger John Hamer remarks on the wealth of diverse religious identifications he saw while at Arlington and Fort Leavenworth National Cemeteries. The cumulative effect of row upon row of markers that look similar from a distance yet reveal individual differences upon closer examination conveys Kennedy's message of remembrance while also evoking the American principle of e pluribus unum that a lone, large cross does not convey.

Mapping Religious Adherence: Association of Religion Data Archives

ladysquires — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:45:12 +0000

(Image Credits: Association of Religion Data Archives)

What do people mean when they say that the United States is a religious nation, or even a Christian nation? The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) compiles data taken from census records and surveys to provide comprehensive information on expressions of faith throughout the nation. Of particular interest to this blog is the impressive interactive map database that allows you to choose and compare data sets in order to gain specific information about rates of adherence, denominational affiliation, and demographics. I have used these in my Literature and Religion class to help students begin to think about the relationship between faith and other socio-cultural forces, such as immigration patterns and socio-economic changes in a region.

The map above shows proportional rates of religous adherence for all denominations nationwide. The darker a state is, the more religious it is. It is perhaps no suprirse that the Midwest and parts of the Deep South show the highest rates of adherence, but it is perhaps a bit counterintuitive that parts of the Northeast--New York and Massachusetts in particular--seem to be roughly on par with Mormon-dominated Utah and Oklahoma and is actually more religious than any of the states that constitute the Deep South. As you compare this map to maps that show adherence to specific denominations, a story begins to emerge.

As you can see here, Evangelical Christian affliation tends to be concentrated in the area we think of as the "Bible Belt," not exactly a surprise.

Perhaps equally unsurprising is the fact that Catholicism tends to be concentrated in the Southwest and Northeast, areas which are known for thier concentrations of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. This suggests that is, indeed, the high rate of Catholic affiliation that is driving the suprisingly high proportion of religious adherence in the "Godless North." In fact, proportionally, there are more Catholics per 1000 people in the Northeast than there are Evangelicals per 1000 in the South. What this data cannot tell us, however, is what adherence actually looks like. People may express a cultural or familial affiliation with the Catholic Church, for example, even if they haven't attended mass in 15 years. Religious adherence is, after all, often as much about cultural identification as it is about faith.

The database allows literally thousands of possible comparisons and allows you to examine data down to the state and county level. One can look at rates of religious adherence and compare them to demongraphic data on immigration, gender, voting trends, crime rates, proportion of men to women, urban vs. rural population concentrations, rates of new housing development, percentage of kids in private vs. public school, occupations, education levels, and how long it takes people to get to work in the morning. For example, below I took a look specifically at Texas and compared overall rates of religious adherence to the age of the population.

This is a comparison I don't quite know how to interpret. It shows rates of religious adherence becoming higher where the population is younger, when common wisdom suggests that younger generations tend to be less religious than their parents. Perhaps it is significant that the younger counties tend to also be border counties where the proportion of people who immigrated here in the last twenty years tends to be much higher. Age might simply be a correlation or it might indicate higher levels of cultural cohesiveness, where children identify with the values of their parents much more strongly.

This one, however, isn't really a surprise. The Evangelical Lutheran Church tends to be associated with higher concentrations of descendents of German and Scandinavian immigrants, and as you can see, it tends to be particularly concentrated (though the numbers are obviously statistically small) in that area between Austin and San Antonio usually associated with German heritage.

I could go on and on. If you do anything with religion, this is a great site for students to explore and play with. It is extremely user-friendly and has the potential to challenge what we think we know about religion in the United States. It also presents an excellent opportunity to talk about how we interpret data, correlation vs. causation, and statistical significance.

Inherit the Wind

Sarah Wagner — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:25:09 +0000

Made in 1960, Inherit the Wind is a closely rendered version of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925, with most of the courtroom arguments being taken straight from the trial transcripts.

(I’ve been surprised by how many people have never seen this movie, and that some don’t know the trial very well. For a summary, check out this entry in wikipedia.) The rhetoric text I’m using this semester, The Elements of Persuasion, has a whole chapter devoted to the actual trial, so showing the movie fit in especially nicely this semeter.

The movie works very well in a 306 class as a way to discuss arguments on several levels. First, there's the basic argument of the trial, which was not just about the Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution, but about the reconciliation of scientific and religious views of the world. At the same time, there is the subject of admissible information: the court rules that scientists who would argue the validity of the theory of evolution are not allowed to testify, based on the judge’s ruling that its validity has no bearing on whether or not Scopes (“Cates” in the movie) violated the law.

And then, of course, there is the argument being made by Stanley Kramer, the director of the movie. While many of us might see the legal case alone, the defense and the prosecution arguing the Truth of the Bible versus the Truth of Intelligence (which are indeed major arguments), and while many of us might feel justified in seeing creationism and its proponents as ridiculous, the director is after something else. In this movie there are five central characters: the Teacher, his Fiancée, a Baptist Minister (the Fiancée’s father), and the Defense and Prosecuting attorneys. The Teacher and the Minister stand for intellectualism and religion, or maybe “thinking” and “faith”. The attorneys are those who would defend each. The Fiancée, caught between her father and her husband-to-be, loves Thinking and wants to love and be loved by Faith. Herein lies the real struggle. She loves both, but is told that she can’t love Thinking and be loved by Faith, nor can she stay connected to her Faith and love Thinking.

With the movie’s tight camera work during the trial scenes, the tension between these two all-or-nothing perspectives on the world builds dramatically to two points in particular: one in which Brady, the Fundamentalist Prosecutor, reduces the Fiancée to sobs when he shouts at her to condemn her lover; the other in which the Defense brings Brady to his own demise, left stammering on the stand as his disappointed supporters leave the courtroom. At first glance, it’s a victory of Thinking over Faith. And yet, the sight of the Prosecutor, a good man and a gifted and beloved orator, trying to find his footing by nonsensically reciting the books of the Bible, is heartbreaking.

What has surprised me most about showing this black-and-white movie in class is the students’ engagement with it. The first thing I notice is that they laugh—at the melodramatic scenes as well as at the parts meant to be funny to the 1960 audience. And in a scene near the end, they react with intense shock (imagine a classroom-sized sharp in-breath) to a slap in the face. They seem to connect, unsurprisingly, to the cynical reporter (based on H.L Mencken). I see no nodding heads, I don’t have to wake anyone up. Why? In one class discussion a couple semesters ago, one student couldn’t believe the trial happened nearly 100 years ago because at her Christian high school, this debate was still very much alive. Another student remarked that the movie was especially interesting to him as a biology major.

The movie, especially this semester, is not old. As all of us watch the current political news, we hear discussions about small-town conservative America versus progressive urban America, about intellect versus common sense, and about faith versus logic. People bemoan the divisions in our country, and yet hold fast to the idea that they are right to value their perspective over another. The other side is so ridiculous as to be angering, and their views do not deserve to be reconciled with ours. Still we say, you can’t love faith and logic, small-town America and progressive policies, book learning and common sense.

(I expect many of you know the website American Rhetoric. If not, you should check it out. This site gave me the idea to show Inherit the Wind in my 306 class in the first place. Click this link and you can watch one of the crucial scenes of the trial, and/or read the transcript from the movie.)
americanrhetoric.com