Why are the Men Angry in "12 Angry Men"?
The movie deals with one of the most important of all modern topics: "How rational are humans?"
Over my adult life, I’ve gone back and forth on the question of how rational humans are.
Probably I’ve held every position imaginable, for short periods of time.
And rewatching the classic film “12 Angry Men” for the umpteenth time, it seems that this movie too has all the same vacillations I’ve had, and more.
Living in academia as I have, I can get easily swayed by the idea that humans can and should be rational decision-makers, thanks to Enlightenment thinking that permeates many disciplines. You could even call it Platonic thinking, the hope and dream that we can educate ourselves enough to overcome base, animalistic desires that lead to civic problems.
But living in the wider world as I do, this hope and dream doesn’t make much sense. That world is more like “12 Angry Men,” a motley of thumotic desires that stir and clash in every social setting. And if they aren’t clashing in social settings, they are at least clashing internally.
As in the movie, most everybody thinks they are right, and most everybody seems to be raging mad at others. “Angry,” as the title puts it. Such anger makes the hope and dreams of the movie — skeptical rational discourse leading to a considered group judgment — seem like a high flight of fancy.
In that wider world, including the Internet, which is the world’s own jury deliberation room of eight billion hot-and-sweaty passionate people, many humans seem to be manifestly self-destructive in every area of life, even including academia.
They are self-destructive as individuals and socially destructive in groups, and they go against even their best interest quite often. The most common problems could be solved by rationality, or better thinking. But no, they never are: drug addiction, sports gambling, violent crime, forever wars, domestic abuse, child abuse, in-group prejudice, and on the list goes.
And that includes unjust judgments in justice systems, too-harsh penalties for the innocent, while the guilty go free too often. This is a source of strong thumotic desires in real life, as it is in “12 Angry Men.”
So let’s assume, for awhile in this short piece, that humans are prejudiced towards irrational biases, that they can be hoodwinked by deceptions, that they give into illusions that can last a lifetime, they can be gaslit easily, they can not only believe but give their money to nonsensical causes, and they can hold onto their beliefs even though with a quick fact-check those beliefs could be easily disproven.
I think I’ve just described 90% of the Internet (though not this Substack, of course)!
Anyway, now take an institution predicated on the idea that humans can act and deliberate rationally. That institution would be seem to be rather insane to make that assumption. Yet there are a whole bunch of these institutions, actually — such as the republican system of voting for representatives in an all-important deliberate body.
Let’s forget that for now and hone in on the concern of the famous movie “12 Angry Men” — the justice system.
And specifically the American justice system, which, with jury trials, assumes that twelve citizens can deliberate wisely enough to decide crucial cases, including those regarding whether a defendant lives or dies.
“12 Angry Men” worries incessantly, in every frame, about whether humans are rational. It should. The threat in the movie is that these twelve regular guys aren’t going to get it right.
Moreover, they think they are getting it right, and many of them think they are getting it right because they’ve *reasoned* their way to the correct answer, while not considering whether they might’ve got it all wrong.
That’s the killer idea: humans can think they are rational, yet they can do so under the delusion that they are rational. They thereby act irrationally while claiming to be rational (by whatever definition).
They therefore get major decisions wrong, so wrong that they kill innocent people.
And yet they can go on with the illusion that they are still right.
What I just said, I believe, should haunt everybody who believes strongly in some cause, idea, or religion. The stronger you believe in it, the threat even stronger that you and I are really Don Quixotes. We think we see reality correctly, so correctly that we act to shape it to our ends.
Sometimes, though, the truth is that we are tilting at windmills of our own or of someone else’s making.
“12 Angry Men” is a brilliant movie, among the most brilliant ever made. Part of that is the collection of social and philosophical tensions it depicts and sustains, even to the end. Perhaps the strongest tension of all is whether twelve normal, sane men can know anything at all about the truth of the case in front of them.
In the movie, the truth of the case confronts each individual, as per his own bias. Every juror, all twelve, are clear and obvious character types. There’s the advertising executive, the stockbroker, the nerd, the sportsball fanatic, the Italian immigrant, the lower-class slum resident, and so on. Absolutely zero of these men are free from the biases of their own experiences and perspectives. They represent, generally, much of the American public — and for this 1950s film, the white-male demographic at large.
But worse, when these individuals form an ad-hoc group for the sake of making a major decision, their collection of biases creates groupthink.
At the beginning of the movie, all of them are ready to give in to what they think they know: the defendant must be guilty. None of them except one are willing to attempt to question that.
Now I take it as a fundamental axiom that a rational person, in order to be rational in a Platonic or an Enlightenment sense, can and must be a skeptic of himself. (I’ll stick with the male pronoun here following the movie’s lead, even though this applies to females as well).
Ergo, a rational theologian or an atheist each need to show skepticism as to what they are asserting — that’s one strong reason why I respect Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa” very much. Ergo, a climate-change advocate or skeptic each must scrutinize his/her own position and reasoning.
But if you want among the strongest proof of all that humans aren’t rational most of the time, if not all of the time, then observe that hardly anybody is a skeptic — at least out loud and in public — of his own preferences and ideologies.
Frankly, it’s just easier to live without doing that. Day-to-day life offers plenty of challenges enough, without each of us trying to think through why we believe what we believe, and why we act the way we act.
When a human tries to be skeptical and strongly question and challenge his own position, well, troubles show up. Doubt, melancholy, cognitive dissonance, identity confusion, wishy-washiness, and the problem of appearing consistent in public in order to save face — now we are in Hamlet-Land. I mean that is all very well depicted in perhaps the most famous play ever.
When a group of humans tries to do this — to hash out what is true and reasonable within a group setting — the best of luck to you. Because that’s going to be frustrating for somebody, to say the least. Somebody will be piled on, somebody will be doubted, somebody will be challenged and shamed in public.
And I think humans, as pack animals, want a dominant leader to emerge. That want might just be a baser desire than anything reason itself can stand. Charisma so often trumps logic.
There’s your “anger” of the title. “12 Angry Men” sits there as the name of this movie for decades, and that word “angry” primes us to think about the disposition of the 12 characters. Why are they angry?
Well, they have to discuss, as a group, a major decision.
Already this is annoying. In the movie, the baseball fanatic wants to get out quickly and go to his ballgame. The old bigot in the film, the one with a cold, can’t fathom why discussion must happen. He knows he’s right, so why listen to anyone else Everybody else is slightly annoyed at Juror #8’s desire, as he says, “to talk.” It’s really hot and cramped in the deliberation room.
Already any attempt at rationality is attacked by our circumstances. Even the temperature of a room affects our mood, which alters our thoughts. Mood and circumstance so often trump logic.
Everybody on the jury is prejudiced as well. Juror #8, played by Henry Fonda, makes a mini-speech late in the movie that describes the general state of humanity: he says that prejudices always get in the way, and we can never be fully certain of what’s true because of them. (By the way, these could be *helpful* prejudices, like the ones that can save you from harm. But he is specifically talking about racial biases at that point in the film.)
Look at the way each member of the jury is portrayed. The old bigot is, well, bigoted. But the crux of it all is that he thinks he’s right based on reasoning through his experiences with “them,” the lower-class immigrants he castigates several times in the movie. His frustrations with others leads to strong emotion on his part Yet he and his fellow “guilty” voters regularly accuse the “not guilty” voters of being emotionally prejudiced!
This happens most of all with the movie’s “villain,” the character played by Lee Cobb. He’s the last holdout for the “guilty” vote. When everybody else says “guilty,” he goes against them all. Why?
The movie makes a magical-story move with him: he gets a melodramatic moment of self-revelation in which he changes his vote. His reasons — which are not reasons at all but deeply held traumas — are that he’s estranged from his own son. He would sentence a young man to death just because he’s projecting his own son’s estrangement onto the young man. However, throughout the movie, he accuses the other jurors of being emotionally manipulated themselves. At one point, he calls them “bleeding hearts,” accusing the not-guilty votes of relying on pathos instead of acting as reasonable people who can sift carefully through evidence, such as he can.
That revelation in the end, of the Lee Cobb character, may be Freudian. He the father wants to kill his son, just as the son wants to kill the father, probably. It’s an Oedipus complex. The father, Cobb’s character, projects his psychological trauma onto others. Here he projects it onto the young male defendant.
Nothing could be, in Enlightenment terms, more unreasonable. (And if you want see Enlightenment hopes for rationality attacked massively, just read Freud’s book Civilization and Its Discontents, which probably was cribbed for the screenplay of “12 Angry Men.”)
For Cobb’s character, since the movie’s a mid-20th century work of art, it *has* to consider all the contemporary possibilities and theories about humans as generally irrational creatures. A dominant one then was indeed Freudian psychoanalysis, hence the Freudian projection in that character.
Another mid-20th century challenge to the rational-human theory was mass marketing, which is a greater challenge today than ever before.
The movie showcases this problem in juror #12, a persuader by trade, a marketer. He’s a “guilty” vote in the beginning too, and he seems to accept the prosecutor’s reasoning as all the other men do. But his position isn’t strongly held. Twice he flips-flops. He goes from guilty, to not guilty, back to guilty, and the not guilty.
He’s the only one in the movie to do this. I think that has to do with his character type, his profession, the core value of which is the persuasion of the masses through graphic and emotional advertising. He brags at one point about a catch-phrase he invented for cereal.
By Enlightenment (or Platonic) thinking, it’s unreasonable to be moved by a catch-phrase. That might even be considered the dumbest sophistry according to Plato, if he could only watch a commercial break on TV.
But as we know, ads do seem to move people. Jingles are catchy, designs are cool, and the next time you go to the grocery store, you can notice what catches your eye and why you buy what you buy. Some of it, at least, will not be based on skeptical, thoughtful reasoning.
So there are a few of the many threats to democratic discourse on a jury: Freudian projection, pathos, persuasion through emotional manipulation, mood and atmosphere, and the belief that we are more rational than anybody else.
The most “reasonable” person in the movie for the “guilty” verdicts is the stockbroker, juror #3. He’s the spitting image of rationality, in movie terms. Fairly motionless, fairly emotionless, a clean light suit with a pocket swatch, and a glasses-wearer to boot.
In movie language, if you want to make a character to appear smarter than others, you make them wear glasses. He’s the only one in the movie to do so.
This juror is a long holdout for “guilty,” one of the last three men to believe in that verdict. And he does so over and against the necessary truism of the justice system: the need to have no reasonable doubt in order to declare a person guilty.
He has his reasons. They all seem right. One by one they are disproven for us throughout the movie. In the end, his glasses become a metaphor — he can’t *see* correctly enough to reason properly. Like the witness in the murder case, he thought he saw the crime clearly. Everybody else proves that he might not.
Now that word “proves” in the last sentence is tricky. What’s happening in the movie is that a negative is being proven as plausible, not that the innocence of the defendant is proved at all. The positive position of the “not guilty” vote is not being proven, which is the certainly of the defendant’s guilt. Every juror has to move from certain about guilt to slightly uncertain about guilt.
I might add that it’s a fundamental axiom in classical logic that you cannot prove a negative. If you claim someone is “not guilty,” the burden is on those who make a positive claim, a “guilty” verdict, to prove their case. Saying “this is not true” can never be proven for sure, 100% — although I admit that it gets complicated upon further thought. My point is just that the justice system forces the “burden of proof” upon the prosecution, who makes a positive (guilty) claim.
It’s proving this slight uncertainty of “not guilty” that is demonstrated to be nearly impossible, for a bunch of normal guys huddled in a group.
That’s another source of their overall “anger.” Just think about the last time you were proven wrong in public. Either you can’t think of it, because it doesn’t happen much, or it’s quite painful to recall. Being proven wrong in a group almost always being shamed as well. And it’s not that the group is necessarily shaming you; it’s just that the circumstance makes it feel like it is doing the shaming.
You’d be angry too if you were shown that you were wrong in front of many people.
This is what happens throughout the entire movie! I suspect this is partly why humans double-down when they are wrong, rather than changing their positions. Consistency is part of character identity and maintaining face.
The movie hopes and dreams, in my view, that rationality in a group setting can still prevail, even by the mid-point of the 20th century. In their immediate historical rear-view was World War 2, which should question and challenge everybody’s supposed rationality, including scientists.
I think “12 Angry Men” contains strong tensions about this, even strong doubts. Can twelve ordinary people get together to do what is right? Well, it takes a ridiculously challenging session, with courageous individuals who have nothing of self-interest on the line, to risk their reputations in public. One man against eleven is a rare sight, and sometimes, even that one man is completely wrong. Juror #8 knows he might be, too.
The movie ends with ridiculous tension. The jury might’ve let off a guilty man. Juror #8 says this late in the movie, and it’s implicit in the logic of a “not guilty” verdict anyway, which is about reasonable doubt as to “guilty” and not about certainty as to “not guilty.”
For my money, then, the movie ends on a perfectly discordant chord, signaling the frought tension that remains even at the end of the movie. Some of the characters, maybe all, are still bigoted. The movie also implies that other jury deliberations may go astray, condemning innocent people to capital punishment. And maybe, just maybe, the defendant was guilty. No matter what we use to reason through the case, nothing will get us to the absolute truth.
So the chord sequence the movie ends on demonstrates these tensions amazingly. It may be among the best musical endings of a movie ever. Take a listen, but don’t expect to hear anything pleasant.
Is this chord sequence “rational”? Doesn’t the music tell us about the vast complexities of the human self, and how those selves play out in public?
Anyway, I’ve always thought that that French horn with the moving line at the end is trying to disrupt everything that’s already disturbing enough.
Out of tune with all the other instruments for a time, that French horn might just be angry.
What a great comment this is. I think this is the best I've read of yours since following you the last couple of years. I have been grappling with Absolute Truth vs. Personal Bias for most of my adult life. It is so difficult to challenge one's self; it is so difficult (if not impossible) to see clearly, to know and see through personal biases. It is so difficult to live honestly. I think 12 Angry Men depicts this so well and you've done an excellent job highlighting its depiction. It is such an important topic both for our personal lives and for society's stability and I thank you for taking the time and making the effort to highlight it.