67,000,000 Angry Men
“It’s only one night. A man may die.”
I’ll hold my hands up quite happily and admit that I’ve never been much into the black and white era of cinema. City of Lights, It’s a Wonderful Life, Breathless. I could probably count on one uncultured hand the number of monochrome films that I’ve watched and enjoyed in my time. I don’t think it’s necessarily an issue of my child-like brain requiring colour for engagement, either, though that’s probably part of it. There’s something in the performances, the staging, and the plot of those early films that seems to push me up, up, and away from any interest in continuing on with them. So, I rarely do. Recently, however, I saw a film studies professor on Twitter talking about this same subject, mentioning that the only “old” film that the current crop of students seems to reliably enjoy and hold above all others is the Henry Fonda courtroom classic: 12 Angry Men (1957). I found this interesting because I had a similar experience when I first watched 12 Angry Men. I was twenty-one, a first-year screenwriting student, and everything about that film blew me away. Sitting in my room last week, I remembered that feeling of being shocked at how I felt about the film, but I didn’t remember why. So, I slouched down twenty degrees further against the pillows of my bed, delicately placed my feet upon the bedside table, and re-watched 12 Angry Men the way the director intended it: through an Xbox One whilst wearing headphones because everyone else is asleep and I’m so, so scared of waking them up.
A week or so before this viewing, I saw a very different tweet to that professor’s. It was a video posted by the climate activist group Just Stop Oil, in which one of their members is pushed to the ground and then kicked in the head by an angry motorist during one of their slow-walk protests. It stuck with me for a number of reasons. Firstly, broad daylight extreme violence is relatively uncommon in the UK. As with many people in my generation, I’ve grown quite used to seeing viral clips imported over from America of shootings, street fights, road rage, and racially motivated murders at the hands of the police. We obviously have our fair share of all of those things, perhaps minus the shootings, but outright random violence against innocents still feels like something that happens elsewhere, not here. Not in little old blighty. Where we know how to queue, where we make tea for builders, where we…hold open doors? Mindless violence just doesn’t happen in a society like ours, does it?
Another thing that struck me was the man’s number plate, which was: KN58 SFJ
And the last thing that made this horrible video stick in my mind for weeks on end was the fact that the assailant in the video, a thirty-eight-year-old man in skinny jeans, wasn’t even being inconvenienced by the protestors. They were marching in the opposite lane to him, and he’d swerved across traffic, got out of his car, and seized the opportunity to do, in his mind I’m sure, righteous violence against peaceful protestors. And the internet cheered.
Comments sections for this video were truly difficult to read, and that wasn’t only because no one could spell “desserved” correctly. Men, and women, hundreds of them, innocuous looking people who you’d walk past in the street, people with children, and wives, and husbands, and jobs with responsibility to the public: all baying for blood. It was incredible in the worst way, and fascinating.
12 Angry Men is the story of a very hot day in New York. A day on which twelve strangers, jurors of all ages and backgrounds (though all white men), gather in a room they don’t want to be in, with a fan that doesn’t work, and discuss the murder of a man they don’t know. They’re unsure of how long they’re going to be there, and at first glance, the case seems open and shut: a poor boy was beaten by his poor father, the poor boy snaps, and kills said father with a knife, before running away from the scene of the crime. The evidence is stacked against the poor boy, and the sentence for murder is death at the hands of the state. The men in the hot room, the jurors, must decide unanimously if the boys deserve a guilty verdict or not, and almost all of them immediately agree that he does. But almost is not all, and one man (Fonda) stands alone and argues that, although the boy may be guilty, they shouldn’t rush to a decision based purely on instinct and knee-jerk feeling. To the other men, this is nothing but noise and inconvenience, one man keeping eleven men in a hot room, an act of selfishness on his part, someone who hasn’t considered that the others might have places to be. A baseball game, a dinner, anywhere else. But no matter where they want to be, they can’t go. He keeps them there, for a long time, and it makes them very, very angry.
At multiple points in 12 Angry Men, characters jump to their feet with fingers pointed stiff, screaming “Why I oughtta!”, spit flinging from their horrible, sweaty little mouths - but no actual physical violence ever occurs between the jurors. No one is quite ready to break the social contract of the situation and risk the consequences. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s a nice or pleasant environment to be in. The men are agitated and upset, which often leads to them showing their worst sides, and I couldn’t help but notice the distinct parallels to be drawn between the things these men in this film were saying sixty years ago, and the things you read and hear every day if you live in the UK and engage with any sort of news.
“You come in here with your hearts bleeding all over the floor about slum kids and injustice.”
It's a familiar line, and if not for the use of the word ‘slum’, it’s a line that could easily be ripped from the Facebook page of your uncle in 2023. That cousin who watched one Jordan Peterson video in 2018 and never looked back. That old school-friend who started sharing Andrew Tate videos despite being nowhere near as ripped as him and only half as bald. We all know men like these. In Britain, we’ve somehow got to a point in time where people use the term ‘do-gooder’ as an insult, spat with venom at people who have the arrogance of empathy. Perhaps a result of Thatcherism and the blind pursuit of individual wealth in a country where “there is no such thing as society”, or perhaps the result of something more subtle and sad, an affectation of people who gave up doing good because no one ever did good for them. I’m not sure, but it’s interesting to see it reflected so vividly in such old cinema, a thought that actually strikes me as quite terrifying with regards to what it says about innate human character. Maybe people were always like this, and maybe it’s just easier to notice when you can refresh a feed every five seconds and have the evil pumped into your eyeballs as soon as you wake up, and immediately before you go to sleep.
Since Just Stop Oil began their slow marches a year or so ago, I’ve seen a lot of arguments against them from well-intentioned people, but the main, and most sympathetic argument, is that of the very real damage it could do. Hypothetically. The big question is always:
“What if there’s an ambulance and it’s a matter of life or death?”
Which is absolutely a fair question, and one that I wish there was a better answer for, because the honest answer is: so what? There may come a time when someone dies because of a Just Stop Oil protest. And in fact, it probably will happen eventually. When that happens, it will be awful. It will be a horrible day, and a lot of people will be angry, because it will have been preventable, and the family will very rightly feel a rage that I can only imagine, and it will be very difficult to argue with that rage. The NHS, and our ambulance service in particular, needs to be something we can count on in the most awful moments. You expect speed, skill, and compassion. You expect to pick up the phone, call 999, and feel better in the knowledge that someone with experience and a steady hand will be there soon to look after you, or a loved one. Any damage done to that system is, from my perspective, absolutely unforgiveable.
By the way, did you know that in 2014, the North West Ambulance Service was forced to cut £13.8 million in funding? Did you know that the East Midlands Ambulance Service implemented cuts of £6.2 million, and, forced to save £53m in April 2011, LAS planned to cut 890 staff over five years? Did you know that the West Midlands Ambulance Service faces cuts of £11.7 million, following those of £8.8 million the previous year? Did you know that during COVID-19, there was an estimated fifty thousand unnecessary deaths directly caused by the government’s botched handling of the crisis? Did you know that there have been over three hundred thousand additional deaths that are directly attributed to austerity cuts since this government has been in power?
And yet, the people responsible for these changes, these cuts, these laws, they aren’t on the street being kicked in the head by a man in skinny jeans. So, what’s the difference? What is the difference between that one hypothetical man in that one hypothetical ambulance, and the thousands of very real men, real women, real children, who have died in the past, and will die in the future, at the hands of an uncaring, underfunded, and unreliable system?
The difference is convenience. The difference is that you don’t have to sit in your hot car and be alone with your thoughts for an hour when some old person you don’t know becomes just another statistic as their ambulance idles outside of a hospital where the beds are all full.
And did you know that this is only going to get worse? Roads are already regularly closed for a variety of non-protest reasons that no one ever seems to care about (football, parades, Queen’s coffin). But just wait until the roads are closed because there’s been three floods in your village in the past month. When the roads are so hot that the tarmac melts off, sticking to your tyres. Who are you going to blame then? Will you feel silly for complaining about the protests in twenty years, when your wife is having difficulty in labour and you can’t get to the hospital in time because ambulance response times are four times what they were in 2010? Will you ever admit that you were wrong? Or is every issue now just Brexit Reloaded? Months and years of arguing over hypotheticals, fierce debates on Good Morning Britain, then suddenly absolutely no accountability taken when it turns out that, yes, they were all wrong, and they always have been.
There’s a character in 12 Angry Men who I think a lot of people reading this will be able to relate to right now. He wears a funky jacket and hat and really, more than anything else, he just wants to go to the baseball game he has tickets to. He thinks this is all a bit too serious, a bit too sincere for his easy-going liking, and he deflects from the reality of the situation by telling jokes and making sarcastic comments. Cornered in an argument and pushed dangerously close to actually providing an opinion of weight, he checks his watch instead:
“Ah, would you look at the time?”
This attitude is pervasive in the culture of Britain. It’s the calling card of people who are fun when you want to have fun, and unbearable when you don’t. Men raised without sincerity in their skill tree, their only language beginning with ‘B’ and ending with ‘anter’. Men who can’t tell their friends they love them. Men who you can know for twenty years without knowing anything about them at all. Men who think they’d make a great Best Man. They are one of the few truly quintessentially British things that still exists, a strange bastardisation of what I imagine the initial message of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” propaganda was actually supposed to mean. These people picture the ‘carry on’ part of the saying as a green light to laugh through anything and everything, forgetting that what the men and women suffering under the Blitz were carrying on with was living through, and fighting a war against, the great evil of fascism. They weren’t sat at home, playing FIFA and making jokes about how Hitler isn’t even really that bad lol. They were caring for each other, and helping each other, at great expense to themselves. They were taking in refugees, children they didn’t know, and they were doing it because it was expected, and because it was the right thing to do. When faced with the question of whether to care or not care, the correct option is always to care. This is forgotten, the caring is forgotten. And unfortunately, it seems to be the older members of our nation’s public that have forgotten the most.
One of the central plot lines through 12 Angry Men is that of Juror #3, a middle-aged man in a suit. Early on we learn that he is a father, and early on we learn that he is, in a room full of angry men, arguably the angriest. He rallies against our hero’s many arguments, writing off each new hole in the evidence with a wave of the hand and a shrug. It’s all subjective, he says. I just know that he’s guilty, he shouts. It doesn’t matter what you tell me, he argues. At every turn, he refutes the new talking points of the case, disregarding them all completely offhand, uninterested in changing his mind, uninterested in learning anything about the boy, uninterested in engaging in the reality of what is happening in this hot, disgusting room. Unable to admit that he was wrong.
After some time, Juror #3 mentions that he doesn’t really speak to his son anymore, and that they’ve had some kind of falling out.
“You work your ass off, you give them everything…”
In the climax of the film, he’s the last man standing in the argument that the boy is guilty of murdering his father and should receive the death penalty. He is distraught and stubborn, unable to explain why he has his opinions, knowing only that he has them. After a while, and some prodding, he breaks down, screaming about his son, his boy who has left him behind, betrayed his fatherhood. He finally relents: “not guilty”.
Exactly how much of modern conservatism is encapsulated in this moment and in this character? That is obviously impossible to say. But it does feel like there is something there. It’s an interesting reversal of the traditional idea of a teenager acting out against their parents from pure impulsive need to disagree, with the role of the impetuous teenager now played by the parents, or just the elder generation in general. Change isn’t new, and negative reaction to progressive change is far from a shocking new revelation, but the internet adds a perverse new battleground for the cultural war that the two generations, young and old, seem to be currently locked in. With the advent of Twitter, and to some degree, Facebook, the volume of the public forum was suddenly equalised, with voices that were previously suppressed now being able to be heard with the same weight as everyone else’s. And while this means that you can now tell every celebrity, in public, from the safety of your own home, that you disagree with something they’ve said, it also means that a fifty-seven-year-old man from Wigan can tell you publicly, from the safety of his own home, that he wishes your race didn’t exist. The call for change has never been so loud, but neither has the refusal from those in a position to change it. If you pull that way, we’ll pull this way. It’s generational, it’s instinctual, and it’s probably going to destroy whatever ironic remnants are left of the “United” Kingdom.
There’s a scene in 12 Angry Men in which the eyewitness testimony of an old man is called into question, with an argument growing in the room regarding exactly why he would lie about having seen the accused boy leaving the crime scene at a certain time. During the conversation, one of the jurors makes a statement, describing the witness as a “quiet, frightened, insignificant old man who has had nothing his whole life. No recognition, his name isn’t in newspapers, no one knows his name.”
The point the juror is making is that, sometimes, people who have had nothing, done nothing, and will be nothing to no one once they’ve passed, might be tempted to do something silly, or immoral, if it means they’ll get a Moment. Just one Moment. It’s an act born out of frustration at a world that doesn’t allow you to be the hero you grew up reading about, existing in a reality that oftentimes rejects people for being different, and also rejects them for being the same. But just because it’s understandable, it doesn’t make these acts, or the people committing them, admirable.
There’s something in growing up, in becoming an adult, that requires you to accept these little frustrations, and to forget about becoming a Robin Hood, a Zorro, a Fernando Torres. Growing up is realising that you can be a hero in the little things, in the small, good moments. Whether it is holding a door open for someone, or telling a friend who needs it that you love them, or helping someone out when you could just as easily not, you can be remembered for the little things, not the big. And when you die? Well, when you die, the people at your funeral will find relief in not having to talk around that one time you kicked a teenager in the head because you thought it would impress some losers on the internet.
Sometimes living in the UK can feel like sitting in a hot room, surrounded by people you don’t know and don’t much care about, arguing over something you don’t really, fully, understand.
But that room is only going to get hotter, so you better learn to get along.