Spectacular Expectations : Women, Law and Film HEIDI SLETTEDAHL MACPHERSON This article explores the contradiction between the ingrained belief that justice should be ‘‘ blind ’’ and the filmic tradition of positioning woman as spectacle. Recognizing that a law film does not offer a direct translation of material reality, it explores how these representations of the law work with and against popular understandings of femininity – and feminism. The article offers a reading of selected screen adaptations of real legal entanglements to show how a focus on appearance marks a woman’s trial (and subsequent filming of it), before focusing on the case of Barbara Graham, immortalized in the award-winning film I Want to Live! Richard K. Sherwin argues that law ‘‘ is both a co-producer and a by-product of mainstream culture. The stamp of the latter continually falls upon the meanings the law produces. ’’ 1 Thus it is not surprising that visual rep- resentations of women in the courtroom are so popular, or that ‘‘ real-life ’’ cases take centre stage so frequently ; the spectacular sight of the female defendant (whether stereotypically beautiful or butch) is a mainstay of Hollywood cinema – and social lore. This article explores the contradiction between the ingrained belief that justice should be ‘‘blind’’ and the filmic tradition of positioning woman as spectacle. It also argues that, in the context of a heavily mass-mediated society, the line between actuality and representation can become somewhat fluid, permitting slippages between the realms of representation and reality. 2 The power of television and film to replicate, if not encapsulate, American understandings of the law is so strong that a number of US novels reference popular culture’s depictions of courtrooms as their narrators’ only experi- ence of the law. For example, in Chris Bohjalian’ss Midwives (1997) Connie Danforth suggests that the courtroom looked ‘‘a bit like a movie theater,’’ 3 Professor Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson is Dean of Humanities at De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, UK. 1 Richard K. Sherwin, ‘‘ Framed, ’’ in John Denvir, ed., Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1996), 70–94, 71. 2 I want to thank the anonymous reader who recommended this phrase for my article. 3 Chris Bohjalian, Midwives (New York : Vintage, 1998 ; first published 1987), 247. Journal of American Studies, 41 (2007), 3, 641–658 f 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0021875807004033 Printed in the United Kingdom of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875807004033 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 22 Jan 2019 at 09:28:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms