In the movie A Time to Kill, directed by Joel Schumacher, the viewer finds oneself immersed in the town of Canton, Mississippi, and immediately witnesses the beating and rape of 10 year old Tonya Hailey. Her father, understandably upset and outraged at the men who committed the crime, goes and kills them as revenge. From there, it is Jake Brigance’s job to convince an all white jury that his black client is innocent. Although it is not his plan, Jake invokes empathy in the jury that allows Carl Lee to walk out of the courthouse a free man.

Jake Brigance knew when he took Carl Lee’s case that he wanted it because he knew he would have done the same thing to those men if they had gone after his daughter. He felt terrible for Carl Lee and recognized the position he was in, thus feeling bad and taking action to help. Carl Lee was able to recognize that if Jake was helping him because he felt bad for what had happened to his daughter, the same feelings needed to be felt by the jury so that they would help him and decide he was innocent. Jake was not aware of this, but ultimately was able to do this with his closing speech as he described the brutal acts that Tonya endured.

He begins by telling the story of “a little girl, walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon” (TK 2:16:17- 2:16:26). He does not state that the girl is Tonya or that she is black, but due to the conditions at the time of the story- there had been much talk about her rape throughout the case- they know that he is telling them the story of her rape. He continues to describe in vivid detail what occurred, including how “[the men] tie her up, rip her clothes off her body… shattering everything innocent and pure” (TK 2:16:52- 2:17:13). As Jake describes more and more of the horrors that the girl went through, it becomes clear that members of the jury are truly feeling upset and sorry for the girl in the story, and even begin to cry because they feel so badly for the girl (TK 2:18:02). He finishes describing all that had happened and forces the jury to reflect on the state of the girl, which is what Tonya’s family saw when she was found after being beaten and raped.

From there, Jake forces the jury to recognize what Carl Lee went through. He had to see his daughter beaten, raped, covered in blood and broken to the point where she was barely alive, and he is able to get the jury to see Carl Lee’s perspective simply by saying “do you see her?” (TK 2:19:22). This was how Carl Lee saw his daughter, so by allowing the jury to stand in the same position, they could potentially understand the emotions that Carl Lee had felt.

At this point however, this empathy is not real, as it is just a hypothetical situation in their mind. Yes, they knew he is ultimately talking about Tonya, but they do not feel bad because it happened to her, a black girl, but rather because of the atrocity of what had happened. This empathy becomes real when Jake says “now imagine she’s white” (TK 2:20:21- 2:20:24). The jury knew he was talking about a black girl, but when they imagine the same thing happening to a white girl, they are able to connect to her much more and feel awful for her, not just disgusted at the actions that took place. By connecting Tonya’s story to the white jury, they were able to understand why Carl Lee felt and acted the way he did. They were able to truly empathize with him and Tonya, and felt moved to find him innocent.

Works Cited:

A Time to Kill. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1996. Digital Campus. Web. 20 September 2017.

In A Time To Kill, the scene of Jake Brigance’s closing statements to the jury is the most significant evocation of empathy throughout the entire film. In this scene, Jake asks the jury to close their eyes and imagine his following words. He then goes on to vividly describe the brutal rape, attack, and attempted murder of Tonya Hailey, daughter of Carl Lee Hailey— the defendant.

Jake simply asks the jury to “picture this little girl [walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon]”(ATTK 2:16:20-2:16:29). He does not define the girl in any way, but that she is little and a girl. He does not give her name, her age, or her race to the jury. Most of the jurors know that there had been a rape, but they hardly know even half of the story. Jake’s deliberate method of leaving out details about the little girl creates a blank slate in the juror’s minds. This way, the little girl is more relatable to them, and the rest of the story will have more meaning.

The rest of the story is a description of Tonya’s rape— Jake does not hesitate to leave a single detail out. He graphically describes how the two assailants shattered everything innocent about the little girl, piece by piece. After sharing with the jury how the men had snatched Tonya off the road and tied her up, he continues with: “Now they climb on, first one then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure— vicious thrusts—  in a fog of drunken breath and sweat” (ATTK 2:16:35-2:17:21). This sensory imagery is so unsettling that it helps evoke a sort of startling discomfort in the jury— they come to realize the true brutality of the attack. This realization brings with it a new sense of empathy, of feeling deeply for the Hailey family. Many of the women in the jury and in the courtroom are shown to be crying, visibly disturbed.

This new sense of empathy, however, does not become the true, deeply internalized emotion of empathy until Jake’s haunting last line: “Now imagine she’s white” (ATTK 2:20:21-2:20:23 ). This line truly works to transport the jury into a place of understanding— a place where each and every juror can feel Tonya’s pain and Carl Lee’s pain— because they are finally seeing Carl Lee’s case through their own eyes and hearts. Throughout Jake’s closing statement the empathy invoked in the jurors has been real, but it is during this line that the brutal reality of the situation truly strikes them.

Thus, the feeling of real empathy invoked in the jurors is also coupled with guilt. There is guilt for their close-mindedness— they themselves may realize that they are only able to care about a little girl’s life when she is white. The end of Jake’s summation serves as sort of an epiphany for the jury— they come to a startling conclusion not only about Carl Lee Hailey, but also about themselves. They come to terms with their own blind racism, and find it within themselves to overcome it by declaring Carl Lee Hailey innocent.

Works Cited

A Time to Kill. Directed by Joel Schumacher, Regency Enterprises, Warner Brothers, 1996. Digital Campus. Web. 20 Sept 2017.

Successful movies usually position the audience into the main character’s’ perspective and made the audience feel the emotions that the characters are having. In the movie “A Time to Kill,” the director Joel Schumacher used different techniques to evoke viewers’ empathy which leads them to believe that the main character Carl Lee is not guilty. Throughout the movie, the director has conveyed this idea by showing us the suffering that the characters went through. Especially at the beginning of the movie, the rape scene had let the audience felt empathy for the little girl. The movie started off with the two drunken white men humiliated the black people in the town. When they saw Carl Lee’s daughter little Tonya carrying her groceries on the road, they abducted her to the forest and then brutally tortured, beat and raped her. Although the director didn’t directly show the audience the violent raping scene, it still gives us enough pictures like blood, bruise, and rope to let people imagine what happened. The two minutes scene had shown the viewers how despairing and scared the little girl was which evoke our feeling of empathy. This scene had created that the two men were deserved to die and we understand why Carl Lee would kill the two men.

I think the empathy that this scene evoke is real because the director used first person point of view to let the audience understand what a ten-year-old girl had experienced. In this way, the audience would actually place them into the situation and felt empathy for the little girl. During the movie, I had to pause the movie several times because I couldn’t even imagine how painful she was.What influenced me the most in this scene is when little tonya kept shouting: “Daddy, daddy”(ATTK 04:52-05:10), but no one was there to help her. The contrast between the brutality of the two men and the weak girl has appealed to me how vulnerable that little Tonya was. When facing such an instance, all she can do is to scream and cry for her dad desperately and waited for all of these to be over. The director used this scene at the beginning to influence people to believe it’s rightful for Carl Lee to kill the two men. Without this scene, people wouldn’t understand Carl Lee’s motivation for the shooting. The empathy that this scene brought is also the reason why Carl Lee was verdict to be innocent. It led the jurors to despite the races and realize the fact that this kind of horrible things can happen to anyone including themselves and their family. I think the movie has successfully made me felt what little Tonya felt. For me, the empathy for her didn’t go away when the movie was over, I still felt sorry for what she had experienced.

Work Cited

A Time to Kill. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Regency Enterprises, Warner Bros, 1996. digital campus. Web. 20 September 2017

There are many instances in A Time to Kill in which empathy comes into play, both real and apparent. The film is largely based off of the emotional struggles in the court room, along with the emotional stresses of Jake and the other characters. However, Jake’s closing speech is a particularly extreme empathy-invoking moment in the story.

The entirety of Jake’s closing speech is focused on the element of sympathy, pity, and empathy. He describes the rape of Carle Lee Hailey’s daughter, putting a face to the victim, and not only a face, but a face the jurors could find in their own family: the face of their child. Jake starts with an apology: “I am young, and I am inexperienced. But you cannot hold Carl Lee Hailey responsible for my shortcomings.” (A Time to Kill 2:13:41 — 2:13:51). With his admittance to his faults, Jake immediately seems less like an attorney, but another human being; someone everyone can relate to. He makes both the audience and the jurors see him for the person he is outside of the courtroom: a local boy, their neighbour, and somebody with struggles, a family, and regrets. Jake continues to break down the wall between juror and attorney, and creates an atmosphere of transparency and familiarity in the court room by explaining what his job as a lawyer entails, how he strives to find the truth. He is direct about the issues prevalent in their culture. “I set out to prove a black man could get a fair trial in the South. That we are all equal in the eyes of the law. That’s not the truth. Because the eyes of the law are human eyes; yours and mine, and until we can see each other as equals, justice is never going to be even handed.” (A Time to Kill 2:15:01 – 2:15:20) He points out how they cannot escape the judgements of their beliefs, and since they cannot see each other as equals, they should judge “not with [their] eyes, not with [their] minds…, but with [their] hearts.” (A Time to Kill 2:15:30 – 2:15:40). The biggest call for empathy from Jake comes after, however. It comes when he tells the story of Hailey’s young daughter’s rape. As he recounts the details, from the way the rapists grabbed her and tied her up on her way back home from the grocery store, to the details of her rape, he paints a scenario that does not depend on race. He depicts a situation that could happen to any of the audience’s beloved children, a scene is bound to pull on the heartstrings of any parent. Jake invokes extreme pity for the girl, forcing all the parents into the mindset of Carle Lee Hailey; making them understand how he must have felt. Jake makes the jurors empathize with Carle Lee Hailey and think that for their child, they would have done the same. He ends his moving speech with “now, imagine she’s white” (A Time to Kill 2:20:20 – 2:20:24), successfully morphing the image of Hailey’s daughter into the image of their own white children.

Overall, A Time to Kill plays on empathy as much as the depiction of life as an attorney, as can be distinguished through the empathetic closing speech Jake delivers at court, acquitting Carle Lee Hailey. Throughout the entire movie, we as the audience are moved to feel pity, alarm, fear, and sympathy for the misfortunes the characters live through. As we see life through the eyes of attorney Jake Brigance, we end up empathizing both with his situation, along with the unfortunate circumstances of the people around him.

Works Cited

Schumacher, Joel, Director. A Time to Kill. Regency Enterprises, 1996.

https://digitalcampus.swankmp.net/rochester274683/Mobile/Play/#/play/48376

In the movie A Time to Kill, the main character Jake Brigance attempts to invoke empathy in the jury in his final statement to prove that Carl Lee is innocent. In Brigance’s final statement, he first asks the jury to close their eyes to imagine the brutal and inhumane raping of a young girl by two men. This rather disturbing scene is what Tonya Hailey, the daughter of the defendant Carl Lee has gone through, which leads to Carl Lee murdering the two men who hold responsible of bringing such pain onto his daughter. Brigance mainly uses detailed description of the raping scene to invoke empathy in every jury member. He also gets more and more emotional as he continues to describe the scene, which successfully brings out the emotion of the jury. However, this is only apparent empathy because the jury members are still imagining the experience of Tonya Hailey, a black girl. Real empathy is still not invoked in the all-white jury until Brigance says the last sentence of his closing statement, “Now imagine she’s white” (A Time to Kill, 2:20:20-2:20:22). Brigance finally invokes the real empathy in the jury because now the jury can really be in the shoes of Carl Lee, which makes them believe that Carl Lee is innocent.

Brigance attempts to invoke empathy in the jury because his final statement is pretty much the final chance that he can use to prove that Carl Lee is innocent. In all the previous court sessions, he is not allowed to bring in the rape as one of the factors that drives Carl Lee to kill the two men, and he also fails to prove that Carl Lee is insane when killing the two men. It is extremely hard to prove that Carl Lee is not guilty because he did kill the two men in cold blood, and an all-white jury is definitely not favoring Carl Lee. Brigance goes to see Carl Lee the night before the final court session. He is enlightened by what Carl Lee says, “Now, throw out your points of law, Jake. If you was on that jury, what would it take to convince you to set me free?” (A Time to Kill, 2:11:17-2:11:29). At this point, there is no way to save Carl Lee using the law.  Invoking the empathy in the jury is the only way to save him, and it has to be real empathy, not apparent empathy.

In Brigance’s final statement, he tries to convince the jury that all people are equal under the law, regardless of the skin color. “The eyes of the law are human eyes, yours and mine, and until we could see each other equal, justice is never going to be evenhanded” (A Time to Kill, 2:15:15-2:15:21). This statement makes the jury really start to wonder if the result of the two men and Carl Lee would be different if race does not play a role in the decision. As a result, real empathy is also invoked when the jury understands that they did not treat Carl Lee as equal as white men. At the end, Brigance successfully invokes empathy in the jury, letting them believe that they would do the exact same thing under that circumstance. Eventually, they were able to make the decision to set Carl Lee free.

Work Cited

A Time to Kill. Joel Schumacher. Warner Bros, 1996. Swank Motion Pictures. Web. 20 Sept 2017.

The scene in A Time to Kill of Jake’s closing statement is one of the most prominent examples of empathy in the film. It is a prime moment of not only a character in the movie invoking empathy in other characters, but a character invoking the feeling of empathy in the viewer as well. For the most part, the empathy that Jake is able to invoke is real. However, the empathy he is invoking could also be viewed as guilt. Up until this point in the movie the jury had shown little empathy for Carl Lee and were planning on calling him guilty. Jake’s statement is able to pull guilt from them, since they were looking at the case through very racially biased eyes, and make them change their minds and feel empathy. The scene begins with Jake apologizing for not being an adequate lawyer for Carl Lee, this serves to make the jury think more about how the trial would have changed if the lawyer had been more efficient. He starts discussing the concept of truth and whether we search for it with our heads or our hearts. Through this he causes the emotion of guilt to start coming through because he implies that we let our racial bias get in the way of searching for the truth with our brains. Therefore we must listen with our hearts, and this is when he starts causing the jury to feel empathy. It causes the characters to look further within themselves to realize what they may have been doing, and this tactic was very effective in invoking guilt and empathy. Jake leads into his empathy-invoking story by saying “we are all equal in the eyes of the law. That’s not true. Because the eyes of the law are human eyes”(A Time to Kill 2:15:10-2:15:15). Of course, the viewer is aware that this town is extremely racist but the actual members of the jury follow many of the same racist values that cause their judgement to be clouded by bias. This allows the viewer to see the guilt start appearing throughout the courtroom. This is the moment where it really settles in. The main invocation of empathy occurs when Jake attempts to put the jury in the young girl’s shoes, or at least into the shoes of her parent. He describes her rape and attack in vivid detail, mentioning how she was used for target practice when they were done and was thrown over a bridge when they couldn’t successfully hang her. This was the point in the movie where tears began running down the faces of the audience members. He ends the emotional story with the line “now imagine she’s white” (A Time to Kill 2:20:20-2:20:22) in order to take the emotions he caused, guilt and empathy, and combine them to ultimately make his final point. This makes everyone in the courtroom look up in surprise because they finally realized what they had been doing the whole trial. They finally felt what it would be like to be the parent of the girl who was raped and beaten, and realized that they might have done the same thing as Carl Lee if it had been their kid.

Work Cited

A Time to Kill. Joel Schumacher. Warner Bros, 1996. Swank Motion Pictures. Web. 20 Sept 2017.

A Time To Kill, directed by Joel Schumacher, is a film that heavily relies upon empathy to captivate its audience. The plot is essentially a little girl, Tonya Hailey, who is raped, beaten and thrown off a bridge by two white men in Canton, Mississippi. Her father, Carl Lee Hailey, retaliates by taking the law into his own hands and shooting the two offenders in the middle of a courthouse. The rest of the movie is all about the trial of Carl Lee, the disunity that it brings upon the town, and the lives most heavily affected by the conflict. Those lives would be that of the defending attorney Jake Brigance and his family (TK).

The movie intends to place us on the side of our main characters, Jake Brigance and Carl Lee. We’re supposed to feel bad for Tonya and her family, so badly that we justify letting Carl Lee walk from the court room without any charges. The only way to do this is to appeal to our empathetic nature as the audience. While it’s important what techniques are used to provide this empathy, it’s just as important that the timing is correct, in my opinion. Joel Schumacher’s genius opening scene sets us up for exactly the empathy he wants. The two white rapists are recklessly driving around town, wildly intoxicated, and harassing the black community. These scenes are going back in forth with those of Tonya Hailey, buying groceries from the store, and Jake Brigance, leaving for work. By the fifth minute of the movie, Tonya is being raped by the two men and by the ninth minute, the two are being arrested for the rape (TK 0:57-9:09). It took less than ten minutes for Schumacher to convince everyone in the audience, beside possibly a severely racist white supremacist, to have a feeling of anger towards the two men and empathy for Tonya.

From this scene, the director is able to make us feel as if Carl Lee is justified in the shooting of the two men (TK 19:19). These two scenes allow the movie to progress into its full plot. That’s exactly why I think they are the most important scenes in the movie. We, the viewers, are invoked with a very strong sense of empathy during the rape scene. The camera is in what can be assumed as first person of Tonya, causing us empathize her situation. We are to nowhere near the same extent of pain that she is in, but we understand the situation because we go through it with her. This is very clearly a situation of real empathy. We are put into Tonya’s shoes and witness a rape through the eyes of the victim.

Without the empathy we have from this scene, the movie might as well start at the shooting without any prior context. As the previously mentioned white supremacist wouldn’t have felt any empathy, they likely wouldn’t believe that the two men deserved to die. If we don’t have this feeling of empathy, we cannot be the audience the director wants, and the movie turns out to be much less compelling. This scene motivates us to want Car Lee to be free, which is what makes the movie so great.

Works Cited

A Time to Kill. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Regency Enterprises, Warner Bros, 1996. DigitalCampus. Web. 20 September 2017

In the film “A Time to Kill”, defense attorney Jake Brigance attempts to invoke empathy from the jury during his closing statement to convey Carl Lee’s innocence. Brigance asks the jury to close their eyes and imagine the brutal rape and torture of a young girl; the horrible fate that befell the daughter of defendant Carl Lee, and thus drove him to murder the two aggressors. For the majority of Brigance’s statement, the attorney attempts to invoke a real sense of empathy from the jury through his description of this young hypothetical female victim, but is is only able to invoke an apparent empathy. That is, however, until the final sentence of his statement, with which Brigance is able to transform the apparent empathy of the jury into overpowering real empathy, all by uttering the phrase, “Now imagine she’s white”.

Brigance begins his statement to the jury by admitting to them that in his desperation, he must stray from a composed and prepared monologue one might expect from a defense attorney. Brigance tells the jury that they all have a duty “under God” to seek the truth “not with our eyes, and not with our mind or fear or hate (…) or prejudice, but with our hearts” (TK , 2:15:32 – 2:15:39). This statement plants the seeds for an appeal to empathy by appealing to emotion. Empathy is a invoked through an emotional understanding of another’s situation. Brigance opens his statement by conditioning the jury to make a decision not with their minds and rationality, but with their heart and the emotions it conveys to them.

Brigance asks the jury to “imagine” a little girl coming home and being brutally attacked on her way. Brigance spares no horrific detail of the altercation, asking the jury to imagine the girl being “dragged into a nearby field [her attackers] raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with vicious thrusts” unsuccessfully hanging, and then “pitching her [body] over the edge [of a bridge], (…) [and leaving] her raped, beaten, broken body” (TK 2:16:46 – 2:2:19:31). Through his telling of this violent narrative, Brigance attempts to elicit a visceral reaction of empathy for the victim, and disgust for the crime committed against her. In the middle of his story, he asks the jury if they “see” the little girl, essentially attempting to convert the jury into Aristotle’s Judicious Spectator figure; a witness to a situation who uses empathy in order to more keenly understand the mental and emotional state of the person involved in that situation. During Brigance’s tale, many of the women on the jury are visibly distraught and emotionally regretful for the poor girl. However, the fact of the matter is that at this time the women on the jury are shaken by the details of Brigance’s story due to their abrasive nature, and their hypothetical implications, not due to their actual pertinence in reality to Carl Lee’s daughter. This is due to a social disconnect between the white members of the jury and the black victim who they are meant to feel empathy for, but don’t due to this social inhibition. Essentially, while Brigance’s story has effectively roused the empathy of the jury, this is an apparent sense of empathy is without a target / subject for whom to feel for, due to the fact that the jury is incapable of empathizing with the real victim a black girl, and the defendant, her father.

However,  at the very end of his statement, Brigance is able to harness the jury’s apparent empathy and turn it into real empathy for the actual victim and defendant, all by uttering one phrase: “Now imagine she’s white” (TK , 2:20:21). In his delivery of this line, Brigance is able to break down the barrier between white and black, and enable the jury to feel real empathy for the real victim of the crime by invoking their sense of shame, and as a result, their sense of real empathy. Brigance relies on the tried and true tendency for the whites of the  to protect and empathize with only those of their own race. Furthermore, by asking the jury to imagine the victim not as a black, or even a hypothetical girl, but as a white one, he is able to invoke within the jury a sense of not only real empathy for the victim of the crime, but also a deep sense of shame at their upholding of the racial double standard which was the sole impediment to justice.

For this assignment (which should help you prepare for your first formal assignment), you will find a specific instance from A Time to Kill where empathy–either real or apparent–is invoked. This can be one of three types of invocation of empathy:

1. one character attempting to invoke empathy in another character;
2. the film invoking empathy in the viewer; or
3. some combination of the two.

For your post, you will need to explain how/why the invocation of empathy occurs. You will also need explain whether this is a real, or only apparent invocation of empathy. If it’s only apparently an invocation of empathy, what other emotion or perspective is it invoking?

Your post should be 500-700 words, and is due in class on Thursday, September 21.