We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
THE IMPULSIVE SUBJECT AND THE REALIST LENS: LAW AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN FRITZ LANG'S FURY.
- Authors
Sassoubre, Ticien Marie
- Abstract
Legal historians have paid particular attention to the Progressive revolt against legal formalism in the 1930s, on the one hand, and the growth of the administrative state on the other. Social historians have focused on the emergence of a mass culture of consumption which came to characterize twentieth century American life. In Fritz Lang's 1936 film Fury, these developments are portrayed as interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Indeed, Fury discloses the ways that the contemporaneous political and economic promotion of consumerism, reimagining of individual identity in terms of group membership, and cultural ascendancy of mass media-- particularly advertising and film--shaped the modern legal subject and defined the kinds of social facts the law will recognize. Progressive lawyers and judges in the period meant to protect individuals by broadening the scope of the public's interest. But in the process the values of consumer culture were conflated with the public good. Fury captures this process, and its effects on individuals and law. Yet the film does not imagine that law can or should be insulated from cultural forces. Rather, in Fury, law itself is revealed to be a system of cultural representation: legal representational practices and other representational practices inform one another and combine to produce social facts.
- Subjects
LANG, Fritz, 1890-1976; CONSUMERISM; LEGAL historians; REVOLUTIONS; LEGAL formalism; ADMINISTRATIVE &; political divisions; POPULAR culture; PUBLIC interest
- Publication
Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, 2011, Vol 20, Issue 2, p325
- ISSN
1077-0704
- Publication type
Article