Film Analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 2

Film Analysis - Essay Example r who is not convinced of the boy’s guilt and how he combines a mixture of persuasion and indictment to change the 11-1 voting position of the jury against the defendant to a unanimous verdict of not guilty. An uneducated, Puerto Rican adolescent is on trial for murdering his father with a switchblade. The jury of 12 all white, all male, mostly middle class men retire to the chamber for their deliberations. Only one juror has a dissenting vote of not guilty. At first the others are impatient to get it over with, but the lone juror slowly and persistently forces the other members to re-examine the shaky evidence against the defendant and the unreliable eye witness testimony. He also points out that the court appointed attorney had not tried to serve his client’s best interests and had further compromised the defendant’s case. On this basis, heated exchanges and discussions take place between the other members of the jury, revealing deep rooted prejudices and biases. The arguments bounce back and forth, anger and uncomfortable feelings are unleashed in that closed room, but the outcome is that the existence of a reasonable doubt of the accused’s guilt is acknowledged by all the jury members and the boy is exonerated. The pragmatic approach takes into account the paradoxes between the overt, verbal communication and the interpretation by the listener of the language that is used, as a reflection of the true intentions of the speaker which may be different from the actual verbal message being conveyed. This process of meta communication that goes on at a different level from the outward conventional one and therefore can sometimes result in miscommunication. Bateson reframed psychotherapy based on a horizontal approach that examined an individual’s relationships with those around him rather than focusing on Freud’s intensive vertical approach that stressed the process going on within the individual. This horizontal approach was directed towards the study