Law Frames: Historical Truth and Narrative Necessity in a Criminal Case

Abstract

Postmodern storytellers can fashion narratives that convey many different, yet equally convincing, visions of reality. The film offers not just one frameup, the causal-linear frameup of Randall Dale Adams, but perpetual, repeat frameups, indifferent to narrative logic and linear time. By describing the critical storytelling failures that occur within The Thin Blue Line, I hope to elucidate important lessons for lawyers and legal scholars about the art of persuasion in legal storytelling. Yet postmodern ideas about the demise of the author and of authority in general, the dissolution of the autonomous, rational subject, the end of linear time and causation, the erasure of difference between truth and error, reality and fiction, and the abandonment of stability to the contingency of truth and justice, seem to have limited appeal and dubious utility for persuasive legal storytelling. While the affirmative postmodern concedes the demise of the autonomous modern subject, s/he still finds meaning through the distributed self: an identity made up of discrete cultural and social constructs shared by others.