Introducing:
Through the Looking
Glass - the Framing of Law through Popular Imagination
Special Issue – GLR 24(3)
[This is an extract from my Introduction to this special issue of the Griffith Law Review 2015]
It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
- Alice [1]
It has been 150 years
since the first publication of Lewis Carroll’s acclaimed children’s fiction Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, and it remains a book that is appreciated widely
across culture for its unique representation of the world. Indeed, the enduring
quality of both Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland and Through the Looking
Glass, is evident in the way they
have inspired creations
of art, theatrical performances, judicial decision-making, cinematic
portrayals, videogame plot development, and of course, the desire for
adventure. The 150th
anniversary reminds us of, not only the mesmeric impact of reading Alice’s
adventures, but also the cultural ubiquity of ‘wonderland’ within the public
imaginary.
Now, here, you see, it
takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get
somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.
- Red Queen [2]
When Alice falls
through the rabbit hole or steps through the looking glass, she becomes lost in
worlds that provoke mystification and the abandonment of common sense. It is a
moment of transition, a movement between that which is ‘real’, knowable and
explicable, and that which is nonsensical, chaotic and potentially
incomprehensible. It is a moment of encounter
that requires Alice to abandon traditional assumptions and logic if she is to
begin to comprehend the adventure that awaits. The reward for this abandonment
is entrance to these bizarre and fascinating worlds, where everything seems to be inverted or refracted from what she once knew –
time is personified and made unreliable, decisions precede events, and
punishments are served before crimes are committed. As Alice struggles to understand these new
constructed existences and orient herself in connection with the constructs of
time, space and memory, she discovers that the familiar concepts of logic,
predictability, and rationality can be so easily taken for granted.
In her search for
meaning, order and reason, it would seem that in both worlds she encounters,
law is prima facie absent. However, it is curious to recognize the familiar
threads of law, weaved throughout Alice’s encounters within these beautifully chaotic worlds. In the worlds of
Wonderland and the Looking Glass, there is an ever present concern about law, represented
in the conflict between order and disorder, chaos and predictability, authority
and arbitrariness. This concern stems from a fear that law might at times (or
even frequently) be arbitrarily administered, or that justice might indeed be
illogical, disjointed, or counterintuitive. Lewis Carroll works this anxiety to
perfection in Alice’s juxtaposition between reality and the imaginary, and
still 150 years later, his work continues to demonstrate the mutually
constitutive relationship between law and popular culture.
Give your evidence,’ said
the King; `and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.’
This did not seem to
encourage the witness at all: he kept shifting from one foot to the other,
looking uneasily at the Queen, and in his confusion he bit a large piece out of
his teacup instead of the bread-and-butter. [3]
Just as Alice
contemplated, and then explored, the worlds down the rabbit hole, and on the
other side of the looking glass, this Special Issue of the Griffith Law Review (GLR) calls upon us to reflect on and encounter
the concepts of law and justice as broadly framed within popular imagination,
and to expose the inversions, mirrorings and refractions of law across which we
stumble. In seeking to engage critically with contemporary cultural legal
studies scholarship, this special issue showcases innovative methodologies and
practices that contextualize the role of legal storytelling in the popular
imagination. The articles are inter-disciplinary and methodologically diverse –
yet each contribute to the greater discussion surrounding the transformation of
legal meaning that resonates within the popular imaginary, and in combination,
this special issue exhibits an incredibly diverse and rich interaction with law
and humanities scholarship.
To read more from
my Introduction to the Special Issue click here:
The wonderful contributions
to the Special Issue are as follows:
Penny Crofts demonstrates how horror films can function as the
cultural window through which to investigate criminal law’s transgressive
concept of voluntariness. In a reading of the influential 1970s film The Exorcist, Crofts uses Regan’s transformation
through possession as a mechanism by which to interrogate law’s expression and
transgression of order.
Thomas Giddens provides a jurisprudential reading of Morrison and McKean's graphic
novel Arkham Asylum. In his
contribution, Giddens critically analyses the juxtaposition of law’s reason
with the ‘madness’ of Arkham, and describes a paradoxical encounter of ‘the
meeting of reason and unreason in the context of justice’.
Timothy Peters convinces us to appreciate the
complexities of popular cultural narratives that demand a re-reading and re-encountering of legality. In exploring Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy as a narrative that opens the
possibility for a different grounding of trust, law, and justice, Peters reads
Batman as a Christological figure that ‘makes strange’ the traditional
superhero mythos as well as the narratives they tell of justice, law and
legality.
Dale Mitchell provides a thorough and detailed critical
examination of the legal and feminist dimensions of She-Hulk. Mitchell argues
that, defined by binaries and constructed through real world and imagined
patriarchal forces, She-Hulk (as lawyer and ‘hulking green enforcer’) by
necessity splinters the law to protect her client's interests, thereby
demonstrating her resistance to law’s patriarchal order. Mitchell argues that
by embodying the monstrous feminine, Jen represents the promise of a different
encounter with law – one that turns rejection by the law into something that
challenges it.
Michael Barnett and Cassandra Sharp take their moment of encounter to the
world of video games. In analysing the Infamous
series, which positions Cole McGrath as the superpowered protagonist in a
self-contained post-apocalyptic world that is chaotic, broken and absent of legal
sanction and protection, Barnett and Sharp demonstrate that the game (through
both mechanic and narrative) reinforces a legal consciousness that requires
morality to be fulfilled in the law. Reading both the bifurcated narrative, and
‘moral mechanic’ jurisprudentially, they argue that Infamous reflects a normative privileging of natural law, and that
this reinforces understandings of the relationship between power, law and
morality. Click here to access this article.
Cassandra Sharp interrogates the way 'revenge' and 'justice' are
entwined in the television series Revenge.
Just as Alice
quickly realises that in a world without meaning, the search for truth and
order is misguided and futile, the character of Emily Thorne progressively
demonstrates that in a world that values retribution, the search for justice is
often atavistic yet pathologised. Using Revenge as case study, Sharp contends
that it is the consistent
Hollywood apposition of retribution and revenge as divergent forms of ‘justice’
that belies a conspiracy with law to pathologise the human desire for payback. Click here to access this article.
To check out the full Special Issue click here.
