The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment: Responsibility and Representation in Dead Man Walking and Last Dance

This paper makes a particular intervention in scholarship about the death penalty, turning away from abstract, philosophical questions about the morality or legality of state killing and narrow policy-relevant research toward an analysis of the cultural life of capital punishment. It builds on David Garland's suggestion that we should attend to the "cultural role" of legal practices, to their ability to "create social meaning and thus shape social worlds," and that among those practices none is more important than how we punish. Punishment, Garland tells us, "helps shape the overarching culture and contribute to the generation and regeneration of its terms." Punishment is a set of signifying practices that "teaches, clarifies, dramatizes and authoritatively enacts some of the most basic moral-political categories and distinctions which help shape our symbolic universe." Punishment lives in culture through its pedagogical effects, and it teaches us how to think about such basic social categories as intention, responsibility and injury. In addition, it models socially appropriate ways of responding to injuries done to us. The semiotics of punishment is all around us, not just in the architecture of the prison, or the speech made by a judge as she sends someone to the penal colony, but in both "high" and "popular" culture iconography, in novels, television, and film. Punishment has traditionally been one of the great subjects of cultural production, suggesting the powerful allure of humankind's fall from grace and of our prospects for redemption. This is also true when the punishment is death. Execution is even now an occasion for rich symbolization, for the production of public images of evil or of unruly freedom, and for fictive recreations of the scene of death in popular culture. In this paper I examine the cultural life of capital punishment through a reading of two recent films about capital punishment--Dead Man Walking and Last Dance. I am interested in the cultural politics of these films and the way they seek to convey knowledge of capital punishment. How is the death penalty represented in these films and what connections do they forge among death, spectatorship and the constitution of legal subjectivity? What do they suggest about the legitimacy of state killing? To answer these questions I analyze the way these films speak to two of the kinds of basic conceptual categories to which Garland directs our attention. The first of these is individual responsibility and its utility in explaining the causes of, as well as directing our responses to, crime. Dead Man Walking and Last Dance do not explore the social structural factors that some believe must be addressed in responding to crime; instead they are preoccupied with the question of personal responsibility. To the extent they contain an explanation of crime and a justification for punishment it is to be located in the autonomous choices of particular agents. While building dramatic tension around the question about whether their hero/heroine deserves the death penalty, these films convey a powerful double message: First, legal subjects can, and will, be held responsible for their acts; second, they can, and should, internalize and accept responsibility. Last Dance and Dead Man Walking depend upon categories--agency, will, and responsibility--the stability and coherence of which is today increasingly called into question, yet they evade rather than engage with those questions. These films are deeply invested in the constitution of a modernist, responsible subject as the proper object of punishment, a subject who, as Nietzsche would have it, has the "right to make promises." They suggest that there can be, and is, a tight linkage between crime and punishment such that those personally responsible for the former can be legitimately subject to the latter. The second conceptual category to which this paper speaks involves representation, especially how the death penalty is represented to us, and the cultural politics of those representational gestures. While Dead Man Walking and Last Dance initially appear to deploy complex representational practices that call attention to the partiality and limits of all representations, in the end they depend on a representational realism that allows their viewers to think that they can know the reality of the crimes for which death is a punishment and of the death penalty itself. Instead of inviting us to imagine the scene of death and its significance, they seek to inspire confidence that their viewers can "know" the truth about capital punishment through their "You are there" representations of execution. Yet, I contend, the death penalty plays an uncanny role in film, pointing as it does to the limits of representation, to the limits of our ability to "know" death and, as a result, of our inability to be sure whether state killing is an appropriate, proportional response to the deaths which appear to justify it. Whenever and however death is present in film, it reminds us that, in this domain, seeing is not, and cannot be, knowing. Traditionally, the cultural politics of state killing has served to shore up status distinctions and distinguish particular ways of life from others. Thus it is not surprising that today the death penalty and death penalty films sit at an important fault line in our contemporary culture wars. In the way they address questions of responsibility and in the representational practices on which they depend, Dead Man Walking and Last Dance, whatever the intentions of those who made them, enact and depend upon a conservative cultural politics, a politics in which large political questions about what state killing does to our law, politics, and our culture are bracketed and in which viewers are positioned as jurors deliberating solely on the question of whether a particular person merits death. While they raise questions about the calculus of desert that justifies the death penalty in particular cases, they support the conceptual foundations of capital punishment, and they legitimate its place in America's penal apparatus.