Never Seen It, #194 of 200: 12 Angry Men

Brother, I've seen all kinds of dishonesty in my day, but this little display takes the cake. Y'all come in here with your hearts bleedin' all over the floor about slum kids and injustice, you watch 200 movies you've never seen before... and suddenly, you start gettin' through to some of these old ladies. Well, you're not getting through to me, I've had enough.

12 Angry Men

1957

Sidney Lumet

This was a no-miss prospect. Sorry, I did not go into this fucking thing unbiased, I just didn't. I knew I was going to love it on premise alone, and I loved it when I finally did watch it. And I waited five fucking years to watch this fucking thing. Goddamn alphabetization of the movie list. If they had deigned to call it Angry Men, and There Are 12 of Them, I would've seen this film in the spring of 2020, and would've spent the last five years running my mouth about how much I loved it. But so it goes. I'm glad I watched it now. I knew it was going to be one of my favorites on this list. It's an instant Top Fiver, maybe even my favorite from the list. Worth the wait for sure.

My favorite kind of movie is the type that I usually designate as a "talkie." This isn't a definition that other people use, just me, but I define "talkie" as "a movie that's mostly comprised of people having conversation, with a noticeable lack of action." Not that nothing happens, and not that there aren't moments that are exciting, it's just that everything that happens and everything that's exciting comes from the dialogue, and there's a focus on the dialogue above everything else. 12 Angry Men is a talkie. It might even be the archetype. I knew this about the film, and I knew I would like it, and I was not disappointed.

There's a classic bit on Community during their (first) "bottle episode" when Abed is saying that he hates bottle episodes, because "they're wall-to-wall facial expressions and emotional nuance... I might as well sit in the corner with a bucket on my head." Abed is saying that because he's probably on the autism spectrum, but he also highlights the reasons why I fucking love bottle episodes, which are the TV version of talkies. 12 Angry Men is ALL emotional nuance, it's true. There are brief outlier shots at the beginning and the end of the film, but about 98% of the story takes place in one single room, the jury deliberation room (and the adjoining restroom). It's literally just twelve men having a conversation for 90 minutes (our time, though it feels like it's in real time for them too sometimes). I fucking LOVE it.

We're at the end of this movie blog project. One of the things that I hope I was able to make room for in these ongoing discussions (with myself or with others) is "what type of movie do I like?" There are so many goddamn different "types" of movies out there, so it's an impossible question, but if you sit down over the course of five years and commit to watching and writing about 200 movies, then it just kinda comes naturally. If I were to try to sum up what I learned about myself and my tastes vis-à-vis movies so far, I'd say that I tend to gravitate toward movies that... hmm... let's say movies that features drama in the sociological or interpersonal sense. The ones that tell us something about the human spirit, or the way we behave as a species, or something like that.

This makes sense when I think about my life outside of film-watching, and what brings me pleasure. I love listening to people and hearing their stories. It's the reason I like to have friends on this blog, it's the reason that my social work job is bearable sometimes, it's the reason that my ideal night is just sitting at a bar and chatting, it's the reason that I can sit and watch a 90-minute film about twelve dudes arguing and start to think that it's one of the most amazing, breathtaking, heart-wrenching, human-defining films I've ever seen. 

I don't even need to explain it more than that, because it didn't have to be any more than that. I'm less interested in ideas such as 12 Angry Men being "a defense of democracy." It's great that it's that too, but that's not what gets my goat. Neither is the answer to the central argument over whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty. One of the articles I read about this movie in between the credits and the writing about it on the blog was an essay about how the kid was probably guilty, and that the jury got it wrong. That's fine. Maybe that's true. Maybe a different movie would pull the rug out from underneath you at the end, showing definitively whether the kid is guilty or not guilty. I'm not concerned about that! With enough skill and finesse, you could honestly have twelve sweaty old dudes talk about fucking anything, and I'd probably still think it was a great movie. We're not learning about the verdict, we're learning about the characters. The characters are learning about each other, and we're privy to it. It's just really fascinating stuff, and I knew I was going to love it as soon as I learned that this was the premise of the movie.

I've used the term "movie magic" in this column plenty of times over the years, but have never defined it. I don't think I could, but for the sake of posterity, let's just try. Movie magic, simply, is the idea that a movie makes me feel some new, thrilling feeling. It's when I'm physically and emotionally affected by some light and sound emanating from a thin box with a screen. Movie magic is the reveal of some truth about us as humans that I never thought about deeply before. It's the moment during a movie when you whisper to yourself: holy shit. 

There was movie magic in 12 Angry Men. The big moments, of course, felt magical—the double knife reveal, the torn-up picture, all the threats and timed limp-walk exercises and all that. I'm thinking specifically about the scene in which the one racist guy starts going on his incredibly racist speech, and as he goes on and on, all the other characters, slowly but surely, get up and move to the outskirts of the room, purposefully facing away. It's a powerful moment of solidarity against intolerance. It also breaks the realism a little bit, like in the way that it felt very much like a movie in that moment. Which is okay, and which proves that movie magic is obviously not tied to realism in any way. It was a powerful statement, a stark tableau that will live in my mind for a long time. Intolerance breeds and multiplies in 2025; in what ways can I stand up from the desk and turn away? That's the fucking magic!

This will be my ninth movie on the list so far with a 5 pukes out of 5 rating. I wonder if you went back and averaged out the number of words in each blog post for those films, how much lower the average would be compared to the average from all the blog posts total. That's because I find myself struggling to write about films that I love this much. At a certain point, the perfect films speak for themselves. I have nothing important to add. E.g. yes, it's cool that the camera angles change, get lower, as the jury deliberation moves along throughout the film. But I'm not telling you this, I'm just relaying what I've read. And if you really are here to hear what I have to say, well then, at a certain point, the best films are going to render me somewhat speechless. How to craft an intelligent blog post about 12 Angry Men when all I want to do is yell FUCK YEAH and pump my fist in the air? I don't know.

All I can say is that this film is 100% in my wheelhouse, and that it was worth the wait.

GRADE: 5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: We continue to our second of three "12" movies with 12 Monkeys. I am going out on a limb and saying that it's not about a family of twelve monkeys who love each other and bond over shared hardship. But I don't know... because I've never seen it.