53 pages • 1 hour read
Twelve Angry Men
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Themes
Father and Son Familial Dynamics
There are two important father-son relationships at the heart of Twelve Angry Men. The first is the relationship between the accused and his father, as discussed in the evidence the prosecution presents. The second relationship is between the 3rd Juror and his estranged son. These relationships mirror one another in important ways.
Since the accused is on trial for the murder of his father, their relationship dynamic, which revolves around violence and neglect, is of central importance to the play. As the 8th Juror reminds the jury, “This boy has been hit so many times in his life that violence is practically a normal state of affairs for him” (Act I, 27). The father is a criminal who has spent time in jail “for forgery” (Act I, 23), meaning that he has also been an absent father at times in his son’s life. The dysfunctional dynamic between father and son raises questions about the nature of parental authority and its abuses while also providing a possible motive for the murder.
The relationship between the 3rd Juror and his son mirrors the abusive dynamic of the accused and his father. The 3rd Juror admits to having a violent dynamic with his own son: “I told him right out, ‘I’m gonna make a man outta you or I’m gonna bust you in half trying’ […] When he was sixteen we had a battle. He hit me in the face” (Act I, 28). The 3rd Juror’s attitude also represents conservative beliefs about “traditional” American family life and patriarchal authority. The 3rd Juror laments the supposed decline in children’s respect for their parents, claiming that the problem is “the kids, the way they are nowadays” and calling his own estranged son a “Rotten kid” (Act I, 28).
While the 3rd Juror takes pride in his economic prosperity as a businessman, his higher-class status does not safeguard his relationship with his own son, suggesting that he and the accused’s poor, criminal father might have more in common than he’d like to admit. At the play’s conclusion, his outburst reveals that his strong feelings toward the accused stem from his bitterness toward his own son: “Jeez, I can feel that knife goin’ in” (Act II, 92). In envisioning himself as the victim of the murder, the 3rd Juror momentarily erases the racial and class barriers separating him from the accused’s father, revealing the universal nature of problematic family dynamics.
The Dangers of Racial and Class Prejudice
Like any jury, the jury in Twelve Angry Men is called to deliberate upon the evidence in the case in an objective way to ensure that justice is served. However, the play repeatedly reveals that prejudices can shape and distort a person’s views in dangerous ways. When that person is a juror, those biases threaten to derail the core ideals of the American legal system.
Several of the jurors reveal their prejudices in sweeping, generalized statements about racial and class minorities. These generalizations often present minorities as feckless and dangerous. The 4th Juror claims, “Children from slum backgrounds are potential menaces to society” (Act I, 28), suggesting that a poor person is automatically more of a threat. The 10th Juror repeatedly emphasizes that “they”—heavily implied to be African Americans—are inferior to white Americans: “They think different. They act different […] That’s how they are by nature […] Human nature doesn’t mean as much to them as it does to us” (Act II, 82, emphasis added). The 7th Juror applies the same generalizations of “us and them” to immigrant minorities and even tries to dismiss the 11th Juror by invoking his immigrant status: “I’m tellin’ ya they’re all alike. He comes over to this country running for his life and before he can even take a big breath he’s telling us how to run the show” (Act II, 72, emphasis added).
These racial and class prejudices serve two important thematic functions in the play. First, they illustrate the play’s preoccupation with the difficulty of being truly objective in the exercising of justice: Since several of the jurors are already so deeply prejudiced in their views, it is difficult for a person of color and/or a person coming from a disadvantaged background to receive a truly fair trial. As the 8th Juror warns, “prejudice obscures the truth” (Act II. 84) These prejudices suggest that the justice system works better for some groups of people than others, calling into question the objectivity of that system. Second, the jurors’ prejudices reveal some of the uncomfortable divisions in American society along class and racial lines. While America aspires to be a land of equality and opportunity, the jurors’ attitudes reveal that it is far from being so in practice.
The Myth of the American Dream
The myth of the American Dream—the idea that anyone can achieve success through their own merits and hard work, regardless of background—forms an important thematic element in the play. The 3rd Juror is a stereotypical example of the American Dream in action: He brags that he “started with nothing” (Act I, 18), eventually turning himself into a successful businessman through his own efforts. The 3rd Juror therefore embodies American pride in self-sufficiency and respect for entrepreneurialism.
The 11th Juror also appears to cling to an idealized notion of the American Dream, but in a different way. We hear from the 10th Juror that the 11th Juror came to America “running for his life” (Act II, 72), and this fact, combined with the 11th Juror’s “German accent” (Act I, 19), implies that he might have been a refugee from the totalitarian and genocidal Nazi regime. The 11th Juror therefore prizes American ideals of democracy and justice and tries to uphold these ideals in the face of the other jurors’ prejudices: He calls the jury system “a remarkable thing about democracy” and insists that it is “one of the reasons we are strong” (Act II, 65). While the 3rd Juror represents the more materialistic, self-serving aspects of the American Dream, the 11th Juror represents the more altruistic ideals in the American mythos.
Twelve Angry Men calls both aspects of the American Dream into question. The terrible background of the accused—with its chronic poverty and violence—reveals that opportunities are not equally available to everyone, regardless of what the American Dream claims. Likewise, the 11th Juror’s vision of a truly objective, democratic justice system clashes with the very marked prejudices and flaws the jurors themselves display, suggesting that justice is not equally applied to all citizens. The enduring racial and class barriers the play highlights therefore suggest that the American Dream remains out of reach for too many.
Nature Versus Nurture
There is a thematic tension running throughout the play regarding the nature versus nurture debate. While some jurors lean toward essentialism, making broad generalizations about people along racial and class lines, other jurors argue for the importance of personal context when seeking to understand an individual’s situation.
The racial and class prejudices discussed above most clearly embody the essentialist attitude. In using “us and them” rhetoric, jurors such as the 10th judge others according to their prejudices about the supposed “nature” of certain groups. The 10th Juror’s statements such as, “You can’t believe a word they say. They’re born liars” (Act I, 23), and “[T]hey don’t need any big excuse to kill someone” (Act II, 82), reduce the experiences of individual people like the accused to racial and class stereotypes. Such prejudiced thinking claims that bad qualities or actions are innate to certain groups, leading to the assumption that everyone within a racial or class group is and must be the same.
Some of the other jurors, especially the 8th Juror, challenge this essentialist thinking with a more nuanced, contextualized view. At the outset of the deliberations, the 8th Juror reminds the other jurors of the accused’s difficult upbringing, remarking, “That’s not a very good head start. He’s had a pretty terrible sixteen years” (Act I, 23). The theme of “Nurture over Nature” suggests that people must be understood in terms of their unique personal stories—and as the 8th Juror suggests, the jury needs to consider the difficulties the accused has faced in order to evaluate the evidence fairly. Twelve Angry Men emphasizes the importance of allowing this more nuanced thinking to triumph over the essentialized thinking that leads to unfounded racial and class prejudices against other people.
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