"How To Kill A Mockingbird" - Literature in Film Blog 3

I've never seen this film until now, which is surprising because it is right up my alley: black and white, old fashioned, funny! *Disclaimer, I missed a section in the middle, but I have a pretty good idea of what happened in between* All the while as I watched the film, I kept trying to piece together the story. What did Boo Radley have to do with everybody? Why were the kids obsessed with him? Why do the kids call their dad by his first name? What's the purpose of the story being told from a child's perspective/memory? In natural theatre major fashion, I was trying to put together everything all at once (I still am). But my most favorite and most interesting aspect of the film is the nature of the trial. The "radical" sense of a white lawyer defending an accused black man really brings intrigue, considering the year the story takes place (1930s). Institutionalized racism has existed since slavery (and even before then). But the trial is more than just a trial against a black man, it touches upon the dynamics of racism and rape in what I believe to be a modern situation. Tom Robinson (the accused) isn't the actual perpetrator, it's the woman who attacks HIM. In the twenty-first century we struggle to believe that a woman could rape a man, so I'm positive it was eve harder to believe that a WHITE woman would kiss/assault a BLACK man. And as Atticus said, she was tormented by the societal guilt of her crime, which is why she accused Tom Robinson of attacking HER. The idea of a white woman being sexually attracted to a black man was too absurd for her family or society, so she took out her guilt and misplaced it on the object of her affection. I am shocked that this kind of situation was addressed in the 1930s, let alone the 1960s when the film was produced. If we still struggle with this issue now, how bad was the struggle to believe it then? Racism, sexism, and societal pressures influence the interpretation of this story and real life application of this situation. #THESTRUGGLEISREAL