Last night after my husband (a 1L) heaved a sigh of relief after turning in his open memo, we celebrated by watching The Paper Chase (1973). Until the final moments of the movie, I was completely invested, but since I’ve reserved this blog as a place to celebrate the good, I’ll leave the ending out of the picture. (The director would have been wise to do so as well.)
That being said, there are few movies that dare to drop you down into the middle of a world that is not your own and just let you go without backstory or preparation or explanation. One of the few films that stuck out to me as functioning in this way is one of my favorites, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (interestingly enough also from 1973). We get plummeted into a world of crime and connections and navigate as we go. The Paper Chase worked in the same way. We enter the classroom (not just any classroom but a Harvard law classroom, the most glorified, deified of hallowed educational grounds) with the protagonist Hart (played by Timothy Bottoms). We go in knowing just as little as he does about what to expect. Neither of us read the posted assignment. Neither of us are prepared for what lurks ahead. And orchestrating the most intense piece of the experience: Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr., a renowned legal genius who feeds on the fear and incompetencies of these neophytes of the law in the form of a bow-tie clad T-Rex turned professor.
For a little under two hours, those of us who are outsiders to this subculture are granted passage into what it’s like. We navigate the various echelons of student performance and study groups, the politics of competition. We see and even feel the effects of hero worship in academia, watch how the mighty tower over and alternately terrify and inspire those crouching at their altars. We recognize the thrumming, ever-present competition, destroying dreams and lives and pushing some beyond the limits of what they thought possible, for better and worse. Aside from just observing Hart, we are granted an invisible seventh spot in Franklin Ford III’s exclusive study group (probably to the chagrin of Bell, who would probably call us a “pimp” and deny us access to his 800 page outline). This group shows us the many faces of 1L’s and how pressure manifests itself differently in various personalities and backgrounds.
And impressively, we’re left to draw our own conclusions about this elite microcosm. Maybe Kingsfield is a self-aggrandizing bastard whose closest thing to a human connection are the photos on the walls of his study. Or maybe he’s a truly inspiring genius who grants his students the gift to be the living extensions of the judges. Perhaps Kevin is a pathetic, throw-away bourgeoise, living like a king on his in-laws’ dime and driveling about a photographic memory. Or perhaps he’s a determined young man trying to balance a family with a program that’s eating him alive despite extraordinary effort. Either/or, we get to make our own judgments. And in the end, we recognize that whether we think Kingsfield is the ultimate ass or feel pity for Kevin, it absolutely doesn’t matter. Harvard Law (and any successful sect of academia) with its traditions, its “grooming of minds to rule the world” as Hart says, is going to continue and thrive despite any of our outsiders’ (or insiders’) assessments. It’s a whole more grandiose and self-interested than any of its minuscule, individual parts. And it’s captured and parceled so well in this film.
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