Blog of the week

“It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.” The truth isn't something that can be prefect defined often times truth can be clouded by our own biases. The film takes an objective stance on truth that it's out there but it doesn’t present itself until we search for it. The quest of the film is eliminating that we already know the truth and letting ourselves hear the opposite side of things. It is not to manipulate or sway people from their original view,but to give them something more outside of their own prejudice. The film shows us that we can speculate and theorize, but there are only so many factors that make up truth. We have to leave our notions at the door and look at the evidence that is presented to us. Before we get to the truth there is a feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty that is only solved by coming to a conclusion that best fits the evidence we are presented. The film never tells us who the murder is or if the boy is actually the murder, but this doesn’t matter with the context we are given the thing to know is that if the boy is guilty or not using the evidence that is presented. The film is a struggle in the obstacles we have to overcome in order to get to the truth. The whole argument of truth is an interesting one that has been going on for centuries. A common way to frame it is in sophistic rhetoric vs a more platonic rhetoric. I feel when framing it that way Juror 8 has a more platonic view on truth trying to achieve it from what he has compared to most of the other jurors at first making claims on the truth based on their biases. They say “The boy must be guilty cause X” ,but he refuses to accept this and takes them down around where he must force them to rexamine things.