legal studies explication layout

“When we started putting the facts together on how much information we actually had, on the leads that we had, to find out what we had, we found out we didn’t have anything.”

• Intradiagetic narration

• Homodiegetic narration kind of

• Reflexive narrative

• Straight on angle

• Close up distance, unfiltered confessional

“A bookmark lay between its pages, a stiff piece of watered silk upon which an admonition had been embroidered: “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.”

• Extradiegetic narration 

• Prolepsis

• Still angle, static shot

• Soft lighting

• Small depth of field, background fades as we center on the bookmark

“Old Mr. Fleming, a classic country lawyer more happily at home with land deeds than ill deeds, opened the cross-examination.”

• Extradiegetic narration 

• Symbolic juxtaposition

• Framing: ironic tone and descriptive narration

• Distant angle, observational

• Warm lighting contrasting between innocence and corruption

“Psychiatry has matured rapidly in the past twenty years. The federal courts are beginning to keep in tune with this science as related to people charged with criminal offenses. It just seems to me we have a golden opportunity to face up to the new concepts in this field.”

• Presented in a mimetic style

• Forensic realism

• High and authoritative angle, voice of reason

• Bright lighting, rational tone

• Formal framing

  • Juxtaposing if the crime is purely evil or moral - asking if it can be explained psychologically

 “I fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done.”

• Emotionally charged words (disgust, murder)

• Homodiegetic narration

• Self-facing, reflective angle

• Harsh lighting exposing guilt

• Confessional framing

• Remorseful tone

  • Puts his personal reaction into a moral critique. At first he thought it was a punishment, but he realized it was a murder by the state

  • Saying the execution didn’t stop the crime and it doesnt work that way

“I was willing to take that gamble. And it wasn’t because of anything the Clutters did. They never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it’s just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.”

• Mimetic narrative

• Analepsis

• Introspective angle, close up on perry’s thoughts

• Dim lighting, internal

• Emotionally intimate distance, reader inside killers mind

• Regretful tone

  • Humanizing perry, his violence stems from emotional pain and resentment toward society

  • Reveals emotional displacement

  • Blurs the line between victim and perpetrator

“I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight; and that I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us, and to cleanse our land of blood.”

• Homodiegetic narrator

• Moral spotlight

• Low to high angle, looks upward toward god

• Depth of field limited to inner emotion, background world fades out

  • First person confession, adds realism and moral urgency

  • Shows his guilt and realization that watching this is morally wrong

  • Admits shame, asks got to help fix society

  • Turns personal regret into a public moral message

“Tonight, having dried and brushed her hair and bound it in a gauzy bandana, she set out the clothes she intended to wear to church the next morning: nylons, black pumps, a red velveteen dress—her prettiest, which she herself had made. It was the dress in which she was to be buried” (Capote 56).

• Prolepsis (foreshadowing)

• Situational irony

• Extradiagetic, heterodiegetic narrator

• Close up camera angle

• Soft lighting, gentle before dark turn

• Intimate angle

  • Dress is a symbol of innocence destroyed

  • Collision of purity and brutality

  • Turning a normal day into a scene of emotional tragedy

  • Reminding readers of the randomness and cruelty of the crime