Unclear and Present Danger - The Firm

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

Episode 25 — The FirmIn this episode of Unclear and Present Danger, John and Jamelle discuss the 1993 John Grisham film adaptation “The Firm.” They use the genre of the legal thriller to discuss the legalization of American life in the 1990s and the turn from politics in crucible of history to management at its putative end. They also talk about Wilford Brimley, so there’s that too.Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodLinks from the episode!New York Times front-page for June 30, 1993Barack Obama’s lost manuscript“Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening—and Our Best Hope”Next time on Unclear and Present Danger…Jamelle and John return to “The Hunt for Red October.”

I want to start by telling you that Bendini-Lamberton Lock is a small firm, 41 lawyers and all. But I prefer to think of us as a family. And like most families, loyalty is what we value more than just about anything. How the letter you got from us were the only one sent out. Because you're the only one we want. We've taken your highest offer to date and added 20% and we'll guarantee a 10% increase the second year. It may interest you to know that most of our clients are very wealthy. Poor people rarely have tax problems.

It's one of the few advantages of being poor. You should also know that many of our partners are millionaires by the time they're 45. Our offer includes a bonus schedule, a low-interest mortgage for the purchase of a new home, and the lease of a new Mercedes. Your wife can choose the color. We have faith that you're going to be with us for a long, long time, Mitch. The fact is, nobody has ever left us. Nobody.

Nobody. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. You know, Welcome to episode 25 of unclear and present danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section.

My name is John Gaines. I write a substack newsletter called on Popular Front, and I'm working on a book about American politics in the early 1990s. Today we are talking about the firm. A 1993 John Grisham adaptation. Fun fact, John Grisham. Grisham lives in Charlottesville. I've never seen him, but he's around here somewhere. He must be old. He's, I think he's very old. Directed by Sidney Pollock and starring, well, everyone, Tom Cruise, Jeannie Triple Horn, Gene Hackman, Holly Hunter, Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, David Stray Thurn, Wilford Brimley, and Gary Busey with roles as well for Margo Martindale, character actors. Paul Sorvino, Tobin Bell, and Dean Norris, among many others.

Tobin Bell, we've seen before, he was in the line of fire. He's one of the skeezy guys at the beginning. And if you are a horror hound, you will recognize Tobin Bell as the Jake Saw Killer from the Saul franchise. Anyway, the taglines for this movie, I'm going to start reading these because I just realized, I just remember they existed, and so they're kind of fun. The taglines for the firm, power can be murdered to resist, which is fine. But this one, the next one's good. They made him an offer he should have refused.

Here is a very short plot synopsis. A young lawyer joins a prestigious law firm only to discover that it has a sinister dark side. Before we get started, you should watch the movie. It is great, by the way. I mean, we'll say this later. but the firm is a great movie. It's really comforting to watch. It's like a warm blanket of like a 90s movie. So you should just, you know, put it on and watch it. Enjoy an evening with a glass of wine in the firm. It's available to buy or rent on iTunes and Amazon. And it is available for streaming on HBO Max. Before we get to our conversation, let's look at the New York Times page for the day of release, which was June 30th, 1993. Please take it. it away, John. Okay, well, now we're really getting into the quiet 90s. U.S. set to drop

plan for nine tests of nuclear arms, military requests denied. Clinton reported to decide not to resume explosion until another nation does. So Clinton decided not to do nuclear testing. This is a very post-Cold War thing. You know, why do we need to test nuclear weapons? Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. It's not very good for the environment to set off a large nuclear weapon anyway. So I think we have we started testing? the nuclear weapons again? Or we haven't? I don't know. I don't know. I think Trump wanted to modernize nuclear arsenal. That was like one of the things they wanted to do. But I'm not sure. And I say that is if like Trump has some sophisticated like, you know, view about nuclear strategy. But I think

it was kind of just like we want ours to be the biggest and the best. But I don't know if we've actually tested a nuclear weapon. I think we're signatories to the nuclear test ban treaty. But I'm not sure about that. Apparently we did a cult, what is known as a cold test, which was not quite an explosion, but we haven't done a critical mass full test in quite some time, as far as I can tell. Yeah. Okay, so what else we got here? Four networks agree to offer warnings of violence on TV, advisories for parents.

On the air messages are seen as a way to block demands for a rating system. So this, I guess, was the beginning of TVMA and TV 14 and so on and so forth, hoping to stay a federally imposed system of rates for violence and television, of the nation's poor broadcast networks have agreed to provide a war to your parents that would be put on the air just before shows laden with ma'am come on it's funny we talk about this a lot sex and violence and movies and tv was such a huge issue in the 90s and you just assumed it would kind of get worse and it seems like it didn't tv and well you've got all the prestige TV kind of leads into that but a lot of things kind of pulled back from it I feel like shows are less violent

movies are less I feel like violence has actually probably stayed constant It's not worse. It's not, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I mean, it's, uh, I was watching, I was a hotel a couple months ago in Virginia Beach, Virginia, visiting, um, some friends. And I was watching TV in the lobby, actually, because my kids were asleep and I didn't want to disturb them in the hotel rooms. I was watching TV in the lobby at like 11 o'clock at night. And New York undercover was on, which was like a very, you know, very, this was back when

they put black people on TV, just sort of like they didn't. there was no kind of like people weren't upset about it too much. And this is one of the shows that was part of basically sort of like a block of like network black programming and living color and living single stuff as well. And I was just sort of like shocked at how like openly horny the show was. Like there's no sense of like shame about like putting sexual desire on screen. And that I think is like more or less gone for movies and television. Except for this Game of Thrones stuff, I guess, but that's on the HBO. Right, that's on HBO.

But violence, I feel like violence and network television is just like no better, no worse than it's been. Okay, what else we got here? China's rude awakening to the art of a swindle. Here's a slightly condescending article about China being open to markets and how they don't really know what they're doing. And there was a financial scandal, stocks and bonds. It's scandal involving junk bonds, a promise to pay and I popping 24% interest, which were sold through dance hall girls, favorable newspaper articles, and salesman earning fat commissions is reverberating through the Chinese political establishment. More than 100,000 investors, including some top Chinese officials, are angry that they have been swindled and lost. Okay, it's very easy to make fun of, oh, this backwards country is just becoming capitalist, but Americans fall for this shit all the time.

I mean, like, you could make a good case, like, a non-trivial part of our portion of our economy of arrest. Yeah, especially, like, post-industrial deindustrialization is just kind of like going from one bubble to another. So I'm not sure how different this is. Prague fears becoming migrant trails last stop. This is about refugees from the wars post-Yukoslavia ending up in central Europe. and the Central European countries not being so happy about that, which is a pattern we see repeated in our time with refugees from Syria and Libya. They've been a little nicer about Ukrainians, but we'll see how long that lasts. Fearing by a move by Yankees, Cuomo explores idea for a new stadium.

The Yankees kept on threatening to leave New York. Questioning of suspect leads to new more dead bodies is the famous serial killer Joel Rifkin, who you may remember from a gas. on Seinfeld, when Elaine is dating a guy, also named Joel Rifkin, U.S. indicts 31 for extortion plots and minority hiring conjunction. Thirty-one people were indicted yesterday on charges of running eight groups that violently extorted thousands of dollars from New York building contractors and the guys obtaining construction jobs for black and Hispanic workers. Unlike some other cases in which whites use minority group confederates to obtain contracts set aside for minority-owned companies, most of the 30 men when they were black or Hispanic.

What else we got here? Murdoch wins waiver to acquire the Post. So the New York Post is just being bought. New York Post was not always a conservative newspaper. I don't know if it became conservative after Murdoch bought it, but that would make sense. But it was kind of a liberal newspaper at once. U.S. fires at Iraqi site. This is during our, we still have the no-fly zone and we would shoot at anti-aircraft stuff if they turn their radars on.

Yeah, anything else here jumped out to you? Nothing really jumps out here to me. You're right. This is very much a quiet 90s front page. I mean, you can see on this some of the things that would, I think, be kind of parts of the recurring stories in the politics in the 90s, the American relationship to China and sort of China's relationship to the world economy. On the domestic front, kind of the only growing obsession with content, violence on television, violence and music, et cetera, et cetera, indictments for the extortion plot. I mean, that's obviously criminal, but I'm sure that if you're like listening to talk radio in this period or whatever, you were going to be hearing kind of complaints about affirmative action, how this is only inevitable if we're going to have these sort of set

aside, et cetera, et cetera, which again is a thing that is very much a topic of conversation and political dispute in the 90s. And then Clinton, you know, Clinton's reputation, or attack on Clinton as a dove, as someone kind of allergic to the use of military force and really understand the military. The test of nuclear arms is part of probably made its way into critiques of Clinton in that way. And I'm sure, you know, I'm sure that if you really kind of delved into the, um, the muck of Clinton conspiracies in the 90s, you would, you would find some reference to this as one, as one point in a list of reasons why Clinton is like, you know, trying to defang the United States.

So nothing here jumps out, but it does feel like very representative of the kinds of stories, political stories and otherwise that are common throughout the 1990s. Okay, let's do a little bit of background on some of the people in this movie. I don't think we've done a Tom Cruise movie before. Have we done a cruise? No? No, I don't think it's weirdly enough. I don't think so because he was.

He's kind of such an 80s guy. I mean, he's a forever guy now, but no, I don't think so. Okay, so Cruz is at this point in his career just a huge star. I mean, it really can't be overstated how big of a star he was. How big of a star, Cruz, I mean, the only kind of fallow point in his career was the couple years after, you know, the Katie Holmes stuff and the jumping on the couch and the Scientology revelations and all of that. And that was like the real fallow point, but kind of from his big breakout in risky business in 1983 to 2003, Cruz was kind of on top of the world. So like I said, he had his breakout role in 83 with risky business. He was sort of in a pretty much a movie every year after that.

And by 1993, when the firm is released, he had already worked with Tony Scott in Top Gun and in Days of Thunder. and that's in 86 in 1990. He had worked with Scorsese in The Color of Money, which is a great movie, if you've never seen it, which came out in 86. He had worked with Barry Levinson and Rain Man at the 88 with Oliver Stone and born on the 4th of July in 89, I believe, and then with Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin and in a few good men. A movie that I thought about including for this podcast, but I'm really not sure.

It's not like that political. It's like very much kind of like a, I don't know. I'll think about it. It also kind of sucks. Yeah. It also kind of sucks. I agree with that. And he was nominated for a Golden Globe and a few good men.

And that was the year before this. He is a star. His movies are hits. Even the ones like cocktail, which aren't particularly good, are hits. And the firm was a hit. It opened to $25.4 million in its first weekend and grossed $150 million during its run. I think it's total gross, like, you know, of all time is like $240 million, something like that. Maybe higher, 270.

It is, it was, this was a huge hit. Critics really liked it. Grisham, like the adaptation as well. Holly Hunter earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for this one. And the score, which is a jazz piano score that I really like quite a bit by Dave Grusson, or Gruson, I never really said his name out loud, earned a nomination for best original score. This movie, directed by Sidney Pollack, who you will almost certainly know as an actor. The role for which he kind of always stands out in my mind is eyes wide shut,

the Kubrick's last film. We were talking before we started about his performance in Michael Clayton. I mean, he's just sort of, he's an actor who you've seen in many things. but he's also a director with a career going back to the 1960s when he directed television and also films. He had a pretty notable run of movies in the 70s with the way we were, the yakuza, written by Paul Schrader, Three Days of the Condor, very famous movie, and Bobby Deerfield, which is a sort of underseen Pacino movie, but a race car driver that I kind of like.

In the 80s, he has the absence of malice, Tutsi, a movie that I have not seen, since I was a kid. While I was watching Tootsie as a kid is a separate question. And a movie I feel like doesn't hold up. Yeah, probably not. I feel like Tootty doesn't hold up in 2022. I kind of want to watch it just to see. But yeah.

He also directed Out of Africa, which is, I think, Redford and Meryl Streep, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and won him, an Academy Award for Best Director. The Firm was another one of his big hits at the 90s, and he followed this up with a remake of Sabrina, which I like. Not a lot of people do, but I really like that movie. And Random Hearts, which is another, these are both Harrison Ford vehicles.

We'll probably do Random Hearts for this podcast. I need to add it to the list because it is a political thriller as much as it is a romantic drama. The last thing I'll say about the people in this movie is I want to talk a little bit about Holly Hunter, who is one of my favorite actresses. She is also kind of something of a run at this point. In 87, she was in Raising Arizona, kind of, you know, for many people, the Cohen's best movie. It's at least a very, it's a great one.

And she's also in broadcast news, which is a movie I love. That's James L. Brooks. That year, in 1993, she was in Jane Campion's the piano, and she earned an Academy Award for Best Actress. So two academy nominations that year for two very good performances. I like her a lot in this movie. I think she is terrific. So that's some background. Let's talk about the firm.

There's not, I mean, the plot of this movie is at once kind of Byzantine, but also somewhat straightforward. It's just that Tom Cruise plays a sort of top kind of hot shot law student. And he has, like, his pick of law firms, and he's approached by this firm out in Memphis, Tennessee, that offers him a ton of money. I think, I think specifically they offer him, like, $95,000 in salary, plus, like, they'll pick up his law school loans and whatever. And I think if you plug this into an inflation calculator, it's something like $180,000 in today's dollars. So, like, a serious salary for Memphis, Tennessee, no less. So he's, you know, you can live like a king. And he takes the job, him and his wife.

It's almost $200,000 now. Almost $200,000. Wow. Yeah. Him and his wife head down, played by Jeannie Triplehorn, head down to Memphis, where he kind of, not quickly, but gradually realizes that this firm is kind of shady, is doing some real shady shit. And that shady shit has gotten at least.

four lawyers at the firm killed, which as my wife said to me last night and we were finishing of this movie, wouldn't you notice, like, wouldn't people just notice if a single law firm had like four lawyers, not just die, but die like violent deaths? I feel like that's a thing that would, you know, you would see on the nude at the very least. Yeah, it's a little suspicious. And I think that's probably the biggest hole in the movie is that like the first time somebody dies in the movie you can't even suspend disbelief you're just like oh they killed him and like that's where we're going here with this right this is no mystery yeah um but like i'm just saying if you saw in the new york times sort of like you know memphis law memphis law firm

uh lawyers die an explosion in the cayman islands oh you'd be like oh that was a mob hit right like that's clearly what that was yeah there's very little bad about that it sounds pretty suspicious. So in the in the film, Cruz kind of gets entangled in all of this. His mentor, Gene Hackman, who I think actually gives a really interesting and nuanced performance in this movie is kind of a man. He's like broken by his own corruption. Hackman kind of pulls him into this as well. And he, Cruz realizes what's going on is approached by the FBI, who's has been following all of this, and then gets like in this tangled web of deception and corruption and trying to find a way out for him and for him and his wife.

So that's kind of, that's like the story. And like I said earlier, it's, I think it's a joy to watch. I think it's a very compelling movie to watch. But as far as the politics go, and as far as like what this might say to an audience in 1993 about the country, like, jump. what are your thoughts well i have a couple thoughts about that but i want to first note isn't there this occurred to me while i was watching it isn't there like isn't there an obsession in the 90s with boston as a city and harvard in particular have you noticed this i feel like there was

like boston was just like played up as some kind of location in a lot of these sorts of movies i guess it's just because the movie takes place at harvard law school but anyway that's just neither here nor there, but something else. I guess so. I mean, there's, there's, what's that, what's that, what's that, that, uh, that, uh, afflike Damon movie. Yeah. Well, goodwill hunting. Yeah. I guess it's sort of, there's a bunch of stuff like it plays on Boston's like working class, authentic place, but it also has these, all these institutions of like higher learning and so on and so forth. Anyway, I feel like there's a nine, I don't know what to make of it necessarily, but I feel like there's a 90s fixation on Boston and Harvard. Um, okay.

The movie itself and its politics, I think that, you know, there is a big fixation in the 90s among kind of Gen X about the idea of selling out, which is basically like, can you work in corporate America, can you make a good living, so on and so forth, and still, I don't know, hold on to some kind of values, not necessarily political ones, but moral or aesthetic values that are not like mainstream and this movie kind of plays into that a little bit like he's obviously very talented guy um he's got a ton of energy one thing that bugs me about tom cruise is like how hyper he is in movies and at the beginning of the movie it's just like him running around and jumping on things and stuff like that so and it's just it's just like really driving home you know

how how young and and promising he is and he kind of gets seduced into this world um you know this law firm is a little bit funky, it's not corporate, and it's like in the South and kind of has its own charms, and I think that's what, like, draws him into it, but it turns out that it's actually like, I mean, it's very fancy, but it's also kind of has its own character, but it turns out to be, you know, basically a criminal enterprise as he finds out. And it really, like, highly, almost absurdly like they're surveilling him from the beginning like it's a conspiracy

it's the whole firm is conspiracy and a really overriding one that has everybody's number and so on and so forth almost to the point where you're like it's not necessarily that believable you're like I feel like they could have done a lot of these they could have been like this corrupt

without being this evil like they're almost too all powerful but I guess that's the that kind of drives the drama of the movie so yeah I think that and he interestingly kind of wins you know he shows like he saves his his um his dignity and you know his moral soul or whatever by doing the right thing but he kind of does it his way he doesn't exactly become an ideal informant for the FBI he kind of gives them his own conditions which includes

It's funnily enough money, right? Which is for his, it's not totally mercenary because it's for his brother who was in prison. He ends up on top. He makes the point to the FBI agent that he's actually got a lot of trouble. But it's a way it's like an interesting thing or it's like he's a yuppie. He starts out in his life and he's able to navigate these things. I mean, it's highly stressful. He almost loses his marriage.

He has an affair in the movie. But he's able for, for, you know, career-minded people. of this generation, he's able to navigate these pitfalls and basically come, not to say, there's no real tragic loss. You say, oh, well, if you stand up to these forces, you're going to take a big hit. It's like, no, you can outsmart all this stuff. He pulls off this terrific caper. He fools everybody.

He has all this wonderful support from his wife and, you know, Holly Hunter, who he befriends. and it's a very optimistic view where he kind of just like gets up not gets off scoffrey exactly I mean there's there's real tension and real you know he gets hurt but he he he outsmarts everybody in the end which I thought was kind of interesting comment on like what they were telling people was possible because I feel like that's a very we've talked about this sort of in what we're talking about sneakers you know like the middle class thriller let's say you know I feel like I feel like there's a lot of different characters characters types like there's there's like the working class thriller with just like you know the

movie we watched last time or not last time but the time no we watch passenger 57 that's yeah and and in the diehard movies which is kind of like a working class guy who outsmarts you know his his social betters and experts and then there's like these middle class bureaucratic sort of thrillers where you know a competent person you know shows himself to be like to outsmart all his rivals and this is definitely not and he's he's like he doesn't have to sacrifice that in the end they decide to go back to boston which as i said it's like some kind of symbol of authenticity and start over basically so i thought that was interesting the fact that the firm is i mean the fact that it refers itself to the firm plays itself

into this plays into this as well but the fact that it has like this all this pervasive surveillance operation it's surveilling um you know it's a bug their home it's kind their cameras ever were constantly surveilling the surveillance is sort of the the affair that tom cruise has as arranged by the firm and then surveilled by the firm it's also you know the cause for my my favorite line in the whole movie which is wilfrid brimley confronting tom cruise with the pictures of um of cruz's character at the prostitute and then saying um you know it wasn't just screwing mitch all sorts of intimate acts right god oral and what or on whatnot is just the funniest thing in the world to me.

Yeah. That can be particularly hard for a trusting wife to forgive and impossible to forget. Just some great character work from Brimley right there. But all the surveillance seems part of a theme as well. Part of the thing that we'll see more in these movies, right? And of course, Enemy of the State, which is a couple of years. years from now. It comes on 95, I think, 96. It's a movie all about surveillance, also starring Gene Hackman. And the early 90s, late 80s, are kind of the beginning of what

would be known as the digital revolution, sort of the miniaturization of these devices. You know, we're not quite a ubiquitous cameras, but cameras are getting smaller. are much more common video cameras as well. And so I think you're beginning to see in the pop culture around this point some anxiety about what this all means. There's a scene where before Tom Cruise meets up with Ed Harris's FBI agent, he asked Holly Hunter, who had been the secretary for Gary Busey's character. Gary Busey's character was killed by goons for the firm, and then Holly Hunter decided she's going to work with. Tom Cruise and kind of take down the firm, Cruz asked her, you know, did, did Busey's character

have any recording devices, any high-speed cameras, that kind of thing? She's like, yeah, of course, of course he did. And there's sort of like the implication that, you know, of course there are all these people around who have the capacity to just sort of like observe you at all times. And it's not just the government. It is also just private actors. I mean, one thing to note here, and I think we talked about this way back when in our Patriot Games episode. But this is, this is like a post-Gulf war. This is post the point where like the big thing for that war, the big thing that they showed on TV, they're like, oh, look at American military might, was precision-guided missiles, was satellite imagery, was all this,

this high-tech ability to see from, you know, the atmosphere, you know, the be particular to what an individual might be doing on the ground. And I think, that that idea of pervasive surveillance of that the privacy doesn't really exist anymore in a meaningful sense, even for ordinary people, is one of the things that this movie, maybe it's not about, but it's certainly playing with. And I think it would have been, I think it would have been legible to an audience. I think an audience would have been like, yeah, of course, they can do that kind of thing in a way that, that I don't think would have been, I don't think it would have been as there wouldn't be so much like cultural paranoia about it 10 years earlier.

I recently watched the conversation at a phenomenon would be, a repertory screening here in Charlottesville. And, you know, that movie is all about surveillance, obviously. But it's like... It's very weird at the time. Right, exactly. It's like, it's not a thing anyone would expect. And devices themselves aren't like all that sophisticated.

It's portrayed as something. difficult, right? Like, the whole conceit of the movie is they're having a hard time deciphering a conversation between two people in the open that was recorded without their knowledge. And by contrast, in this movie, the surveillance is very easy, right? Like, it's not hard to capture a conversation or to capture a photo or to capture a video. There are scenes of Tom Cruise trying to get documents in the law firm and constantly looking up at the cameras everywhere that are following his movements. And so that's just, I hadn't thought about that earlier. But I think the, I think that this movie, again, not about surveillance, but kind of that, an emerging paranoia

in the culture about surveillance. I think it's very much present in this film. Yeah. And then you kind of turn it back on the people because they record the FBI agent and they use all kinds of, they sort of like use the methods of the people trying to trap them back, which is kind of like this whole entrepreneurial idea that we often see in these thrillers. The other thing is, like, its attitude towards institutions is very indicative at the time. Even though, like, there is a lot of cynicism towards institutions about law firms, obviously, as you mentioned before we start recording, being filled with scumbags and so on and so forth, the FBI doesn't come off that great.

It's either kind of very self-interested and narrow idea of enforcing. the law and kind of unimaginative and semi-competent. But what he says at the end, he kind of becomes an idealist at the end. He's like, I believe in the law again. Interesting that there's like he believes as a lawyer, he has access to the law as such, as this free agent. He can kind of interpret the rules of society for himself and decide what they are. He doesn't need these mediating institutions like the government or the firm he belongs to,

which I think is kind of funny that he's just like, he is like, oh, now I've, I've, I've, I've rediscovered the law, you know, like, I forgot about it, which in the law, the way the law is presented is something like you can kind of manipulate and, and, and he's being shown to be smart for manipulating, like that scene with the mobsters when he's like, because of attorney client privilege, I'm not going to do anything to harm you so I can get your cooperation, and so and so forth. You know, he's manipulation. He's still a lawyer.

But the movie kind of implies that those sorts of, like, lawyer tricks that people resent are actually, like, somehow virtuous or, you know, can lead to positive social outcomes when applied for the good, you know? Which I guess what lawyers believe. Yeah. I mean, Grisham's novels in the movie's based on are very much. you know set in obviously in the world of their legal thrillers um and the attitude towards the firms is often quite skeptical but there's a lot of certain amount of idealism about

the profession itself maybe i think that's right i mean i think i think that his movies have a tremendous amount of cynicism about kind of like the edifice of the legal world um you see this in A Time to Kill, and I think that's a Grisham adaptation. If it's not a Grisham adaptation, then it, like, it fucking feels like that. Yeah, it is. It's his first movie, apparently. It's first novel, apparently. But you see this in all, all Grisham stuff, but at the same time, it's clear Grishin believes that there's, like, a certain purity to the law that can be accessed by people who are, like, you know, decents by people who are trying to do the right thing, et cetera, et cetera. You know, one thing I find interesting about that is that, you know,

It kind of stands a little bit in tension with what seems to me to be like a real cynicism about the law in the 1990s, about the law's ability to really kind of do anything. I'm thinking, so I'm thinking of two things. The first is just sort of like, you know, the common, very common jokes, lots of humor in the 90s about kind of how lawyer to scumbags, about sort of like how the United States is a highly litigious culture. I think it's here you see Republicans really begin. to press for tort reform as like a thing. Trial lawyers. Trial lawyers. Right. I feel compelled to say that some of that, like a good deal of that is that trial lawyers are like the part of the legal profession that donates heavily to Democrats. And so it's like you can you can nip that in the butt a little bit.

It's why I'm opposed to car dealerships, you know, that it's a Republican constituency. They're bad, but also. They tend to be Republicans. Yeah, they tend to donate money to reactionary causes in like college. football so whatever um but this is where you're seeing all of that you know in the simpsons there's like lots of like you know shitty lawyer characters um uh and so there's just like real like cynicism about the law about american litigiousness about all these things that again makes its way into popular culture and i think we're seeing seeing some of it here i think you know

the question i do ask myself whenever i watch these movies is like would any of these But any of this political stuff be legible to an audience watching it at the time. And I think I can imagine someone watching this movie and thinking, yeah, like lawyers are like, yeah, what a bunch of assholes? Like, these people are terrible. And that is very much a part of this movie. I mean, the interesting thing about this sort of cynicism about institutions, not just the law, but politics as well. Although politics isn't directly implicated in this movie. I mean, it kind of is.

There are scenes that take place in Washington, D.C., involving, like, you know, tax law, and there's, like, a real sense that, like, hey, this is all a game for powerful people to make money and, you know, get away with literal murder. But it's like there's, it's like two sides to it. There's like two, there's two aspects of it, to it, two consequences of it. The first that I, that's laudable, right, is like, you keep you on your guard, recognizing that, like, people in powerful places. positions, people that sort of influence, necessarily your friends, are necessarily looking out for your best interest and should be regarded with some suspicion. But because the cynicism is also sort of interacting with a kind of like 1990s apathy and like apolitical attitudes, you know, they're all the same. What's the line from that raised against the machine? So,

song, Morphor Gora, the son of a drug lord from guerrilla radio, which to me is just like a very 1990s line in music. But the other thing about the cynicism is that it can kind of like lower your guard at the same time. And I should have like this somewhat inchoate theory that part of what, part of what Donald Trump played on as someone who was like in the culture in this period, right? Someone who is like very much a celebrity of the 80s and 90s. One of the things he played on was exactly American sort of hyper-synicism about, you know, legal institutions, about political institutions, the sense that they're all crooks.

And if they're all crooks, then it doesn't really matter if this one particular person happens to be an open crook. It doesn't really matter if, like, they're sheared of any kind of like even, even surface-level commitment to the public good. Because, again, they're all liars, there are crooks. what does it matter? And I think, I think, I mean, I think you sort of see some of this playing out in the 90s itself with like Gingrich and sort of the rise of the Gingrich Republicans and kind of like the rise of all that. Bross Perot was clearly at least like playing on this, but saying because there are crooks, you should vote for me an honest man. But it's all, it's all there. And I think it's all, I think it's, I think it's something worth considering. Absolutely. I know exactly what you're talking

about. And I think that that's, you know, it's the three-penny opera problem. It's like Brecht made this satire of capitalist society that showed capitalist as basically gangsters and then capitalists watched it and were like, yeah, we are. What are you going to do that? You know, like, and I thought it was very clever. I think the other thing to say about the interesting point about law and all the cynicism we were talking about law and all the kind of negative attitudes for lawyers is like the 90s is real time, for all that happening. For all that happening, where law, in a way, replaced politics because most things became a matter of litigation. You know, we assumed, you know, things were going to be constituted, fought out in constitutional law.

The Supreme Courts would make decisions. You know, Alan Dershowitz became extremely famous. I mean, he was famous in the 80s, but he became extremely famous in the 90s. There was the O.J. Simpson trial. There was all this high profile. legal stuff. And law sort of became the belief that, you know, the Institute of Courts and the Institute of Litigation could solve social problems was definitely a huge thing. You know, I remember most people were idealistic at the time, you know, thought of becoming lawyers

and not necessarily political activists are going into politics. I mean, you know, often lawyers go into politics later. But I think there was a real, it was a real kind of feel forgive me for saying so, neoliberal belief that, you know, that only, you know, things had to be taken, had to be done in certain institutional channels, right? And we can, they're not perfect,

but that's all we got, you know? Activism had sort of, and, and, and strikes, labor organizing, civil disobedience, you know, were not taken as seriously. And what was given a lot of social respect, despite the cynicism, despite the jokes, was, you know, going through these process, these acceptable processes. And yeah, I think that in a way, John Grisham's books came on in the right time where there was this kind of fascination with the law as both a place where, you know,

know, social problems could be solved or dealt with that was, it was higher than politics, you know, but also was a site of corruption or abuse of power as well. So, yeah, I think the 90s, I think like probably the cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which was, it's very, it came to fruition in, in the 2000s, but it's really a product of the 90s and her being put on the Supreme Court, which is kind of liberal celebration of legal figures as our highest, most admirable, you know, possible figures in a liberal pantheon more than politicians because Clinton, you know, we all understood he was a flawed person. So who did you turn to after that? Well, civil rights lawyer, Supreme Court justices, so on and so forth.

So, yeah, there's a strange thing in the 90s with it. I think that what you're talking about is the cynicism, both of cynicism and a lot of jokes about law, but I think that's just because of its prominence to a certain degree. It was like one of the only institutions that still functioned. I don't know if that's right to say. But it was an institution that people that had a lot of buy-in still, right, and seemed to be able to do something. I want to say that a lot of court shows begin at this time, but I think that they're earlier

and started in the 80s and the 70s even. But I feel like there was much more interest and many more movies about lawyers in this era. Just on the cultural point, I mean, like, this is the era. I mean, this literally this year, I think, is like this is the O.J. Simpson trial. Like the law is like very much in the public eye in this major way. This is the beginning of kind of like. legal television, whether it's kind of quasi-reality TV, like court TV or, you know, Judge Judy or Judge Joe Brown or whomever, or scripted shows, like the Law and Order franchise.

And they became stars. Like you had, well, you had Dershowitz was a big star. Johnny Cockhart was a big star. Look, who are the Kardashians? It's Robert Kardashian's family. You know, and he became a big star in this period. So these lawyers, yeah, there was a big interest in them as kind of like the leading, as leading cultural figures, which I think is kind of funny considering, you know, I don't know if they really had, well, you had celebrity attorneys like, well, you had Roy Cohn who was sort of a villain, but it's hard to think about for me, I don't know if this is just a function of my age. It's very hard for me to think of celebrity attorneys as a pre-90s phenomenon, right? you know all i can think of is johnny cochrane and and and the card i and rob cardassion and and uh and peter newfeld and

uh you know all those guys um a lot of who came from the o j simpson legal team you know right yeah the other thing you put me in mind in in mind of uh john is there's this new book new new is relatively recent book by the legal scholar Jed Purdy called Two Cheers for Politics. And it's sort of, I mean, it's a book that's kind of about the problems with the United States Constitution. Now it's sort of like a drag on democratic life. But it's also a book about what he calls anti-politics, which is like the ways that over the course of the last 30 years or so, Americans have tried to shunt what are fundamentally political disputes into some other realm where they could. be handled either technocratically or economically or legally. And Purdy traces this, like the beginnings of this to the end of the Cold War and kind

of the end of history, right, consensus. Like, hey, we, you know, liberal democratic capitalism has won the class of civilizations. And now we're just kind of in like a maintenance mode. We're just sort of like tweaking around the edges. And in that case, there's, yeah. Right. Right. We don't need politics anymore. We need economists. We need bureaucrats. Yeah, we need lawyers. The administration of our of our cultural and political victory. And so I think you're right that there's like this increased prominence of lawyers in part because I think the politics of the country has churned toward this sort of sense that we, you know, now we just, now we're just tweaking around the edges. You know, now we're just, if there's poverty, then, you know, you design. He designed some tax credits and that'll take care of it if there are, you know, if there are civil rights concerns, then the lawyers will take care of it.

It's interesting that we're talking about this movie and this topic now, like today, because the Times, the New York Times recently had a story kind of riffing off of a new book by Timothy Shank. Actually, it's just, Tim wrote it, and it's about his book. But in, apparently in the book, we're in the course of writing the book, Tim Schenck, who was an historian, discovered basically this unpublished manuscript by Barack Obama, like a college age Barack Obama, about the failures of liberalism in the 90s. And this would have been now, right? this would have been, Obama would have been writing this in the early 90s. It was a 250-page manuscript written with a friend of his, a former economics professor, Robert Fisher, had the working title, Transformative Politics.

And I'm looking right now, it's sort of the outline for the book. And it's very much hitting on these themes. So, you know, in Obama's estimation, and like a young 20-something Obama's estimation, The American left had lost faith in democratic discourse, what he called a rudderless pragmatism, had sort of a static conception of pluralism, what he calls a notion of static interest group formation that translate into the continuing necessity to buy off the middle class. And here's the thing I wanted to emphasize in expertise ethos, expertise, expertise. ethos, reliance on the judiciary to promote social change, and the belief that the judiciary

is the principal area for social change, and the insistence on bureaucratic centralization. And this is all sort of, yeah, this, yeah, first of a, you know, Obama's right. Where did that Obama go? But second of all, this movie does not deal with any of this, but I think you're right to sense it in a cynicism about the legal part. profession, it is sort of like channeling some of what is, some of what more astute critics are noticing about life in the United States in this particular period, kind of a legalization of American life, the rise, not the rise of bureaucracies, but sort of like the turning to

bureaucracy for all problems, kind of retreating from politics and retreating from political discourse and political contestation, and, yeah, going into sort of this, like, maintenance mode. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of like what the way, you know, in the absence, post-labor unions, I mean, the only institution that really workers have is class action lawsuits or discrimination law or sexual harassment law, you know, like these ways of putting pressure on employers. And those are susceptible to a lot of, like, the discourse around them gets also itself cynical because they're, you know, like, there's a famous, like, coffee cup case where the lady burned her was a, I don't know if it was a man or woman, burned themselves with a too hot cup of coffee. And then this became like a gag, basically. It's like, oh, what a litigious society would become.

But actually, the coffee was, like, scalding and it was dangerous. and, you know, she was seriously her. So I think it's like a weird thing with when mixed feelings they have when it comes to criticizing, you know, and this comes up all the time when people talk about this today when people complain about, you know, PMC stuff or woke stuff or whatever you want to call it and complain. You know, some of the stuff looks silly, but then, you know, or excessive, but then you have to remember, like, these are like the only institutions of recourse for some people it's like if they're hurt on the job like there's no pension for them like you know they have to sue you know like these this is

sort of the one institution that we have left uh that protects they potentially protects people um it's too bad in a way and it kind of i think atomizes people it kind of treats i mean not in class sections too you know treats people as a class or whatever the legal definition of that is. But, you know, it does kind of treat everybody like, look, you don't have like bonds of solidarity with other people. Ultimately, like, you're out for yourself. If you have a problem, you know, it will be mediated through law and the courts.

You know, you get a good lawyer and so on and so forth. I mean, it's just a function of our social ideology, which is that everybody is a kind of atomized individual who is. has legal rights, but not that much other institutional support often than that, you know? And the goal, which I think is a laudable one, and I still believe in, of a lot of these movies, especially have more idealistic lawyers, is like, well, all we need to do to fix society is basically extend the same access to legal rights to every member of society. So we just need to ensure that it's possible for very poor people to sue, you know, like, you know, if they're polluted, live on polluted ground or they're hurt, a employer is abusive or something like that.

They need to be able to sue. They need to access, they need to access to the same kinds of legal remedies that rich and middle class people get. That's the way we'll get social justice, right? We'll extend law, the protections of law to everybody. And I believe in that. Obviously, I don't think, you know, it's a, it's a crime and a scandal that people don't have the same access to, to legal representation. And that does create a real inequality in society. But that sort of was the horizon for changing.

It was like, look, if you have access to a lawyer that's like you're, you're, you're, and you have legal equality, that's, that's what's, that's what's going to create social equality. I don't know. I think there are limits to that. that because I just don't think usually when the law, when civil litigation gets involved with people who don't have a lot of resources, it's usually after something very bad has happened, you know, and not like, oh, well, I didn't have an institution that came between me and harm earlier, you know. it's like that's after I've been very badly hurt and then someone found me as a member of a group of people who are being got finally part of this class action.

You know, it's sort of like, oh, should we have institutions to prevent this sort of thing. But yeah, so legal recourse as is as equality was sort of like where this went. To use the example of labor again, it's sort of like we essentially traded labor unions for which people could collectively advocate for their own, for their interests as workers and also sort of like have some influence in the actual structuring of their work and the and how their job actually operates so that if they felt, right, that there's something dangerous happening on the job, they can use the power of the union to not do that dangerous thing or to make sure that dangerous thing is less dangerous. We've substituted that for, oh, well, now you can like, now you can sue under OSHA. or now, oh, rather than, oh, we're going to, you can organize to, and the racial discrimination in your workplace, now it's like, well, you know you can sue under the Civil Rights Act to deal with racial discrimination in your workplace after you've been racially

discriminated against, right? Like, after you've, this harm is, yeah, after you've suffered this harm. The other thing I would add is that the substitution of what you might. right call sort of like democratic rights for legal ones. I think also like undermines people's like sense of sort of I'm looking for like political efficacy, right? Sort of like now you're just, you're just, you're subject to these larger forces. And if you're lucky enough, you can, maybe you're part of a class, as you said, that can sue. The Supreme Court has like steadily eroded the ability of people to actually file class action lawsuits.

But that's the next step, you know? Right, yeah. I mean, yeah, pretty much. But then, I mean, that kind of gets to the point, right? So, like, once you erode the ability of people to act for themselves collectively and kind of shunt their, shunt, like, you know, any efforts to get redress, efforts to confront sort of, like, you know, powerful entities, powerful institutions into the legal system, then that it's actually pretty easy to then dismantle those rights after the fact, right?

Like, because the legal system happens to be where large and powerful institutions have a good deal of influence. Mm-hmm. Yeah. This is one of my, this is one of my hobby horses. But you see this, you see a version of this in land use, right? Sort of like lots of people in many places are complaining. They're like, you know, why is it that the only thing.

things that ever get built are big, expensive developments. And typically the answer beyond just sort of like user-earning restrictions is that the web of rules you have to navigate to even be able to build anything is so complex that the only people, the only entities that can effectively do it are those lots of capital in big legal teams that can afford to like throw away a million dollars to get around or navigate regulations. And so, So it basically creates an incentive for, or at least like it raises a barrier to smaller builders, to community builders, to anyone coming from the bottom up to do something and kind of like is, closes the door to everyone but the most powerful and the largest and the most sort of like, you know, oriented to orient oriented towards maximizing their profit above all else, um, institutions. in the game. And like, something like that kind of happens in our politics, too, because of the erosion of, you know, bottom up power. Collect, collective, not just like individuals being

mad, but sort of like, you know, institutions of collective influence in favor of maybe you can find a lawyer, maybe you can get in front of the right judge, et cetera, et cetera. And as we've seen, Like with abortion, the law cannot protect you from organized interests who have captured the law. Right. Yeah. I mean, also, it's like a just different, it's not always that efficient way of preventing harm. I mean, look, if you're on a fat shop floor with a union and you've got a foreman who's picking on you, your union fellow union members, like, can physically intimidate and interpose themselves.

Like, there's a dynamic there that's a lot different. Like, if you work in an office, they, people's, you know, very rarely our other, other employees might encourage you to go to human resources or encourage you to sue or quietly have your back. But there's not the same kind of like workshop floor solidarity because everyone's you know kind of like worrying about their career that's the way it works it's like well I don't want to step I don't want to step out of line and get in trouble and you know have the boss yell at me and and retaliate against me so so you know if there's several employees might join together sue but they don't really like at the workplace it's not like that common for

people like stick up for their fellow employees in the same way so or the way workplace solidarity works is a lot different. So yeah, it just kind of turns everybody into like a career like focus like it's like well I don't know how this is going to hurt my career and then you know basically the way the damages work is like well if you had worked in this job for longer like how much how much does it hurt your career and how much you could have expected to earn and so it's so it's yeah I mean it sort of treats everybody in a different way and it's not always the most effective way to get justice or to prevent harm, but it's kind of what we got. And obviously, like, I'm for trial lawyers, you know, I want to make it very easy.

You know, it's really interesting. It's like, look at when you look at the bills during COVID, who wanted to exempt employees from, you know, legal liability having to do with COVID? Well, Republicans. Why? Well, their biggest constituency is business. And who didn't want to do that? Who wanted to make sure that, you know, you could still sue if something happened, Democrats? Well, why? Well, big constituency for them as lawyers. So you had these different interests. And obviously, you know, I think in the absence of organized labor, there's got to be some kind of way for employees to, you know, get. their interests represented. So I'm for all this stuff. I just think it's too bad. I don't think it's necessarily the most, the kind of the best way we can organize our society. But when push

comes to shove, you know, I'm not going to be like, yeah, complain about litigation or anything like that. Right. In the absence of anything else, it is, we want to expand access to the legal system as much as possible people should have but be able to get legal representation as quickly and easily as possible right like public defenders offices should be you know fully funded all these things but to use the COVID example it's like do I want do I want poultry workers like slaughterhouse workers who had like horrifically higher rates of death from the disease do I want them to have better access to lawyer so that they can sue employers who don't keep them safe? Yes. Would it be better if they

were organized? If there were, if there was like, you know, strong unions that could preemptively stand up to employers, even better. Probably you'd have both working in tandem with each other. This isn't an either or thing. But our society, our society made like a considered, I think that kind of the conclusion here is that the society made a considered decision to undermine one of those things under the idea that you can just have the law do its thing and that that just doesn't work although it does work for tom cruise getting out of his mobbed up law firm the law works for tom cruise and for a lot of the heroes of these movies they're able to control it and use it to their advantage.

Are you? Probably not. But any last thoughts on the firm itself before we move on to wrapping up. It's just a good thriller. It's pretty well made. Cindy Pollock's a good director. Oh, I want to see one thing about Sidney Pollock. I forgot.

I mentioned this before we started recording. He has a real talent for playing these feelings, kind of. these guys who seem very warm and chummy and friendly but actually are revealed to be real scumbags and I seem almost interested in that vibe if you for lack of a better word in this film as well because like a certain form of evil I guess because he's like the firm is very warm and welcoming to Tom Cruise has this kind of chummy clubby behavior and then they turn out to be you know like a real scummy themselves. So he seems to be really interesting

in that kind of like, oh, things that can put forward a comradly, you know, I'm your friend front, but actually be quite insidious. I think it's some kind of theme that he seems to be very talented playing with as an actor and seems to be a part of his films as well.

Yeah, I agree with that assessment of his of the kinds of actors he likes to portray. I don't think we discussed, it's worth a quick note, of how this film of a young man trying to kind of preserve himself in a corrupt institution and try to survive a corrupt institution

is very much also the theme of Three Days of a Condor, which might be Pollack's most famous film, or at least one of the most widely watched one. And so if you've not seen three days of the Condor listener, you really should. It's a really tremendous film. And yeah, the firm. I love this movie. I think I've mentioned before.

I've seen it a bunch. It's a kind of thing that if it comes on, I'm kind of committed to the two hours and 40 minutes or however much has gone by before I got to it. So if you have not watched the movie and you've listened, to this conversation, I really recommend that you watch the firm. And we'll be doing other Grisham adaptations on this show. There was a couple coming our way. One of my other favorite, the Pelican Brief, is actually coming up pretty soon. The Pelican Brief featuring something that has, you know, surprisingly never happened in real life, which is the assassination of Supreme

Court justice. Never happened. But it's a jumping up point. for the Pelican Brief, and I think we'll have a lot of thoughts about sort of the political side of the courts for that film. Okay, that is our show. If you are not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, and Google Podcast, and wherever else podcasts are found. If you subscribe, please leave a rating and a review. It does help people find the show. I might start, like, reading kind of the good reviews. I mean, they're all good reviews. No one's writing bad reviews. But some of the ones that stand out, I might start reading on air, which I guess is an incentive to leave them if you want to hear yours read on air. Don't do it. Or not. Yeah, maybe don't. Maybe don't. Maybe don't do that. You decide for yourself.

You can reach out to both of us on Twitter. I'm at J. Bowie. John, you are. At Lionel underscore trolling. And you can follow the podcast itself at Unclear Pod, where I post pictures and occasionally sort of tweet from it while I'm watching the movie. You can also reach out to us over email at Unclear and Present Feedback at Fastmail.com. For this week in feedback, we have an email from Massimilano, who I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. I think that is correct.

The email is titled, Is It Too Late to Inc. include Disclosure. Hi, I'm a fan of your show from the European Union. Hello. I'm also for better or worse, quite fond of Michael Crichton's blockbusters from the 1990s. I enjoyed hearing your take on Rising Sun, probably one of Crichton's worst-aged movies. It surprises me, however, that you have not included in your list another interesting adaptation from the same author. Disclosure from 1994. Here's why I think you should consider including it. It is centered around sexual harassment, and in the workplace, an excellent opportunity to tie in with Bianita Hill case. The story is set in the American computer industry during the dot-com bubble.

There are references to themes still relevant today, like globalization, outsourcing, and the impact of mass telecommunications. Also, being written by a cranky boomer like Crichton, it gives some insight into the fears and anxieties of the American middle class in the 1990s. I really hope to hear your thoughts on this one. Despite the embarrassing sex scene, I think you'll find in the movie to be a perfect addition to the show. Thank you for your time and for such a great podcast.

Thank you for listening. I think that's a great suggestion for a movie. I would happily do it for the show. What about you, John? Sure, why not? Yeah. We get lots of good suggestions. And so please send them our way.

I tried to do a very thorough kind of like finding everything within this broad set of films. But I miss things. And disclosure seems like one. uh that i missed okay episodes come out every other friday so we'll see you in two weeks with uh with actually you know our next episode episode 26 uh will be our one year anniversary of doing this podcast um which is crazy uh so we will be bit on the air for a year and so to mark at the one year university we're going to return to the hunt for red october talk about that movie again. Maybe bring on a guest to talk about it, haven't decided yet, but we're going to

revisit The Hunt for Out October. And we'll also, we'll have some other stuff to share as well. Anniversary episode will be, there'll be things. It'll be interesting. The Humphoran October is available for rent on Amazon and iTunes. You can also buy a copy. I, myself, own a 4K Blu-ray of the movie, and you can buy a regular Blu-ray. It's a movie worth owning um so uh watch that before the next episode rewatch it i'm sure most of you have seen it uh and we will uh have another chat about the movie before john gans i am jemel buoy and this is unclear and present danger we will see you next time I don't know.