Stanford University Press Blog

The Final Decision

This week, the Supreme Court once again revisited the question of the death penalty, this time to determine if the method used by most states, lethal injection, is cruel and unusual.

Dead Certainty by Jennifer Culbert, recently released by Stanford University Press, examines the history of Supreme Court death penalty cases, providing a solid background for understanding the debate currently taking place in the Court. Culbert focuses not on the ethical and moral issues surrounding the death penalty, but rather looks at the Supreme Court’s decisions in these cases to understand how the Justices understand judgment. She finds that the death penalty began to be questioned when the Supreme Court started looking for an external, objective truth to justify each death sentence, as opposed to trusting a jury to weigh the idiosyncrasies of each individual case.

The case currently before the Supreme Court also rests on the search for certainty when we cannot access infallible, external truth: the Court is considering whether the third and final shot in a lethal injection is sometimes unnecessarily and cruelly painful when the second renders inmates unable to signal that they are in pain.

 

Brian De Palma: Visionary Redactor?

Recently in American cinema, there have been of a number of films released that tackle the contentious issue of the war in Iraq. Perhaps the most controversial of these films is Brian De Palma’s Redacted, which unlike its counterparts such as Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, eschews traditional narrative for a multimedia format. Redacted is comprised of several media forms—a U.S. soldier’s video diary, U.S. and foreign news footage, a European documentary—which De Palma uses to reveal how images of war are seen and how they are filtered through a media lens.

The central image of Redacted is the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the subsequent murders of her family members at the hands of U.S. soldiers, a heinous act based on the actual rape and murder of 15-year old Abeer Qasim Hamza  in March 2006. While most critics have dismissed Redacted as heavy-handed "war porn,"  De Palma has still received praise for his use of multimedia formats and was the recipient of the Best Director award at the 2007 Venice Film Festival. Reviewers have also noted the significant nods to Jean-Luc Godard, one of De Palma’s main influences, particularly in light of the self-reflexive nature of the film and its discussion of knowledge, truth and how it is represented through media.

Perhaps most well-known for films such as Carrie and Scarface which have become iconic in American popular culture, Brian De Palma shows depth and boldness with Redacted, directorial or creative missteps aside. Eyal Peretz’s Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses explores that depth, bridging the disciplines of film and philosophy through a careful reading of De Palma’s work. Peretz shows how De Palma’s technique and choice of images create meaning, sparking examinations of trauma, representation, and cinema as technology. 

Peretz discusses Carrie as well as less successful films such as 2002’s Femme Fatale, giving each film a thorough analysis regardless of critical praise, or lack thereof. While Redacted might not catch on in the cinematic world, Peretz might argue that, with a more philosphical approach, it deserves a second glance.