12 Angry Men Paper

12 Angry Men Paper

In the movie, 12 Angry Men, a lesson that is taught is to check your intuitions-neither dismiss them, nor trust them blindly. In the movie, 11 of the jurors went with their first intuition that the boy was guilty. This turned out to be wrong in the end (as far as we know) and the jurors made the mistake of trusting their intuitions “blindly”. Another example is the man who kept changing his mind as to whether he thought the defendant was guilty or innocent. He could not decide whether to go with his intuition or to dismiss it. Intuitions can sometimes be trusted, but sometimes need to be dismissed. We need to check it often to determine whether it really is correct or not.

Another theme is that there can be many different interpretations of ‘the facts’. One person may see something one way and another person may see it a different way. An example of this is when the woman claimed she saw the boy kill his father and this seemed to be fact. It turns out the woman needed glasses and may not have seen the boy kill his father, although she may have thought she did. The sales clerk may have thought that the knife was one of a kind, when in fact he was wrong. They all were part of the same ‘story’, but had a different interpretation of what happened. Sometimes, something like this will happen in real life, when two different people think two different things happen and you need to figure out both sides of the story.

One of the main themes of the movie is that prejudice gets in the way of truth. One man who thought the boy was guilty, only thought that he was guilty because he did not like kids and he was comparing the boy to his own son. Another man did not like people from that neighborhood so he was convinced that the boy was guilty. One thing that we, as people, need to learn to do is to not let our