Evidence of Things Not Seen

My first instinct is to spend this entire post raving about the Spielberg's choice to NOT show the shark for 90% of the movie Jaws. But that seems a little on-the-nose, and I can't remember if we discussed it in class or not. Still, spend a few minutes appreciating the sheer terror of what you can't see in this scene...

My brain then leapt to the pilot episode of The West Wing. The episode centers around a member of the president's staff having an unfortunate interchange with a right wing religious figure on television, and not knowing if or when the president will fire him. The president, Martin Sheen, is referred to through the entire episode, but we don't actually meet him until the final three minutes or so. The president is largely Dark Matter, until the moment when he bursts into a meeting and makes it clear to everyone why he is the president.

What an entrance! This is a great example, as Emily prompted, of something being more impactful once it was shown, than if it had remained Dark Matter. The original idea of The West Wing was to have it be entirely about the staffers around the president, and only see him once every three or four episodes. The problem became, Martin Sheen is so damn good, and he made such an impact with only three minutes of screen time in one episode, that they immediately realized the show was just as much about him as about the people around him. In this way, what was primarily supposed to be Dark Matter materialized into the anchoring force of the entire series.

Finally, when asked to ponder the idea of Dark Matter that enforces some sort of political morality, my mind wandered to 12 Angry Men. Both the play and the movie center around 12 members of a jury forced to deliberate the guilt or innocence of a boy accused of killing his father. The play in particular is set in one location, there is no intermission, and nobody leaves the stage for 90 minutes. The actors/characters are literally shut away in a room until they come to a decision. Initially, 11 members vote the kid guilty. That leaves one juror, Henry Fonda in the film, who argues that the boy might be innocent and it's worth going over the information. Slowly but surely, for good or ill, he convinces everyone else to change their mind.
This the main piece of Dark Matter in this work is the suspect, the boy accused of killing his father. In the movie, there is an initial shot of an immigrant teenager. In the play, we never see the boy, but he is repeatedly referred to as an immigrant teen from the wrong side of town. As the story unfolds, we see this Dark Matter exposing each juror's individual biases and personal tendencies. One juror hates immigrants; one places no value on the boy's life, but simply wants to get to a baseball game; one is an old man initially too tired to put up a fight, but eventually emboldened to change his vote; one is a father estranged from his own son who wants to unleash his own pent up rage on anything he can find. It's really a rather brilliant piece of storytelling. All of the characters have a common goal and obstacle: to come to a decision that is independent of their own personal views and opinions. From a political standpoint, Juror 8, the stand alone juror at the beginning, operates as a sort of panopticon. He is not unseen, but his motives are. He says he simply wants to give the boy his due discussion. Conversely, none of the other jurors can hide from his gaze. They are stuck in a single room, and must at some point face this juror and own up to what it is that is keeping them from voting "not guilty." Juror 8 is the filter through which we the audience can see the various shortcomings of the judicial system. And how there is actually no way to be an unbiased juror. Hovering over everything, of course, is the Dark Matter. The boy who may or may not have killed his father awaiting his fate. Literally everything that happens is because of him, and he never once steps onto the stage. And even though we see him for a brief second in the film, he never speaks nor moves. He is the Dark Matter that binds the rest of the dramatic action together.

And for those that haven't seen it, here you go.