Their Children's Hell
Trap, Juror #2, and the American Family
This post will freely discuss plot details from Trap and Juror #2.
In the first season of Arrested Development there’s a small subplot featuring actor Thomas Jane, who plays himself pretending to be a homeless man—preparation to star eponymously in a film called Homeless Dad, which is exactly what it sounds like. The subplot derives most of its humor from the fact that Jane is always in character in a sort of oafish way; at one point, receiving instructions from Jason Bateman’s Michael Bluth at a construction site where he’s taken a job, he loudly interjects “I just want my kids back,” producing a moment of befuddled silence before the conversation simply continues on its way. The joke, of course, is that this is what movie dads always want. There’s no easier way to generate stakes or pathos in a Hollywood production than by introducing tension to a parent-child relationship, placing children in jeopardy, setting a father (or, more rarely but notably, mother) against the people who harmed or endangered their child. The family is one of American cinema’s great sacred cows, the stock emotional engine of a dozen different genres, the easiest possible “why?” that a screenwriter can bring to bear.
It's also one of the great seed-beds of American reaction, and we live in a political moment where this connection presents itself in a hundred different ways. Anti-trans backlash is framed as protecting children from fanciful LGBTQ predation; crime and homelessness are depicted as threats to the sanctity of the single-family household. Thatcher’s infamous assertion that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families, is alive and well in Anglophone political discourse, and depravities of all kinds—patriarchal, racist, anti-worker—are justified to the American public, made palatable to people with less avowedly antisocial instincts, with reference to the family, the unalienable rights of parents, the incontrovertible goodness of doing what’s best for your child. Some of Hollywood’s most reactionary products deploy this wedge with crude effectiveness: Taken (2007), for instance, draws on Liam Neeson’s warm, paternal screen persona, and on the indispensable American image of a white daughter placed in sexual peril by brown malefactors, to generate a scenario in which the War on Terror’s most monstrous excesses are purified, made righteous, made congruent with the guileless moral universe of the substance-free popcorn flick. The family’s power to work this metamorphosis is one of Hollywood’s most durable verities; it’s also among the central subjects of two 2024 releases, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap and Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2, each of which uses the trappings of a ‘throwback’ genre exercise to interrogate this particular moral shortcut and the nasty realities it elides.
M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap begins from the kind of premise that might have animated a dozen thriller spec-scripts in the 90s. Firefighter Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes his teenaged daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert at a Philadelphia stadium, only to find that the FBI is planning to lock down the venue: they have reason to believe there’s a serial killer among the attendees, and they’re not letting anyone leave until they find him. It’s not at all hard to imagine how this might have played out as a straight cat-and-mouse thriller in a bygone studio age: Cooper learns that the killer has set his sights on Riley—perhaps she’s even captured while Cooper’s back is turned—and he sets out to save her, keeping one step ahead of the feds who want him out of the way. Cooper might be played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, say, who indeed depicted a Pittsburgh firefighter (close!) chasing terrorists through a packed stadium in Peter Hyams’s Sudden Death (1995). Shyamalan’s spin on this scenario is as simple as it is inventive: Cooper is the killer, known to the public as “the Butcher,” and the feds are here for him. The danger is not that Riley will be killed, but that she will come to understand why he is acting so strange, disappearing for long stretches of the concert, obsessing over back exits; or perhaps that he will be faced with a situation where the only way to escape is to leave her. The danger, in other words, is that Cooper will lose his child, but to himself, his own self-interest, his own monstrous proclivities.
On the level of pure narrative mechanics, this complication introduces innumerable possibilities, and if Trap pursues somewhat fewer of these possibilities than one might have imagined (or hoped), that’s perhaps because it has other ideas in store. There is nonetheless quite a bit of fun to be had with this early-middle stretch of the film, in which Cooper wreaks quiet, ingenious havoc throughout the stadium, arranging a woman’s disastrous fall down the stairs here, a grisly eruption of fryer-oil there. He’s constantly balancing his responsibilities as a federal fugitive with his responsibilities as a dad, checking in with Riley at her seat, navigating awkward exchanges with the mother of her classroom frenemy. The uneasy truth here is that we’re rooting for him, not just because it’s a movie, or because he’s played with immense charm and wolflike humor by Josh Hartnett, in one of last year’s best performances: it’s also because of Riley, the personal stakes introduced by their relationship, the sense that he might on some level be a loving dad. It’s ludicrous, of course, to consider this seriously redemptive; Cooper is not some conflicted antihero but a vicious serial murderer, with an innocent victim waiting in captivity even as the concert plays out. But the capacity of parenthood to bypass any more rigorous moral sense is almost limitless, and Shyamalan knows it. “How much can you stomach from a protagonist if he truly loves his child” is a question a film like Taken asks only as a kind of personal challenge; Shyamalan poses this question to us as a conscious provocation, an invitation to consider how we assign our allegiance when we watch.
Cooper, of course, has made his own bed. Though the film gestures—not entirely elegantly—towards the kind of tortured-upbringing explanation that has been a part of serial-killer media for decades, the simpler reality is that Cooper kills, and that he loses his family as a direct result. Crucially, however, Cooper does not see it this way. In the film’s pivotal scene, he confronts his wife Rachel (Alison Pill), having realized she was the one who put the FBI on his trail. He speaks candidly to Rachel, for perhaps the first time ever, about the rage he feels towards her, so unfamiliar to him, so much darker than the feelings conjured by his murderous compulsions. “But it’s why I’m angry that’s amazing,” he tells her. “It’s because I won’t see Riley and Logan again. Because of you. I won’t get to see them grow up. And that’s overwhelming me.” If it seems absurd to blame Rachel for collapsing this cheery suburban house of cards rather than Cooper himself for erecting it, there is a crucial patriarchal logic here, one that could be seen at work in households across America if their secrets were similarly laid bare. In truth, between the façade of a loving father and the reality of a monster there is no contradiction at all; men everywhere have built homes they work to insulate from the broader world they despoil, raised children they shelter carefully from the brutal violence they inflict on others. This is something like the dream of reactionary politics, a perfect home amidst the chaos of Hobbesian competition, a pristine garden on the very edge of the camp. That these barbarities seldom stop on the doorstep, that the loving-father façade is often just that, is itself a truism, but not one Cooper can acknowledge; he holds fast to the fantasy of a true double life, of creating two realities that never need to meet. “We could have managed,” he hisses to Rachel, and the suggestion is less far-fetched than it might seem at first glance. American families do it all the time.
Fatherhood has been a major theme of Shyamalan’s work for years, featuring especially strongly in 2023’s Knock at the Cabin. That film weighed one family’s love for one another against the fate of the entire world; Trap is smaller, crueler, more cynical, its father figure ultimately delusional and self-serving. Yet this doesn’t make the latter film any more distant from Shyamalan’s own concerns as a parent; indeed, the casting of his daughter Saleka in the crucial role of pop star Lady Raven adds an amusingly meta layer to Trap’s thematic preoccupation with fatherhood. The obligatory Shyamalan cameo doubles down on the joke: he plays Lady Raven’s uncle, whom Cooper approaches under false pretenses to get his daughter chosen as “Dreamer Girl” in one of the singer’s key numbers, with crucial accompanying backstage access. One father appealing to (almost) another, banking on their shared love of family, the unquestioned premise that there’s nothing a dad won’t do for his child. Shyamalan has probed the seething underside of this instinct with his depiction of Cooper, revealed some of the ugliness it can obscure, the venal self-interest it can potentially disguise as selflessness; yet his daughter’s in the movie, and M. Night himself is here to praise her and cheer her on. After all, he’s still a dad. You know how it is.
If the post-Die Hard single-location thriller was a staple of 90s studio cinema, so too was the courtroom drama. Structured by the rhythms of legal procedure and providing reliable starring roles for both aging heavyweights like Gene Hackman and younger marquee names like Matthew McConaughey or Alec Baldwin, these films were some of the most overt vehicles for the era’s liberalism, staging dramatic confrontations between our society’s ills and its formal instruments of remediation. From the moment that Clint Eastwood’s latest, Juror #2, was announced, the word ‘throwback’ became inescapable in this relation, particularly when the premise was revealed, with its obvious moralizing potential. There is, in fact, something amusingly Trap-like about the dilemma in which Nicholas Hoult’s Justin Kemp finds himself: appointed to serve on a jury for a homicide it soon becomes clear he may have unknowingly committed, forced to try and manage the situation without inadvertently revealing the nature of his own involvement. But Juror #2 also shares with Trap a kind of nauseating play with the audience’s assumed sensibilities, a probing awareness of the way the family normally functions in an American studio film. It’s a film aimed squarely at the perception that matrimony and fatherhood have the power to redeem, a sometimes shockingly strident commentary on the kind of moral blindness other movies are all too happy to exploit.
The early passages of Juror #2 juxtapose with almost blunt force the two spaces, home and courtroom, where the drama of the film will play out. Justin Kemp’s home, which he shares with his lovely wife Ally—in the very late stages, we soon discover, of a high-risk pregnancy—is presented as overwhelmingly idyllic, a place he and this loving woman have created for their family, a place where their community can gather. There is, just possibly, the barest hint of an allusion to some unnamed challenge in the couple’s past, but on the whole this is a space of warmth and companionship, a space to cherish, a space to protect. (We might note, here, that Justin and Ally’s marriage evinces a particular kind of sexless perpetual cheer, a frictionless lack of either flirtation or interpersonal bite. This is marriage not as romantic or sexual companionship, but as the basis for nuclear family life.) The legal system, by contrast, is compromised: our first introduction to the case which will upend Justin’s life comes with the revelation that the prosecutor (Toni Collette) is pursuing a conviction for her own political gain. Already this juxtaposition between the purity of the home and the corruption of the outside world is generating pathos of a modest sort; we are invited to be affronted that such a morally dubious proceeding will keep Justin from what matters most. We are invited to see his civic life as the enemy of his home life.
The simple balance of narrative and genre probabilities suggests to us that the defendant in this murder case is probably innocent, and that the prosecutor’s self-interested pursuit of victory is morally unjust. In a more conventional courtroom drama, these kinds of injustices are remedied by the system itself, and by the fundamental decency of its key servants: in this case, the jury, as the judge argues in a high-minded speech explaining their role. “You are impartial, no skin in the game, nothing to gain or lose,” she says. “That’s why I believe that this process, as flawed as it may be, is still our best chance at finding justice.” This, however, is precisely the rug pulled from under our feet as we watch Justin, physically sickened, realize during opening statements that he—rather than the defendant, James Sythe—may have been responsible for the alleged crime. The jury, positioned initially as the system’s last line of defense, is fatally undermined at a stroke; there is a juror now with everything to lose, a second man in the courtroom for whom this process might mean the difference between life and death. The earlier juxtaposition between a decent family man and a corrupt system has now been unsettled by the suggestion that he is the corruption; the call is coming, in more ways than one, from inside the house.
As this scenario unfolds, the deck is stacked in numerous ways to make a sympathetic figure of Justin, who sincerely did not mean to do any harm, who truly did not know a woman had been killed until he heard it in that courtroom. Justin, wrestling with his conscience, passes up a chance at a swift conviction to keep the jury deliberating over Sythe’s case (in the film’s clearest nod to Twelve Angry Men), at least until it becomes clear that a “not guilty” verdict is out of the question. He displays a clear, if slightly sweaty, desire to come forward, but is assured by a lawyer that his fate would be sealed; a jury would never believe that he had not been drinking, and the state would surely put him away for life. It’s Justin’s family, above all else, that makes this outcome categorically unacceptable, a family we gradually come to understand plays an outsize role in his self-conception for very specific reasons: the lawyer he consults (played by Kiefer Sutherland) is his AA sponsor, and Justin is a recovering alcoholic, with multiple DUIs on his record. He met Ally during his court-ordered community service, and there’s awe in his voice as he describes her role in his redemption, the way she saw something in him worth saving and rebuilt him into a man who could be worthy of her. His potential imprisonment threatens something he speaks of with almost religious fervor: a family, a wife and child who will be abandoned without him, an image of healing grace to which he has affixed his entire sense of himself. We can see, once again, why a man would do anything for this.
Yet here is where the film ultimately closes its trap, where it finds Justin going too far, where it locates the cruelest irony in the nature of his absolution. Addiction and recovery loom large in his story; with Ally’s help, and with their shared dream of a happy family, he has come to understand himself as a changed man, a man who can matter. But this is the crux of the prosecution’s case: that Sythe, a former gang member with a criminal history of violence, cannot change, cannot be redeemed, can only ever be what he always was. With a nausea that mirrors Justin’s we watch him not only decide to endorse this narrative, but internalize it; in service to his own belief that he matters, he is willing to accept that someone else does not. He is willing to see Sythe as a kind of nonperson, rightfully punished for past misdeeds, undeserving of the kind of redemption Ally—who, it should be noted, encourages Justin in the path of least moral resistance at every turn—has brought Justin. Sythe is positioned in the film as a clear parallel to Justin, a man who might have been redeemed by the love of a woman had fate not intervened, but Justin rejects their obvious kinship to construct a moral hierarchy in which he and his family have greater value. This too is essential to reactionary politics, this double standard, this moral law that protects but does not bind. In a crucial exchange, Justin reasons obliquely with the prosecutor, who has come to understand the situation: if she attempts to undo Sythe’s conviction, he argues, “a criminal goes back on the street, and a good man and his family will be just destroyed. Where’s the justice in that?” In the service of his family Justin transforms Sythe into a kind of ontological other, a person whose humanity Justin need not accept, and directs the state to sacrifice him in Justin’s stead. After all, he reasons, is this one lowlife worth a whole family?
“When I had a second to think about it, it kinda dawned on me how this might have happened,” Cooper says to Rachel during the climactic confrontation in Trap. “Maybe the trap wasn’t set there at the concert. Maybe it was set here.” This is true in a literal sense, of course—Rachel made the call that caused the walls to close in—but it’s true in a deeper sense as well: it’s Cooper’s family that has made an easy escape impractical, has turned a coldly logistical problem into a dangerously personal one. In Juror, too, the trap was set at home, where Justin’s wife and child-to-be transform his dilemma into a cruel double bind. In both cases the mythic power of the family-as-image poses a threat to communal life, though the nature of the threat differs in each case: Shyamalan seems to see family as a kind of visible sociality that shields dangerous men from discovery—from self-awareness—even as it produces ties that constrain them, whereas Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams see in the family a frighteningly antisocial power, a ruinous capacity to turn men away from their obvious responsibilities to the human community. Put another way, Shyamalan argues that the family and its various projections might shelter an evil man, while Eastwood and Abrams seem to suggest that they might in fact create one. But both ultimately see in the purifying image of family the potential for something darker, the fuel for a masculinity that is delusional in its heedless destructiveness; a conviction on the part of men that their harms can never truly signify. They just want their kids back. What could be more natural than that?
In a recent interview, J.D. Vance generated a modest controversy by invoking the theological concept of ordo amoris to justify his movement’s vile and nakedly fascistic immigration policy. Christianity, he claimed, teaches that you love your family first, and then your community, and then your nation, and so on, in a kind of concentric sequence that reserves your truest love for the people in your home. It’s a sentiment writers and social media accounts even on the notionally ‘moderate’ right immediately endorsed in the most emphatic terms, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to explain just how far they would take this: to murderous ends, even to genocidal ones. They insisted on seeing it as a fundamental axiom, debatable only by the truly depraved, that for one’s child no sacrifice can truly be too much, no act too monstrous, no other moral limitation ultimately in force. It’s a sentiment that feels natural, as it has been made to, by innumerable social and political structures as well as by a culture industry that has drawn on it with reckless abandon. That it is, in its most heightened and politically metastatic form, ruinous to communal life, to the structures and norms that allow other people’s children a life of their own, to the kind of global order that might be truly just, has been seen in our day as an argument against community, an argument against justice. Trap and Juror #2 are movies too small to paint with this kind of breadth; in the end they are simply movies about men, and the things that make men feel justified. But in setting their sights on the family home, in smelling the blood on both sides of the threshold, they just might be doing something radical.
I'm surprised you brought up Saleka playing Lady Raven amidst the fatherhood theme without mentioning how her character brings up her own father leaving her, and as a result her being angry at him for a long time. Riley is the big Lady Raven fan and, unknown to her at the time, her father will soon be absent and she will have plenty of reason to be angry at him.
Hi Peter, great read! The last paragraph was particularly insightful. I was wondering if this kind of comunal thinking is uniformally applied. I mean in both movies these moral dillemas are applied to american, white men who have a place upheld in society. I always wondered what happens to the argument when it comes to marginalized individuals to which their “community” means the one closest to them? In these cases is it not morally just to prioritize their house/blood over a society that rejects them, and not serve that same disfunctional society at the cost of their own skin? I see how it’s an individualistic argument and doesn’t contribute to improve anything, but I never really could think up an answer to that. I’d appreciate reading recs on the subject if you know of any. Again, great read!