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Film: Sing Sing

A film emblematic of our peculiar moment. They insert a subplot about Coleman Domingo contesting his wrongful imprisonment, implying his innocence. But the the filmmakers elide entirely past whether he was wrongly imprisoned for decades or unable to admit his guilt. They will surely argue their film "wasn't about that," to which one might ask - then why make it a subplot at all? I know the answer. They want to make us empathize with the character and thus suggest he was an innocent man. But then they want to insist the film itself isn't about injustice but rather the power of art to heal. In other words, they want their cake and to eat it too. 

The steel man case might be - we are telling the film from the perspective of Divine G - and from his perspective, he was an innocent man. I call bullshit. You might as well say Norman Bates was actually his mother. Come on people. Lets grow up.

The first time I encountered this phenomenon with younger people was around the time of the podcast Serial. After listening to 8 hours of this thing, I asked some younger folks whether they thought Adnan murdered Hae. They couldn't answer. Literally couldn't come up with a thesis. All they knew were the cops acted poorly and Adnan should be free. So I said, well then that means you think Jay the friend who Adnan showed him the body was lying. They said, no. So they managed to hold this position in their minds that Adnan both didn't murder her, but Jay also didn't lie. As if this were possible. 

We see this everywhere now. We had to believe Christine Blasey Ford's testimony against Brett Kavanaugh even though literally not a single person could corroborate any of the details. Nor could she present any evidence of anything like the incident ever taking place. To this day, I would bet 80% of Democrats "believe" she told the truth. Why? Because they find it mentally impossible to think it couldn't be so. And so yes, Coleman Domingo is innocent because his character believes it to be so. If only there were no such thing as reality.