Natural justice shapes most dramatic stories. What do I mean by that? Natural justice is the idea that the right thing will happen in the end. So the underdog will get his girl, the victim of crime will find reward and the criminal will get what’s coming to them. The hard worker will get their recognition and the cheat will be humiliated. In story structure terms it’s a very basic beat: the hero is shown in a deserving light, they are denied what should be theirs, they overcome, the end.
Natural justice as a plot device is incredibly powerful; the more we believe in the main character, the more engaged we become with the story and the more our hearts start to race. “Righteous Kill” sums this up perfectly as a film title because we’ve seen it so many times: there’s nothing so heart warming than watching a cold blooded murderer take one between the eyes or clutch at ozone as he falls from the sky scraper.
There is an alternative. An essay in an early run of Ed Brubaker’s “Criminal” (I won’t tell you which one, read them all, it’s well worth it) outlines the common mistake when people define “Noir”. As a genre the hard-hitting crime drama of noir is often linked with film noir and associated with style rather than structure: long shadows, heavy smoking, private eyes, femme fatales and Tommy Gun paced dialogue. However most of those films and some of the pulp fiction novels they’re based on got one of the fundamentals wrong: they included natural justice as a story telling device. The heart of noir fiction rejects the very idea natural justice, believing that the good often die young, crime pays, and most rich people are grown up bullies who got wealthy by taking from the weak. But the most important rule of noir fiction is that everyone is crooked and nobody finds justice or escape. This isn’t cop fiction where the maverick renegade ignores the threats from his captain and gets the bad guy by employing unconventional and illegal means. Noir is a Godless corner of the most fractured city, too dank for guardian angels and too corrupt for a fair trial.
The question is: does this make for a good story? If the message is: ‘everyone is out for themselves, nobody cares about you or your problems,’ how do we engage the reader? Is ‘justice’ the only way to end a story? Is it the only possible ending? Even in stories such as Ocean’s Eleven et al we get justice: the person being robbed is an arsehole and the criminals are really good at what they do, so should go rewarded. Right?
Natural justice is ingrained in our souls. Everyone deserves food, shelter, happiness, love. You could write a prison story about a criminal’s fight to survive in a place crammed with pain, violence and ritual punishment: your hero is scum and might deserve what he faces but his right to shelter means the reader will stick with them and care about their outcome. You don’t have to spell it out: even in a prison, which is intrinsically linked to the concept of justice and punishment, the power of natural justice can create empathy and keep a story driving forward.
Tags: justice, Natural justice, noir, underdog
Written by Adrian Robinson
8th October, 2009
