Response to _To Kill A Mockingbird_

       For the next film, we have been watching To Kill A Mockingbird and it has really struck a chord with me. I found the fact that the main characters that initially drew the audience's attention to the story were children to be highly purposeful. The author truly set the stage for the audience to recognize growth or a change in the little girl nicknamed "Scout" from the beginning to the end of the film. This dynamic character perceived as an innocent tomboy child believing scary superstitions about their neighbor nicknamed "Boo Radley" in the beginning, clearly developed into a more mature, adult like state by the end as she accepted Boo as a person like herself rather than a fictitious monster. This transition reminds me of the children Holden imagines falling off the cliff that leads to adulthood in The Catcher In The Rye where innocence is lost, but more knowledge is gained. There still is the unanswerable question about whether or not this knowledge learned/experienced is for the better of the individual or not, but maybe it is inevitable that there will come a time when innocence is lost in an individual's life. One of my favorites scenes in this film was when Atticus was making his closing statements during the trial where Tom Robinson had been accused of raping a white woman. During his last remarks, he made it a point to declare that he himself recognizes that the court/justice system is not completely effective and it too has it's flaws. After reading that article that Ms. Bavaro had given is in class, it makes me question government and the justice systems we have in place. Everything that we as individuals perceive as natural in this day and age is only naturally because some people made it that way. The fact that I acknowledged that "some people made it that way" means that any invisible rules in place were created in a biased fashion. This makes me infer that the justice system can never truly be effective because it really was the "educated and rich" white men who created the laws in the first place. These "laws" everyone takes into account are only as good as the people who wrote them. I'm not even sure how we could go about "fixing it". Are films like this just replicating the ideal that these laws are "right and just" when we watch poor Tom Robinson be convicted of guilt after a perfectly winning argument made for him by Atticus? I don't know about you, but I was a bit pissed off at that.