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Continued... Page 2 > Developing a Theme that Sells This may not agree with the client's perspective on the evidence. Hence, it is a critical part of a lawyer's job to give the jurors a ìhandleî for the evidence, to create a context. WHAT IS A THEME? Harkening back to our days in high school, most of us identify the word ìthemeî with the essays we had to write in English class, such as ìHow I spent my summer vacation.î Tristine Rainer describes a theme more accurately as: The conceptual string that runs through and holds a work together; loosen it or break it, and the work tends to fall apart. Whereas story is the growth of character, theme is the development of an idea. Story provides the mythic and emotional skeleton . . . Theme provides conceptual coherence. Rainer, ìYour Life As A Storyî (1997) at p. 212. The theme is an invaluable tool for organizing the facts, helping the lawyer to determine what to leave in and what to leave out. A general problem among the trial bar is that of over inclusion, a problem that author Janet Malcolm describes as: Filling plastic garbage bags with the confused jumble of things that have accreted over . . . days, months, years. The goal of an attorney, just like that of an author or a filmmaker is to arrange a creative space with relatively few ideas, images, and feelings so that the audience will want to linger awhile among them rather than physically or mentally flee from a saturation bombing style presentation. With the theme as a guide, the attorney is protected from the danger of throwing the wrong facts out and keeping the wrong ones in. The most powerful themes in any artistic or legal presentation involve general life topics that find resonance among ordinary human beings. An identifiable human dilemma of some sort must be at the heart of the story. Subtlety is at a premium the theme is most effective when it is kept unseen, providing the structure upon which the details of the story are hung. The most powerful themes are those which go beyond one idea and in fact have two opposing ideas locked in conflict, creating a dialectic. This can be seen in both the mundane, disposable elements of popular culture and great art: - The TV show Green Acres from the 1960's: City v. Country Living. - The book A Year In Provence ñ The clash between the British cultural values of the author and those of his French neighbors. |
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