St Edward's Academic Review 2025

ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

execution going smoothly, the term “clean” carries moral connotations of purity which is in contrast to the state-sanctioned killing, highlighting the ethical dilemma of the death sentence. However, showing it visually has a more powerful emotional impact. The close-up allows the viewer to connect to Herb on a deeper level – rather than knowing about executions in the abstract, this film shows viewers what it looks like up close. Moreover, the camera shots cut between close-ups of Herb’s and Bryan’s faces, showing Bryan’s emotional response, as well as having long shots from a high angle to show the whole room of people watching the execution from behind the glass. This has the effect of separating Herb and Bryan, who care for each other and whose faces are responding to each other, from the room of strangers who are coldly watching a man be executed. The film also adds a sequence of Herbert’s friends, fellow inmates, saying goodbye to him before he is taken to the electrocution room. In Herb’s final moments, his fellow inmates bang their cups against the bars, making enough noise for Herbert to hear them, reminding him that he is not alone. This invented scene goes beyond the memoir to heighten the emotional climax of the sequence. Furthermore, in his moments of death, the camera cuts between close-ups of Herbert and his friends. The editor of performance and tone Nat Sanders states that this point in the film is ‘very heavy and it’s the emotional centre of the film’ (Giardina, 2020) as the film is visually depicting the effect of his death on the others. The film uses cinematic techniques to emphasise the physical confinement as a part of the legal system experienced by Herb, employing a medium two-shot. The setting is claustrophobic – Herb is taken through small corridors, Bryan sits in ‘ The film’s director, Destin Daniel Cretton, does use setting, sound, and camera techniques to emphasise Herbert’s physical confinement and indignity ’

history for Herb, through the non-linear narrative. For example, in Herb’s final moments, Stevenson reflects on all the contextual information about his life which the court had not considered: ‘I thought of all the evidence that the court had never reviewed about his childhood. I was thinking about all the trauma and difficulty that had followed him home from Vietnam. I couldn’t help but ask myself, where were these people when he really needed them? Where were they when he returned from Vietnam traumatized and disabled?’ (pp. 89-90). The use of repeated rhetorical questions encapsulates the flaws of the broken justice system and how it failed Herbert. Moreover, the semantic field of language has words which are related to trauma, abuse and suffering, all contributing to a sense of the hardship of Herbert’s life. extent as the memoir. It does, however, place a greater emphasis on Herbert’s execution than the text, making it an emotionally charged culmination point of the film by using elements such as music and lead-up sequences of the humiliating experience of his body being shaved in preparation for his death. Yet despite the emotional potency of the film, and the similarities to the dialogue in the text’s rendition of Herbert’s death, it fails to provide the same level of context and backstory as the memoir, which gives detailed narratives about the traumas that led individuals like Herbert to their incarceration. This has the effect of not giving the audience as full an understanding of the systemic issue. The film’s director, Destin Daniel Cretton, does use setting, sound, and camera techniques to emphasise Herbert’s physical confinement and indignity to create a hard-hitting emotional impact on the viewer. The emotive techniques surrounding the tragedy of Herb’s death call into question the inhumanity of the death penalty in the US. Throughout the scene of Herbert’s death in the film starting at 01:13:00, Cretton uses close-ups to capture Herb’s raw emotion, his fear and vulnerability. The camera lingers on a close-up shot of Herb without his eyebrows and this shows his inability to escape from the dehumanising process, and his loss of dignity in the humiliating process of having his whole body shaved in preparation for the electric chair. While the fact of him being shaved is described in the text, 'They had shaved the hair off his body to facilitate a “clean” execution’ (p. 88), the phrase “clean execution” is ironic as whilst it refers to the In comparison, the film adaptation does not provide these flashbacks or contextualisation to the same

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