Hero or a Villain: the Image of a Lawyer in Contemporary American Pop Culture

Abstract

Public opinion polls conducted in the USA during the last several decades show that lawyers have plummeted in public esteem. The author of the article draws attention to the reasons of such a sharp decline emphasizing the so-called “cultivation effect” from the films about “bad” lawyers. Contemporary American filmmakers and writers believe that most Americans dislike lawyers, so they make movies and write books about dishonest lawyers because they are more likely to resonate with viewers/readers. Popular culture “teaches” people to construct a view of reality by means of information derived from its works. The numerous “bad” lawyer movies along with some other factors have contributed to the decline of the public image of lawyers. The article provides examples from different popular movies and books where representatives of the legal profession are portrayed as people who lack honesty, mercy, loyalty to clients and their harmful habits often interfere with their professional life. Movie and book characters are difficult to classify on the binary bad-good scale because it’s their nuanced characterizations that keep viewers interested. TV lawyers are more positively represented because they need to make people feel empathy with them and watch such shows each week. It might happen that the cultivation effect caused by the positive TV lawyers portrayals swamps the cultivation effect of negative lawyer movies.

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