Looking for Justice in The Trial
Orson Welles’ 1962 The Trial (adapted from Franz Kafka’s novel) opens with a doubled narrative device. First, a prologue told in voice-over alongside pin screen scenes—a parable also written by Kafka as “Before the Law” and incorporated into the text of The Trial. As the parable concludes, Welles maintains the voice-over to introduce us to our story proper, including a warning as to its irrational and discomfiting nature. “Before the Law” will come up later in the film, and these layered devices give the film a somewhat Borgesian quality. (It is not only labyrinthine, but also self-referencing and recursive.)
Finally to begin: Josef K (Anthony Perkins) awakes suddenly to find a man (Arnoldo Foà) in his room asking him questions. No context, identification, or motive is given to Mr. K (as the man persistently refers to him), but it seems clear he’s an investigator for the police. He’s asked about his fellow tenant Ms. Burstner (Jeanne Moreau), who’s employed at a nightclub. At the same time, K is asked why he seems so fixated on Ms. Burstner, why he seems so intent on talking about her. Such doubling occurs at every juncture: Why doesn’t Mr. K simply admit his culpability, though no accusation has been made explicit? Why is Mr. K so inquisitive about the actions of the police? Why is Mr. K so reluctant to cooperate?
Josef’s lack of understanding will hardly be attenuated as he seeks answers from Ms. Burstner and his landlady. His coworkers offer no assistance, and his initial trial appears as though staged for some theatrical performance without any real substance. His uncle and cousin are concerned, but their means of help only mire Josef in further murkiness. And the aid of a lawyer (played with languid menace by Welles) may be leading him deeper into the maze of bureaucracy.
As with anything based in Kafka, the events of the plot are not where the work finds its power. Rather, the (il)logic of the plot is in the service of the sense provided by the story and by the form with which it is told. So to return to the beginning: When Josef is jarred from his sleep, he finds himself (and we find ourselves) in an apartment where the ceiling is too short—hardly a few inches above Mr. K’s head—and the drawer to his dresser refuses to close. If the investigator’s responses reject Josef’s attempts to find his social footing, then his surroundings preclude his ability to be “at home” in this place (even though it is his apartment). Josef K exists in a world that resists his humanity in its very structure.
Welles and his crew emphasize that resistance through the mise en scène. The production and set design of The Trial are astounding and confounding in equal measures. The apartment blocks of K’s residence are all concrete, rigid, brutalist and imposing on the otherwise empty landscape. His office is a voluminous hangar of desks that also reveals its construction in the gaps between the floor and the lights and the windows—the inkiness surrounding the set makes it feel false but also piercingly psychological. Edmond Richard’s cinematography captures it all in hard angles and harsh lighting. The world of The Trial is a world void save for the forms imposed on it by the authorities.
Anthony Perkins enters this void world with fervor, turning Josef’s confusion into insistence into desperation into self-righteousness into fury without any visible seams. At times the dialogue crackles with the alacrity of a screwball comedy, though one stripped of its exuberance. It’s a fully inhabited performance as a man chaotically lost. It’s as though Josef’s perpetually stuck in the final reveal of an episode of The Twilight Zone. As with his infamous turn in Psycho, Perkins is apt to employ every minute expression, every gesture, every verbal stumble to assemble a singular character. It’s a dexterity that was appreciated far too little in his time, which should have opened up numerous and varied roles for the actor instead of resulting in his typecasting. (There’s an essential echo of Perkins in Andrew Garfield’s look and acting style, and the latter’s ongoing career demonstrates the versatility and vibrancy of such a skillset properly recognized.) To be sure, there’s a crazed nature to his performance here, as well; but K’s insanity is the culmination and logical endpoint of the illogic of the system he’s caught inside. Josef recalls that, as a child, he would “feel sick with guilt” even when he didn’t know what for. Perkins infuses this recollection with such angst that we find it not only believable, but recurrent.
Within the opening fable, the statement is made that “everyone should have access to the law.” In our day, the claim is so self-evident that it draws no attention to itself. But what is the law—what sort of being is the law? There’s no guarantee that such a being is orderly; and if orderly, no guarantee that it is clear and understandable; and if clear and understandable, no guarantee that it is attentive to the needs of the people; and if attentive, no guarantee that it is benevolent and desirous to meet those needs. In Mr. K’s case, the law seems to fail on all of these accounts, as evidenced in his first encounters with the police. As soon as he speaks (half-asleep, anxious, at sea in the situation), the police throw his words back at him. Even verbatim records are not the same thing as truth: language can connect us to each other, but it can also entrap and alienate, as it does to Josef K.
Such duplicity is infectious. Later on, Josef becomes a participant and perpetrator of this absurdity as he harasses other accused men waiting for their trial. He berates them for their listless lack of self-righteousness, even though he’s trapped with them. Still, Josef is undeniably “a victim of society.” Even in his attempt at freedom, Josef K cannot do other than play their game.
The rules are suspect, even nonexistent. But K’s posture, his attitude within and toward this world, is one that expects (and therefore demands) justice. To demand justice within this world is to accept it on this world’s terms, and so K arrives at his “justice.” It is cruel, yes; random, yes; impoverished, yes; but it’s the only justice known to this world. It’s a tragedy that Kafka’s vision would feel prescient and damning so soon after he wrote it. It’s a further tragedy that it could feel relevant again, both within the United States and elsewhere around the world. The lasting power of Kafka’s The Trial, so frighteningly rendered in Welles’ adaptation, is that authorities, if they choose to do so, have the power to manifest, enforce, and elongate the byzantine.
