At what point do we admit that we are wrong about something?
In most Perry Mason episodes that I remember, Mason interrogates the guilty party on the stand in a hearing and pushes them into a logical corner, where they promptly confess: “Alright, Mason, I did it! You got me!” Cut to Mason having a drink in his office with Paul and Della and reflecting on how he’d reasoned out the truth yet again, garnished perhaps with a bland joke.
In that neat fictional world, a game has been placed to completion. A winner is decided. The loser has conceded. A new legal and social ritual begins next week.
But the entire structure is dependent on the guilty party conceding. They never take the Fifth, delay the trial, refuse to attend the hearing. They fold when Mason raises with a full house, because that’s the best play for them and everyone. This is what I call the “Perry Mason” or “fair cop, gov” standard of guilt. When confronted with a reasonable proof of guilt, one concedes, because the contest is over.
To step out of the Perry Mason realm of logical accountability is to cease to be human and become something else, and so it never happens in the show.
Note that conceding is not apology. Mason is not trying to get his guilty party to apologize, but to just admit they are guilty and that they have lost, so the episode can conclude. We can see this same reasonable structure in another hokey TV show that began the year Mason ended, 1966. A little more aggressive, but Kirk always sought resolution before victory, and afterward, he reclines in his captain’s chair, attended by Spock and McCoy, and cracks a joke.
In all cases, the story must end so another can begin. The opponent at the very least must slink back in the shadows because if they don’t, a two-parter will be needed to resolve the tension.
But that is popular fiction – real life rarely resolves neatly into one-hour chunks, minus commercials.
I’m not saying real life never resolves. What I am observing is that the frequency of resolution seems to have declined from my perspective. What would have triggered an instant fold no longer seems to apply. It wasn’t that long ago that the simple accusation of an extramarital affair would have triggered an immediate resignation by an elected official. Fair cop, gov. You got me, Mason. You win this time, Kirk. Game over.
To be more abstract, I see much less of a closely shared sense of what constitutes decent behavior in any significant contest of wills.
So the problem is not a lack of apology, or the need for one, that is not being met. Rather, it is a lack of admission, to refuse to even admit wrongdoing in the face of the obvious.
Even Gollum followed the rules of his riddle-game with Bilbo (he planned to murder him at some point later, true, but the game itself was completed without fatality, so points where points are due).
But at some point, however, the Gollums of the world have learned that there is a certain power in not admitting defeat. They deny defeat itself, because they have learned that as long as they don’t admit defeat, their story can continue, opening other strange possibilities.
This of course offends my Perry Mason sense of morality. When someone who is obviously guilty of something refuses to concede, it’s maddening. Not that they’re logically inconsistent – that’s already apparent. No, it’s maddening in the sense that a refusal to concede erodes the game of society itself. It is both a deeply unconservative and completely illiberal action. I’ve written about the technique of fence-pissing before as a means of eroding societal discourse; the decline of the Perry Mason standard of guilt is a parallel phenomenon. It’s not quite the same thing, though.
The most obvious contemporary example of a Perry Mason violation is Trump, as he delays his trials again and again in the face of painfully obvious guilt, We can also see it in even weirder hangers-on like George Santos or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Rudy Giuliani, who in any other society would not qualify for the rogue’s gallery of 1966-era Batman as its members knew how to surrender to the authorities when the situation called for it.
That would have been a very different show if, say, the Joker decided that he wasn’t going quietly, he wasn’t conceding, and he would take down the entire structure of Gotham out of pure selfishness just to see if he could break Adam West. Cue the plot of The Dark Knight.
But there is no Batman. There is not even a Perry Mason. And despite the title, I don’t believe in angels. I do believe in people that have only the most shallow respect for rules or society, however.
And the episode does not end. There are no commercial breaks. No deus ex machina. If we are to build a culture with a Perry Mason standard, we will have to embody it and demonstrate its worth over the more selfish conceptions of life. If there are no Perry Masons, we must become them – and of the trio of fictional worlds covered here, his strikes me as the one closest to the ideal – a world where justice is still difficult to achieve, but possible with teamwork and diligence.
What troubles me, though, is that in terms of actual plausibility, Mason might as well be Kirk or Batman. What happens when Mason meets the crook that defies his logical courtroom trap, concedes nothing, and escapes to do more evil and mock any concept of justice?
For that, alas, is the show that we live in. Its ratings may be poor, but there’s nothing else on.