Changeling and Attribution

In Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, the process by which social perception comes to dominate reality account for the manner in which characters are victimized by injustice. When certain personality traits are attributed to single mother Christine Collins, her desire to shed these perceptions runs up against the collective official personality of the Los Angeles Police Department. In the ensuing battle that pits perception against reality, Christine loses as a result of the disparity in access to the media that allows that powers that are to essentially defame her through media outlets despite that she would appear to be a sympathetic party.

The climate in which Christine Collins loses her only son is one ripe for certain forces to bring to bear their own personality in an effort to marginalize others as a means of deflecting negative publicity. With unlimited access to media outlets, Captain J.J. Jones of the LAPD knows that he will be able to orchestrate a publicity stunt of the highest order, designed to, in a worst-case scenario, attribute to Christine traits typical of an unfit mother in the interest of bettering the public perception of the LAPD in the wake of accusations relating to extrajudicial killings. As such, instead of accepting the perceptive consequences of public scorn for allowing judicial matters to be taken into their officers' own hands, the LAPD seeks to exploit its media-access advantage as a means of offsetting this public scorn.

In other words, Captain Jones and all those enabling him know full well that what they do to Christine is wrong; indeed, even after Christine explains that “Walter” is simply not her son, as evidenced through the film’s later scenes, Jones nevertheless insists upon Christine taking “Walter” home with her on what he calls a “trial basis.” Accordingly, Jones understands the evil that he is working and the manipulative designs he is bringing to bear upon a single mother’s livelihood. It is as though he simply does not consider this act to be an evil one in light of the need to mitigate the negative public perception of the LAPD’s police culture socialization and institutional personality. When Christine asserts her own personality in an effort to challenge the LAPD’s exercise of its own personal interests, she is retaliated against through attribution-based tactics that the film makes clear are typically undertaken during the time period.

As a result of endeavoring to challenge the LAPD, Christine is committed to a mental asylum, where her fellows explain that any woman without the means to assert her personality meaningfully against the authority of the LAPD is at risk of similar treatment. Indeed, Christine is soon told that if she accepts “Walter” as her son, thereby substantiating the desperately put forth perception of the LAPD’s good faith and goodwill, she will be released from captivity. However, having had attributed to her all the traits of an unfit mother, Christine is unwilling to further subjugate her personality to the political whims of the LAPD infrastructure, which continues to unjustly work against her in order to exercise full control over any and all public perception bearing on its institutional integrity.

Ultimately, it becomes clear that Christine’s actual son has been abducted and murdered and, as a result, Christine’s release is secured. After she leaves the institution, however, Christine takes great pains to ensure that others whose personalities have been marginalized through the socio-political engine of public perception do not also suffer the fate that has befallen her. In this regard, Christine’s subsequent efforts to secure the release of her fellow mental patients amount to an effort to vindicate the marginalized from the perceptions of their character that have been publicly attributed to them. But Christine’s work is not done, as she travels to visit her true son’s alleged killer, who himself has no need to mitigate public perceptions of is own personality, as what has been attributed to him is an accurate reflection of his personality. With no interest to alter the perception of his own character, Christine is unable to elicit information from the deranged child murderer. Nevertheless, the film ends on a hopeful note, with an escaped boy explaining that the real Walter did also escape and that he cannot confirm whether Walter was recaptured. Given this, Christine is left with hope that her real Walter may yet be alive and may yet be found, just as her real character may yet be perceived in the proper light free of the socio-political manipulations undertaken by an authority with far broader access to the tool by which perception evolves into reality--the media.

In Changeling, Christine Collins is victimized not only by criminal behavior of the usual kind but also by socio-political criminality that pits perceptions of her own personality and character against the need of a political infrastructure to create an alternate perception so as to accommodate its long-term survival in the public eye. The media emerges as the vehicle through which this battle of perceptions plays out, with the far more resourceful LAPD exercising its personality in a manner that makes it impossible for Christine to vindicate her own. The film makes clear that there exists a culture of this kind of perception-based manipulation from which those prone to marginalization are susceptible. It becomes Christine’s task to cast off both her own falsely attributed traits and those of her fellow inmates in an effort to fundamentally alter the manner in which power structures--ones knowingly engaged in fraudulently-rooted efforts to create a public perception inconsistent with the reality of the personalities on the ground--are able to exercise disproportionate media access as a means of falsely attributing traits to those who threaten its livelihood.

Work Cited

Changeling. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffery Donavan. Universal Pictures, 2008.