How 'Presumed Innocent' Uses Race To Make Us Complicit in Murder

Apple TV+ delivers a nail-biting update of Scott Turow's legal thriller that explores the implosion of a multiracial family while exploiting and seducing the rest of us.

Presumed Innocent’s Jake Gyllenhaal. Thore Siebrands/Wikimedia Commons Photo.

Caution! Spoilers ahead.

Scott Turow’s 1987 legal thriller Presumed Innocent was definitely due for an update. In the nearly four decades since its publication, a lot has happened to warrant a new look. The nation’s first Black president. The #MeToo movement. A significant decline in the public’s trust of our legal system from the Supreme Court down.

There’s been an uptick in the presence of multiracial families in commercials and TV shows. We’ve gone from The Jeffersons and Good Times to Scandal, Blackish, and Bridgerton. On the political stage, we’ve traveled from the quixotic to the plausible—from Shirley Chisholm to Kamala Harris.

Surely, the zeitgeist has shifted enough to serve up a multiracial family as the centerpiece of this year’s 8-episode update of Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+.

On one level, the decision to cast Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga as the interracial couple at the heart of this drama was a safe bet. The show is currently the top-rated TV series in the country.

But on another level

that casting was necessary for the series to probe the dynamics of mixed-race relationships. Is everything really as cheery in those unions as they seem to be in TV commercials?

Centering Presumed Innocent around a multiracial family was also necessary to make the audience complicit in the story’s curve-ball plot-twist at the end. This series uses race in order to make the story acceptable. That’s how it turns the viewer into judge, jury, and passive accomplice to homicide.

Turow’s novel and the 1990 film-version starring Harrison Ford flips the view of America’s legal system pushed by the Law and Order franchise. These previous takes on the story reveal that not every District Attorney has the integrity of Sam Waterston. Sometimes judges take bribes, cops conceal evidence, prosecutors are motivated by politics, investigations are sometimes vengeful, and juries aren’t always told everything they need to know to get to the truth.

Indeed, getting to the truth isn’t even the point

It’s all about reasonable doubt and legal tap-dancing to keep some facts from the jury altogether. What’s probative, what’s prejudicial, what is the presumption of innocence?

We get all of that in Scott Turow’s legal thriller and the 1990 film. But Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent is not especially interested in those things, though it does acknowledge the bugaboos of withheld evidence, vengeful prosecution, and limiting what the jury is allowed to consider.

This new take on the 37-year-old story has different fish to fry. And it relies on race to supply the Crisco.

With Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga as leads, Apple TV’s Presumed Innocent comes with plenty of racial subtext. We meet this family shortly after the opening frames. For those of us familiar with Harrison Ford’s white suburban family of three in the 1990 film, the first question that comes to mind is why the racial spin?

Bit by bit, the story provides reason enough

But by the time we reach the end of this 8-hour journey, we don’t realize that we’ve been seduced into approving a package that runs counter to the law. Under the pen of David E. Kelley, we have a story that subverts the law and exploits our sensibilities before we even realize what’s happened.

When we meet Gyllenhaal’s Rusty Sabich and Ruth Negga’s Barbara, theirs is already a marriage in ruins. Rusty has had an affair with an attractive, opportunistic colleague turned murder victim. His wife knows about it and remains in the marriage only for the sake of the family they both regard as special.

From the very beginning, we’re witnessing the aftermath of a troubled past. And their lack of chemistry shows it. If this family is so special, why did Rusty risk it all by sleeping with another woman? We don’t just have a man who cheats on his wife here. We have a white man cheating on his Black wife with a white woman.

I know. I know.

There are those in national politics who would say that Ruth Negga is Irish. They would question if she, like Kamala Harris, is really Black. But just as Kamala is both Indian and Black, Ruth Negga is both Irish and Ethiopian.

Regardless of election-year noise, it is possible to be both at the same time, and the specialness of that diversity is crucial to the TV series. What’s also at play, however, is the fact that some folks in our evolving zeitgeist can only see one thing or the other. A point Negga’s character alludes to when she tells Gyllenhaal, “Sometimes I think you forget that our son is Black.”

Despite the family’s genteel life in an upper-middle-class home

blackness comes with baggage. And though Gyllenhaal’s Rusty doesn’t say it out loud, the viewer would not be wrong to ask if that blackness is part of the encumbrance he’s trying to jettison though adultery.

He admits that raising children, paying the mortgage, both parents working—have all robbed the marital bedroom of sexual excitement. Hooking up with an attractive, intelligent colleague with no encumbrances is just easy—especially when she unexpectedly initiates their sexual journey in the bathroom of a diner. That’s how Rusty explains it in Apple’s version anyway.

In this updated take, when he thinks about his dead lover (Carolyn Polhemus), he resurrects their steamy sex life. During sex, she’s constantly competing with his Black wife. “Does Barbara do this for you?” she asks. “Does she do this? How about this?”

Barbara is Black. Carolyn knows it.

And Rusty is too clueless to see that his betrayal is not just a rejection of his wife—it’s a repudiation. If infidelity is an act of violence, this particular cheat is a kind of murder. It’s poetically just that he should be charged with homicide. And yet, after all this, the wife remains. For the sake of their special family.

Ruth Negga’s Barbara is not the kind of Black woman who sets fire to a BMW. Instead she begins a flirtation with a handsome Black bartender who holds a PhD in art. You want to cheat on me with a white woman? Well, I’ll cheat on you with a Black man. That’s the subtext here. And it comes with a passive-aggressive confession she makes at the height of the trial. This wife doesn’t need to burn a BMW to express her rage.

The stakes are different in the all-white version of the story.

When Harrison Ford thinks about his murdered lover in the 1990 film, the only sex scene he remembers is a tableau of shadow and light during which he hardly even moves. All his other memories focus on her beauty, elevating this ruthless woman to the level of goddess.

But neither the film nor the TV series really gets the psychological nature of a Love Jones the way the novel does. Scott Turow compares Carolyn’s allure to the Brownian motion, the action of molecules coursing against one another in the air.

This molecular activity produces a high-pitched hum some of us can hear, especially when we’re quiet. Most of the time, we choose to ignore it as we go about our lives. But sometimes, if you let it, that hum grows louder and louder till its blaring.

“When I started working around Carolyn the pitch rose, vibrated, sang,” Rusty tells his psychiatrist in the novel. In just that way, Carolyn consumed all his attention. And then the sex happened. After that, he’s willing to risk marriage, career, and family just to get another fix.

No slut-shaming allowed

Apple’s Presumed Innocent understands that slut-shaming is a non-starter in 2024. Its Carolyn Polhemus is sexual but does not sleep her way to the top as in the earlier versions.

Although it doesn’t come right out and say it, this new take on the story also understands that all this heavy sex occurs in a world without Roe v. Wade. When Carolyn becomes pregnant, which does not happen in the book or film, she intends to have the baby. A fact that leads to her death and Rusty’s eventual indictment, since DNA proves he’s that he’s the baby-daddy.

In order for the viewer to buy into this series, we need to care about whodunit. And we do. But those who think this new treatment ends like the book or film are in for a surprise.

Despite Rusty’s many shortcomings

the viewer must also believe in his innocence. We must believe that his multiracial family really is special. After all, they are sweet and loving to one another. They gather on the couch together and rally around Rusty to support him. They believe in his innocence. They show up in court.

But race is always present onscreen to support just how special they are. After all, this is an America that once believed marrying outside one’s race would be hard on the children. But this family, like many others perhaps, has overcome all that.

We must also believe that sometimes the brain protects us from ourselves. Especially if we do something we can’t reconcile with what we perceive ourselves to be. When the brain protects us in this way, it’s possible to commit an act of violence and disassociate from it. To become so detached from reality that it’s possible to separate oneself from the act itself—and go on living as if it never happened.

We first learn about this concept

when Rusty and Barbara’s daughter says she’s been studying disassociation in psychology class. At the time, we don’t realize it will become a rationale for accepting the identity of the real murderer. But the seed has been sewn in the viewer’s consciousness. And there’s no opposing attorney to object. No judge to tell us to disregard it.

Nor is there anyone to challenge Rusty’s explanation of what happened at the end of the series. We accept that the guilty party acted in self-defense and that only this special multiracial family needs to know that. Because we already have sympathy for this family and the murderer, we accept that.

We forget that our acceptance subverts the very legal system to which Rusty has dedicated his life. We don’t realize that it turns us into a judge and jury that delivers its own verdict. Without trial. Without due process. Without justice for the pregnant victim. Whom this special family regards as interloper—a destroyer who must be destroyed.

And therein lies the problem. The audience would not accept this story told in this way if Rusty belonged to an all-white family with a college-age daughter and baseball-playing son in high school. We would see their big house and Rusty’s Volvo, and many of us would be offended by the story of a privileged white family that gets away with murder.

But for some reason, Rusty and Barbara’s mixed-race family escapes that judgment. And we don’t mind at all. Or do we?

Presumed Innocent tells us some things are more important than justice. And that it’s alright for you to make that call. Not the courts. Say what you will about this premise, sold to us by a lovely mixed-race family. But if you were in the same position as Rusty Sabich and his family—what would you do?

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

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