To Kill a Mockingbird is an adaptation of a novel written by Harper Lee. The actual movie was released in 1962, during the civil rights movement. It was set roughly 30 years in the past, but was obviously meant to have a comtemporary relevance. The essential effect of the movie is to soothe the white conscience by suggesting that racial prejudice was worse in the past, and that massive bigotry is largely restricted to southern rednecks. That old displacement technique. There will always be a white liberal saint willing to fight for justice and equality for black folks.

The movie deals with the subject of race prejudice in an indirect fahion, by showing it through the eyes of a little girl. The voice over narration is given by Jean Louise Finch looking back on an event in her childhood. Her father Atticus Finch ( a likeable Gregory Peck) defended the black sharcropper Tom Robinson, a man accused (unjustly) of raping a white woman.

Atticus is a liberal messiah type figure and his oppisite is Bob Ewell, a white farmer, and father of the woman that accused Tom of rape. Ewell doesn't understand how Atticus could defend a black man, and beginns to stalk him and in the movies climax tries to kill his children. We again see the split in the white self, with the projection of undesirable qualities on a charactured villian, and the projection of themselves onto a herioc figure.

Both Atticus and Ewell are widowers and also have daughters, but that's the end of the simililarity. Atticus is middle-class, edcucated, liberal, displays bravery, peaceful, and an excellant father, infact an idealised figure. Ewell is working class, ignorant, cowardly, violent and a drunkard, also a child abuser. So we have the familiar idealised white self, and a kind of anti white-self.

Boo Radly, retarded white neighbour of the Finches. He's meant to be a double for Tom Robinson. Although white, as a victim of prejudice, he is symbolically black, and like tom a pariah in their community, wrongly accused of being violent and brutish even though their kind men. Both Boogeyman. There's a positive outcome for Boo which balances the negative for Tom, thus suggesting the posibility of overcoming prejudice. When Ewell attacks the children he is killed by Boo, not Atticus because that would taint him.

Funnily enough Atticus is revealed to be pretty powerless. He stands outside the jail obstensilbly to protect Tom from a lynch mob, instead one of the children saves him, by greeting the mob by name, thus shaming them. He also doesn't defent him in the court room, since he lost the case, and he can't defend his children from Ewell, so Boo saves them.

He's really a failure, but the movie applauds him for his integrity. All black folk in the movie follow the usual convention of being powerless and docile. Narcisssitic fantasy, and smug self congratulatory tale about overcoming racism.

Oh yep, A Time to Kill is sort of similiar.