Welcome to False Choices. Every Friday I review a formerly popular cultural artifact, book, movie, music, etc. , that sheds some light on our current cultural landscape. Enjoy and please subscribe if you are new here. On Wednesdays I publish a short story. This substack is free, so subscribe to appreciate my work.
Truman Capote first became known to American with the publication of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a 1958 novella about a ‘working’ girl in New York City in the late 1940’s. It was made into a popular but phony film in 1961 (I reviewed both here). In Cold Blood followed in 1966, a true crime novel, the first of its kind, a six year project for the author.
I remember seeing the author Truman Capote for the first time on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. If you search Youtube you’ll find that Capote was a regular on talk shows throughout his career. He was a fairly candid and public man and it would have been the height of hypocrisy if he had not been on the talk show circuit regularly because he wrote about real people, thinly veiled sometimes, in their real lives. In this interview with Dick Cavett, Cavett puts it back to Capote, asking him a long list of questions about his own personal life, including his drug addiction. “What’s good for the goose…”
The film Capote takes a similar slant; it depicts the real Truman Capote as the writer of In Cold Blood, Capote’s account of a gruesome murder in Kansas of four members of the same family in their farm home in the middle of the night. Capote believed he was on to something new, a book written in the form of a novel about real events, real people. He continued in this vein for the rest of his writing career, earning both accolades and enemies.
The genre Capote bequeathed to the reading public with In Cold Blood is alive and well today. Books that follow the story of real people in real life events, and the films made from the books, are very popular. Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, followed by the movie starring George Clooney is one example. Moneyball by Michael Lewis, movie starring Brad Pitt, is another; and The Big Short also by Lewis, the movie starred Steve Carell. I read all of these books and I have to admit they were pretty engrossing. The interesting thing is that while the book is based on reality, the movie is based on the book, which is based on reality. So the movie is two times removed from reality. Is it wise then to place too much truth on the movies in question, any more truth than any other completely fictional movie? (I’m not going to take this down the rabbit hole of what is truth, and does a completely fictional work have the ability to bring us closer to the truth than a non-fiction account; I won’t do it, I swear.) There’s no perfect answer here, but for myself the movies are purely entertainments, and working backwards, the books are also simply entertainments of a different sort, but not non-fiction.
Is In Cold Blood worth reading? I would say that it is. It does not shy away from divulging the real history of what happened, though Capote seems sensitive to NOT making the deaths of four innocent, very good people melodramatic or, worse, maudlin, in any way. Yet the book is eminently readable, likely because it does deal with reality in a way that make it approachable for the reader. Capote uses the methods and techniques of fiction to bear on this non-fiction story, but again he still avoids exploiting this very real story in vulgar ways. You have the sense throughout that he also wants to tell the story of how four good, decent people died one night at the hands of two very selfish, very evil men. We forgive him for making money in the effort; in fact, we are relieved to have a writer of his caliber deliver reality to us in a more humane and responsible way than what we often get from the evening news.
The movie Capote is a faux documentary about Capote’s life during the writing of In Cold Blood. Turns out that writing about real life is not as easy as it sounds. As the case against the two murderers wanders through the appeals process, Capote nearly loses control of himself, and the story of how the murders were committed and why. The movie also provides a glimpse into the soul of the writer who wants to tell the story of real life events to a paying public. In order to achieve his goal, the writer ultimately must concede a certain humanity to the subjects of his tale, regardless whether they deserve it or not. Capote’s frustration with the process reaches one of many high points when Perry, one of the murderers, attempts to describe his partner in crime Dick’s obsession with sex. When he tries to elaborate on how magazines exacerbate Dick’s ‘condition’ Capote fires back “Yes, I know what exacerbate means, Perry!”
In Cold Blood would make an excellent read this summer, I strongly recommend it; and once you complete it try Capote the film. Phillip Seymour Hoffman does an admirable job as Capote. It’s a film without a lot of action, but it has good pace and enough tension to keep you interested. I saw it on Youtube for free.
Feel free to share far and wide, my posts are always free!