Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Bad Nerves and Cold Blood
After seeing the 1967 film of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood at Film Forum earlier this winter, I felt a big interest in reading the novel I'd long dismissed (without, of course, ever actually reading it) as sensationalist popular entertainment.
Through the great majority of the book, I kept returning a singular conclusion: "The movie got this better." And indeed, most of ICB strikes me as too granular, too obsessed with minutia instead of meaning -- as if the meaning of events can be teased out or tricked into appearing solely by unending fusillades of detail. But when Capote gets Dick and Perry to their cells on death row, where they wait out their years of appeals, his powers really rise to the occasion.
Capote captures the internal programming that compels his characters to act the way they do and does it in such a way -- a way I believe film can not -- that one is forced to recognize (think of Richard Brautigan’s poem “10%”) that if I only had a little more x and a little less y, that could be me sitting there waiting to die.
Through the great majority of the book, I kept returning a singular conclusion: "The movie got this better." And indeed, most of ICB strikes me as too granular, too obsessed with minutia instead of meaning -- as if the meaning of events can be teased out or tricked into appearing solely by unending fusillades of detail. But when Capote gets Dick and Perry to their cells on death row, where they wait out their years of appeals, his powers really rise to the occasion.
Capote captures the internal programming that compels his characters to act the way they do and does it in such a way -- a way I believe film can not -- that one is forced to recognize (think of Richard Brautigan’s poem “10%”) that if I only had a little more x and a little less y, that could be me sitting there waiting to die.
# posted by IzzyThePush @ 6:40 AM 
