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Last week, I saw Capote. I think people are probably comparing it the other period piece out there currently, Good Night and Good Luck.
But I think it maps really well to the movie I saw last night, Rent. Both movies have either major or minor themes about what people do for art.
The bohemians in Rent proclaim the importance of ideals and of art and proclaim "Viva La Vie Boheme!" They quit jobs, sell their possessions, drive across country, for their art. They are Artists.
Compared to Truman Capote, they're poseurs.
Once he starts researching the murder of a Kansas family for a New Yorker article, Capote develops a vision of a "new sort of book". Rather than a vague unformed desire for "Glory" or an idea that somewhere in them lies a film, his vision becomes painfully, crystalline clear. And he is willing to do anything, anything to achieve that vision.
Capote will lie, cheat, bribe, manipulate, do whatever it takes to get people to talk to him, to tell him what he needs to know to tell the story he needs to tell. He does not kill with his own hand, but he actively wishes for the death of two men, not because they deserve it for brutally killing four people, but because it will give him the ending he needs to finish his book. There is a chilling scene in the movie where he expresses the fear that the Supreme Court ruling "will go against me" (i.e., in favor of the killers), which simply underscores how invested he is in telling the story he wants to tell.
He succeeds, brilliantly: In Cold Blood is a masterpiece of twentieth century writing.
And he sold his soul to do it -- sold it so completely, piece by piece, that he didn't even seem to realize that he had done so until it was too late. Not until he was sobbing on his hotel bed that no one could have done anything more to save those men, and his friend Nell (Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird) honestly and brutally tells him, "Maybe, but the truth is, Truman, you didn't want to."
One could make an argument that, based on his other writings, and by the life he was living at that point, and the ease with which he sleazed his way into people's confidences, Capote didn't have much of a soul to sell. I think that's clearly wrong: after finishing In Cold Blood, Capote slid into alcoholism, and never finished another book. He died at the age of 59. He said that the book had ruined him. You could also argue that he was motivated by the possibility for fame, not by any driving artistic force; I think that, too, would be wrong, or a least incomplete -- Capote was already a best-selling author whose books had been made into successful movies.
Rent is full of people who view art as an abstraction, as an ideal, who are in love with being artists. Capote is about a man driven by the art itself. There's a difference.
But I think it maps really well to the movie I saw last night, Rent. Both movies have either major or minor themes about what people do for art.
The bohemians in Rent proclaim the importance of ideals and of art and proclaim "Viva La Vie Boheme!" They quit jobs, sell their possessions, drive across country, for their art. They are Artists.
Compared to Truman Capote, they're poseurs.
Once he starts researching the murder of a Kansas family for a New Yorker article, Capote develops a vision of a "new sort of book". Rather than a vague unformed desire for "Glory" or an idea that somewhere in them lies a film, his vision becomes painfully, crystalline clear. And he is willing to do anything, anything to achieve that vision.
Capote will lie, cheat, bribe, manipulate, do whatever it takes to get people to talk to him, to tell him what he needs to know to tell the story he needs to tell. He does not kill with his own hand, but he actively wishes for the death of two men, not because they deserve it for brutally killing four people, but because it will give him the ending he needs to finish his book. There is a chilling scene in the movie where he expresses the fear that the Supreme Court ruling "will go against me" (i.e., in favor of the killers), which simply underscores how invested he is in telling the story he wants to tell.
He succeeds, brilliantly: In Cold Blood is a masterpiece of twentieth century writing.
And he sold his soul to do it -- sold it so completely, piece by piece, that he didn't even seem to realize that he had done so until it was too late. Not until he was sobbing on his hotel bed that no one could have done anything more to save those men, and his friend Nell (Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird) honestly and brutally tells him, "Maybe, but the truth is, Truman, you didn't want to."
One could make an argument that, based on his other writings, and by the life he was living at that point, and the ease with which he sleazed his way into people's confidences, Capote didn't have much of a soul to sell. I think that's clearly wrong: after finishing In Cold Blood, Capote slid into alcoholism, and never finished another book. He died at the age of 59. He said that the book had ruined him. You could also argue that he was motivated by the possibility for fame, not by any driving artistic force; I think that, too, would be wrong, or a least incomplete -- Capote was already a best-selling author whose books had been made into successful movies.
Rent is full of people who view art as an abstraction, as an ideal, who are in love with being artists. Capote is about a man driven by the art itself. There's a difference.