Time For Catch-Up

It's been over a month since I blogged. There was Christmas, then my old laptop crashed. This last week I've been redecorating the kitchen, but more on that later. For the next few posts, I'm just going to catch up on old news and put my Christmas pictures up. Here's the delicious quiche I made for Christmas morning. The "petals' are sliced portobello mushrooms.

Here's Hobbes. He's asleep as I will be in about fifteen minutes.
As you can see the cranberries I strung did get hung on the tree. The tree looked just as beautiful when we took it down during the first week of January as when we put it up.
The bower on the banister is still up. I'll leave it up until after Valentines Day.

Fast-forwarding to the present, Angus and I went to see Capote this evening. It's a very powerful film. I was so struck by how he used the murderers and the story they created - and which he so skillfully told - for self aggrandizement.

I read In Cold Blood in the 70's. I was struck not by its prose or Capote's skill as a writer, but by the bleakness of the story, the bleakness of that underbelly of America in which children are abused, insecurities turn into mental illness and pain translates itself into violence.

Capote himself, if the film is at all accurate in its depiction of what he went through in researching and writing the book, felt great guilt and conflict in both writing the story and befriending the murderers. While he grew to care about them, he found his relationship with Perry - and all that it entailed - a drain.

He used them and wanted them to lose their final appeal and be executed so he could both finish his book and get his life back. It meant he had an ending for his book that was satisfying to the public. It also meant he didn't have to face the uncomfortable fact that, in yet another way, he was an outcast. Not only was he a homosexual at a time when the term "gay pride" did not exist, he had a voice and mannerisms that singled him out as a very odd little man. Add to this that he was now someone who could see a cold-blooded murderer's humanity.

Despite his ability to empathize with Perry, Capote must have seen the truth, that Perry was still a dangerous and unpredictable man. A friendship with someone who killed a family of four in such cold blood is impossible to justify, not just to others, but to oneself. Capote had to be fighting the normal feeling of repugnance toward such a person. What a war within himself, to see Perry in one moment as a tragic figure, then blink and see the monster. Ultimately, Capote wasn't really trying to save Perry from death, but only buying time - through appeals - during which he could get the "inside" story.

And what of the family that died? They became mere footnotes to the "real" story, the story of what makes a murderer kill. That's what we all want to know. Or say we do.

Yet why do most people want to know? It's not to understand what creates a murderer so that they may help create a society that creates nurturers instead of murderers, but for the adrenaline thrill of the story. Of that I'm convinced. And that is the true tragedy inherent in the death of that family.

The film is brilliant and mesmerizing. It makes me wonder if I could write anything that would be as real or so self-serving of my own need to write. Everything I've written seems like Pablum in comparison.