Capote


Another matinee today ... this time I saw Capote. It was one of those films where two or three people jump up out of habit when it ends, but everybody else sits there, watching the credits roll. There's no gimmick, no out takes or anything. There's just a silence. It is the silence we felt after "The Deer Hunter," or, "Matewan." This reluctance of the audience to leave the theater is a tribute to the level of emotional engagement a film achieves.

The review in Salon touches on this film as being somber, and on Capote's being a cruel manipulator and yet a sympathetic character. I didn't find the film "exceedingly somber," as did the Salon reviewer. I found it remarkably balanced between darkness and light, and I found Capote held that same balance.

He was a man who was not separated from his shadow. Of Perry Smith, one of the killers, he said he thought they were raised in the same house. "I went out the front door, and he went out the back."

There is always that moment of choice, when a man can move into the society or outside it, and inside every man there is the unlived life of the opposite choice. Capote was the darling of New York society, but, like Smith, as a child he was constantly abandoned, and shuffled off on relatives. From a lazy point of view he was falling in love with Smith. From a more honed perspective he was meeting his shadow, and watching as it fell through the trap to die of a broken neck.

Capote himself, perhaps because of his feminine bent, preferred alcohol poisoning.

The juxtaposition of Capote with the men around him is captivating because he is such an unrepentant faggot, right down to taking it personally that the killer, to whom he is supposedly emotionally bound, might get an appeal by the Supreme Court, so that he can't end the book. This self-centeredness is what is so confusing, and usually off putting, to more conventional men. They are tied to a top down morality, as are sled dogs, for example.

Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent, expresses this as the defining aspect of his personality when he tells Capote that if the lawyer he hired for the killers manages to get them off on appeal, he'll come to Manhattan looking for him. Somehow the dialogue was more believable if one didn't take time to envision Dewey's showing up in Manhattan to whip Truman Capote's ass for breaking the code of the midwest.

Robert Bly wrote about the male shadow. He gave four examples of ego-shadow sets, but the first one was the male's love of the pack mentality, where the group works like a well oiled machine. This is what drives the structure of corporations, the military, etc. Men really like that experience of being in a well defined, hierarchal structure, where there is no ambiguity. At its extreme God is on top in the form of a divinely connected King, or chief executive. The shadow side of the set is making decisions cooperatively and sharing power, as was the idea behind the United Nations.

Somebody like Capote confronts the male ego because he is outside the structure, as any real artist has to be, and is fraught with ambiguity. He seems to ignore, or refuse, everything which would define his maleness in the larger structure, and yet he has achieved a very powerful place in the culture.

See that little faggot
Got his ear-ring got his make up on,
Let me tell you buddy that's his real hair
That little mother-fuckers got his own jet airplane
Little faggot is a millionaire

We got to install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen delivery
We gotta move these, refrigorators
We got to move these colour TV's

Capote's ambiguity allows him to lie easily and convincingly to protect his work in progress when he is talking to Smith. It is as if he has affection for him, but at the same time has the capacity to compartmentalize and prioritize so automatically that he isn't bothered by the conflict between loving somebody and feeling victimized by his appeal dragging on, delaying his execution.

Ultimately it is the successful portrayal of this decidedly masculine characteristic behind the flaming persona of Capote, that makes this film so interesting. It reveals the person behind the facade in confrontation with his shadow side. The direction is impeccable, the technical work is, also. But a lot of films are well made technically and still bore anyone expecting some manna in the medium.

For me the defining moment of the film was when Capote had finished his book and was holding court. A man tried to express himself to Capote, to say how Truman had revealed something of unspeakable horror. The writer was still for a moment, and then when the man had gone he said, "Dad, come on back here." And he began to joke about the man being his father. Behind the sarcasm there was the truth of the power of the rejection by the father. There was some secret connection, and it was similar to the connection between Capote and the massive stone prison, dominating the overcast and frozen Kansas prairie.

Capote provides an escape from the ordinary, an emotional journey full of darkness and light, and delivers the audience back into a stilled, altered state, watching the screen in silence like witnesses unable to tear themselves away from the scene of the crime.

Posted: Fri - October 7, 2005 at 06:13 PM