Capote (cuh-poe-tee)

We just went to see Capote... at an independent theatre with beer.. Haha. I liked the place, even though hardly anyone was there. It is an interesting movie. Quiet, sort of slow in a necessary way, stark rather than romanticized. It is about Truman Capote, an American writer who was friends with Harper Lee and who wrote In Cold Blood about the brutual murder of a family in Kansas. What I like most is the writer's curiosity that says there is a story behind even a murderer, a human story with a human face and name. Of course the curiosity does not belong exclusively to writers, but they especially want to see the person behind the act. I do believe there is a complex and confusing mess of circumstances and family members (or the lack thereof) and emotions and chemical balances or imbalances and a thousand other things that make a person who they are. The most brutal killers or other kinds of criminals (rapists, etc.) typically have a desperately sad story of not receiving love, experiencing total abandonment, and many other unthinkable things. It doesn't make crimes excuseable, it just makes them as tragic as they really are. Tragic not just for the victims and their families, but tragic also for the criminal, and his/her family, and for the human family everywhere.