In Cold Blood: The sickest movie we’ve watched all year.

      This movie was, first of all, one of the greatest movies I’ve watched all year.  The movie had many applications of modernist attributes throughout the movie.   One of the more obvious attributes of modernist literature is the re-structuring of literature and the reality it re-presents.  In “In Cold Blood”, the story itself isn’t just a mix of flashbacks but the storyline itself is a jumbled mess.  It is as if the storyline was a nice organized deck of cards that Truman Capote took and shuffled and never organized it again.  Another common theme in the movie was the dive into the inner psychosis of Perry Smith.  Truman found this dive to be necessary so he could that Perry Smith wasn’t this cold blooded killer but a brilliant man whose psych wasn’t able to handle the type of life he led.  Those were the major attributes but a couple of the minor ones were the appearance of various typical themes and the tightening of form (an emphasis on cohesion, interrelatedness and depth in the structure of the aesthetic object and of the experience).  The way I saw it, the tightening of form was used to connect the scenes seamlessly so as to say the journey as a whole made Perry go nuts.

    In most of the stories we have read, there may have been an experimentation in form, but the story still had a linear base on which to go off of.  In “In Cold Blood”, Capote tells what the killers did up to the robbery, the finding of the bodies and the investigation, then what Smith and Hitchcock did until they were caught and then trial and subsequent punishment.  The story starts with the men going for what is supposed to be an easy job.  You then find the friends of the family finding the dead without knowing but still have a good idea what happened.  The story then tells of how the detectives find out who killed this poor, unfortunate family.  The story then tells how the men enjoyed their life on the run.  It Truman’s way of showing us without us directly casting judgement, the differences between Hitchcock and Perry.  Then the story shows us how they were caught and the sentence they were handed, the death penalty.  While the two killers awaited their sentence, you once again saw the difference between the two killers.  On one side, Dick Hitchcock was a man who accepted his fate and acted like the convicted killer he was.  On the other hand, Perry Smith fought any way he could to try and get his sentence changed.  He also didn’t egg on the media, he drew amazing pictures and read books and talked to one man and one man alone.  He used this interesting story line to show that Perry Smith, unlike Dick Hitchcock, is a man who was a victim of his environment.

      Another way Capote was able to show who Perry truly was, was through an dive into his inner psychosis and showed what made him tick.  In certain scenes you could see his mood change in an instant, as if he had multiple personalites, one for his current life and another for the memories of his times hunting for treasure and the good times he had with his father.  You could see also the dreadfull memories of his life through flashbacks of his mother’s alcoholic and adulterative habits and his father.  Truman also shows how Hitchcock pushes his buttons to the point where he just goes on arampage and kills everyone of the family.  Capote also tries to show Smith as a man who doesn’t deserve to be dealt the punishment that he is given.  I’d have to agree because if he prosecuted today, he would be analyzed by a psychiatrist who would deem Smith, in my humbled opnion, to be not in the right mind to have commited these murders in such a violent manner.  Capote is trying to tell his readers that Perry Smith is once again the product of his environment and not truly psycho-maniac killer.

     These last two attributes that I noticed were only truly obvious in one scene each.  The tightening of form was most obvious when “Mr. Exibitionist” Dick Hitchcock starts having sex with the lady he brings home there is a seamless transition into a flashback for Perry to when his mother, drinking away is cheating on his father right in front of his eyes.  The transition is so seamless that I thought the scene was still of Dick having his way with his lady friend when in all actualaty, Perry was having a very painful flashback.  The last attribute I saw was when Perry was getting hung and two reporters are talking about what this hanging will do.  The younger, more naive reporter believes that something monumental will be done but, the truth was spoken from the older, more experienced reporter, who said thery say things will be done but the action that is said to happen will not happen and this whole process will just happen again, the hanging of these men will change nothing.  This is a typical theme found in modernist literature, a belief that God doesn’t exist and the critique of the traditions of the culture.

Long Day’s Journey into blog

     I know I am the guy who usually obsesses over the ambiguous endings of many of our modernistic stories, but there really nothing left up to interpretation.  O’ Neill delves deeper into the inner physch of his characters.  The physch of many of O’Neill’s character are all evaluated.  Whether it be Tyrone’s love for his wife versus her addiction and how it affects his family to Jamie love for his brother even though his parents hold his brother on amuch loftier shelf then him.  Of Course, there is also Eugene’s mother, a dope fiend, as Eugene calls her.  Eugene’s mother is the most intriguing because not only does the clock keep track of time during the play but the state of Mary’s drugged up state increasingly gets worse as the play goes on, till eventually get to the white ghost scene where Mary is drugged out that she doesn’t even recognize her own family.  Mary drugged stupor introduces many other attributes of modernism such as  a restructuring of literature for those times when Mary would go off on a flashback of past times with a demenor to suggest that she is detached from reality.  Many attributes are wrapped into this story because of the physcological problems of the whole family. 

         In one of the sources I found on Long Day’s Journey into Night, titled “The Fog of Substance abuse”, they link Mary’s addiction not as a reason to dull the pain and not as a way to escape from her family but as a way to escape what her life has become over the time she has lived with Tyrone.  A symbol of Mary’s addiction is her hands and the rheumatism that plagues them.  Shes sees her hands going from young, beautiful, and useful to old. ugly and useless.  At first the morphine was for the pain of the rheumatism but now it is used to make her hands and in some instances her life seem younger and more beautiful.  This is what causes her dive into her dillusional state and helps time move smoothly in the story.

Ms. Baz, if you want to view my source . . .