Truman Capote
A sangue freddo

The release of this work at the time stirred up quite a hornet's nest. Positive and enthusiastic reviews, marking the birth of a literary genre, battled against accusations of macabre and gratuitous voyeurism directed at the author. Thinking of this latter track, I automatically recall that great film, though quite disturbing and complex, by Cronenberg known as “Videodrome”. The film starts by telling us about the creation of a flourishing and growing market of tapes that allow viewers to watch the violent death of the same actors. When I read “cynical voyeurism” I imagine these gray adults, locked in lightless houses, greedily and avidly devouring the images with their bird in hand. Animals! Beasts capable of getting excited by watching others' lives slip away and disappear, like the brief existence of warm breath on a winter window. I just can't link this to Truman Capote as “In Cold Blood” means something entirely different to me.

The stage of the heinous murder of an entire family is in a quiet and bigoted town of the American Midwest: 20 houses of the Lord, mostly Methodist, for 11,000 inhabitants. Irreproachable people now lying on a sticky bed of blood: all home, spontaneous and lush altruism, and church. Overall, a sort of Mulino Bianco family that, compared to them, Father Christmas is an egoistic, sarcastic bastard; with the father smiling because he's going to work and it's Monday morning, the children happy to show their preparedness at school. The beautiful teenage goddaughter has a boyfriend, but if you think she goes beyond holding hands and watching TV in the living room, well then, you're wrong. She, if she weren't now lying in the morgue with a precise hole in her head, could have really worn the white dress at the altar.

Capote combines storytelling and investigative journalism by describing to us the feverish way in which the police, neighbors, and journalists desperately try to make sense of a massacre that will bring the killer couple the dizzying sum of 40/50 dollars. To simplify, 10 nice green bills per skull. In the town and nearby areas, we can see a birth and suspense, like the gray and impenetrable layer of smog currently gripping Beijing by the balls, an aura of mutual suspicion that shuts all those locks which, before the massacre, were so unused they needed a fat and long bath in lubricant.

The problem, and here I try to give my interpretation, is that even today there is a portion of the population that believes our actions are constantly analyzed by the high-floor tenants with HD slow-motion and all the rest. Fine stuff, cutting-edge algorithms, statistics, and other shit we can't even imagine. For a 1960s Midwestern Methodist resident, therefore, man has a sort of rudder he can move at will to knowingly choose the direction to give his boat. But in the entire arithmetic world, there is no sum that can result in those pieces of flesh lying horizontally under a few meters of earth. Capote dissects the crime and analyzes it from every angle in search of a motive that can... White square on a white background. Not a damn thing to cling to. Accepting that it all comes down to misfortune, madness, chance, is hard to digest. And the fact that these pages proved so uncomfortable for many, in my opinion, testifies to the greatness of the work. The author in an unsettling way analyzes one of the countless and inexplicable injustices of everyday life to underline the fragility of our existences. A violent slap to the dreaming American public of the 1960s, urging them to distrust others. Because there are plenty of people who don’t give a damn about Divine Justice and about how righteous and honest your lives are, and can end it all with a click and a bang in rapid succession, as if it were a film.

While with methodical calm and continuous flashbacks Capote introduces us to the protagonists, he broadens his analysis. With detachment, he describes a part of the closed and bigoted, well-off bourgeois society, the poor but dignified one that tries to make a living with no hope for the future, and the decadent one that lets itself drift downwards and finally tries to climb back up with unfounded projects. The book, written at the height of the Cold War and before the 1968 protests, introduces us, among other things, to the U.S. legislative, prison, and psychiatric system. “In Cold Blood” brings to the surface many little things that at the time many would have liked to remain under the carpet making love to dust mites. Certainly not blurted out in such damn well-written ink that it even made it a classic.