CULTURE CLUB: Journalism and Storytelling

Two movies show a key period in the trades

Chuck Twardy

The two movies could not be more unalike. One is as sparse and pale as the high prairie its cameras caress; the other crabbed, choked with smoke and charged with urgency. But if you see Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck within a short period, you might view them as companion pieces, snapshots of a time that seems as quaintly remote as the days of spats and boaters must have seemed then.


The two films traverse distinct periods roughly a decade apart. The event that launches Capote, the brutal murders of a Kansas family, happens on the cusp of the 1960s, whose fears of violence it would help to animate, thanks to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. The speech that frames Good Night, and Good Luck occurs a year earlier, in 1958, and in it the film's hero, newsman Edward R. Murrow, elegizes what already appeared to be a passing moment of high seriousness.


Both films are about bending the truth, and about the ascendence of entertainment over truth-telling.


As producer Fred Friendly, George Clooney literally kneels at the feet of David Strathairn's Murrow, to signal the on-air star, but he is the de facto star of Good Night, and Good Luck, its director, co-writer and clear sine qua non. In advance of the movie's release he talked up the parallels between McCarthyist Red-baiting and the antiterrorist fear-mongering of our day. How can we peddle freedom abroad, Murrow wonders, just this side of sententiously, when we stifle it at home?


To be sure, those parallels exist. Most contemporary progressives have known a moment when they've cast a glance over their shoulders before speaking, as producer Shirley Wershba (Patricia Clarkson) mentions doing in Good Night, and Good Luck. But you cannot overstate the degree of anxiety about communism in the mid-1950s and the stringent atmosphere created by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others, including Vice President Richard Nixon.


Some conservatives have tried to resurrect McCarthy's reputation by noting that communist spies were active in Washington, in service of an agenda which would have enslaved the nation. Their argument withers, though, when you weigh just how unlikely it was for those spies to have brought about that turn of events. By contrast, we have quite solid fears of the devastation terrorists might cause any day, and those criticizing our government rightly complain that its shameless name-calling has propelled the wrong war.


Like Good Night, and Good Luck, Capote is about a short but crucial slice of its subject's storytelling career, and Capote, like Murrow, was aware he was up to something momentous. The "About the Author" note in the 1965 first edition of In Cold Blood observes that Capote's work "represents the culmination of his long-standing desire to make a contribution toward the establishment of a serious new literary form: the Nonfiction Novel."


Screenwriter Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller chose to unfold their story in an unpromising interval of the In Cold Blood story, the five years between the sentencing and hangings of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Their quiet, ascetic treatment of that time helps highlight Capote's moral and physical dissolution, drinking and sulking as he confronts the necessary end of the story he recounts. He has helped keep Hickock and Smith alive by securing them better legal counsel, but they have to die for him to complete the book.


But if the film is correct, some of In Cold Blood is not. Having befriended Smith, whom he views sympathetically as a fellow tortured soul—both had alcoholic mothers—Capote's Capote must wrest from him the details of the murders, which unspool in a jail-cell narrative laced with grisly flashbacks. In Capote's book, however, Smith spills this tale while lawmen transport him by car back to Kansas from (where else?) Las Vegas. What's more crucial, Capote lies to Smith, and others, to get what he wants.


It is not too great a stretch to tie the novelizing of nonfiction that Capote accomplished with In Cold Blood to the trivializing of television that Murrow laments in the framing narrative of Good Night, and Good Luck. Pursuing shared victimhood with Smith, Capote spun one of life's many ugly, pathetic and essentially meaningless events into a touchstone of the decade—it is a splendid book—and he would crack up cocktail hours and talk shows while drinking himself to death over nearly 20 years. Murrow, shown patiently interviewing Liberace about marriage, would die in 1965, the year In Cold Blood was published, watching his medium slip further into precisely such empty amusement.


At the end of Good Night, and Good Luck, Friendly and Murrow, having just learned their fabled public-affairs show is being shunted to Sunday afternoon, muse about Milton Berle being named the most trusted man in America. Good luck, indeed.



Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.

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