Posts From Author: capote
Do The Movies Have A Future?
“Is the theater really dead?” asked Simon & Garfunkel once upon a time. Forty-five years later, and at the height of the movies’ annual silly season, one might well ask the same of the cinema. Whither the great American movie? Whither directors of integrity and vision? Whither criticism? These are the questions David Denby poses in his excellent collection Do The Movies Have A Future? (Simon & Schuster, 2012). It’s mostly reprints of his New Yorker articles but reworked and reordered to orbit his central worries. These include so-called “conglomerate aesthetics”, the notion that it’s “not only possibly but increasingly easy to attract audiences by making movies badly”, the loss of lyricism in the rise of digital cinema, and a decline in ethical seriousness in criticism. Sound grim? Worry not: Denby’s no wallower. Alongside sharp critiques of the movie industry as it currently stands are a series of lucid, sometimes rapturous readings of a selection of the greatest recent American movies, including Capote, The Tree of Life, Winter’s Bone, The Social Network, and (to my mind the best) There Will Be Blood. In the book’s final pages, we even find Denby an unlikely advocate for 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes. This isn’t stuffy stuff; Denby […]
Read MoreCapote’s Undoing
I’ve never been psychoanalyzed… I’ve never even consulted a psychiatrist… I work out all my problems in my work. — Truman Capote By the time Capote died, at the age of fifty-nine in 1984, years of substance abuse had shrunk his brain. His last completed book was In Cold Blood eighteen years previously. A heavily trailed follow-up, Answered Prayers, appeared in fragments so poisonous that the Park Avenue ladies whose adoration he’d cultivated for so long made a mass exodus from Mount Truman. His later years were characterised, in the words of William Todd Schultz, by “Studio 54, cocaine, prescription pills, Stoli vodka in an unmarked glass”. In a disastrous and notorious TV interview with Stanley Siegel, an evidently fried Capote confessed that his problems with alcohol and drugs would mean that “eventually I’ll kill myself… without meaning to…” Shortly before his death, he bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, knowing that his time was short. He died in the arms of his friend Joanne Carson. Schultz’s psychobiographical Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers (Oxford University Press, 2011) puts Capote’s spectacular implosion under the microscope, finding in his early life the blueprint for his early death. Answered Prayers was […]
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