In Cold Blood
an inquiry into law, literature and violence

Law serves justice by means of violence. It “cures” the perpetrators of violence by inflicting violence upon them; violence that is dark, secret, silent and often disturbingly dignified. It is this violence orchestrated by the juridical apparatus that Michel Foucault talks about in Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason and also in Discipline and Punish. While ancient and medieval periods served justice by explicitly severing bodies, the modern juridical apparatus, powered by modernist rationality, does the same by denying freedom to the accused. The accused thus retains life but at the cost of freedom. And even when the law condemns someone to death, it makes sure it is a quiet, bloodless, painless death; an act performed through scientific, objective means in absolute secrecy. Justice served to perfection by absolutely rational means. Robert Cover echoes these very articulations of a disturbingly dignified violence in his article Violence of the Word. The notions of pain and suffering are strictly tabooed in the juridical vocabulary. The idea is just to deny freedom, or life for that matter, but without pain and suffering. Consequently, the “word” as Cover would say, inflicts violence without pain and suffering. Inferentially, pain and suffering get lost in legal narratives when crime translates into justice. Notions of pain and suffering being lost in legal narratives are often re-invoked and relived in art; in literature, paintings, music, films etc. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood documents this rediscovery of pain and suffering exceptionally. A story about the murder of a prosperous Kansas family by two criminals Dick and Perry, In Cold Blood celebrates pain and suffering with disarming gruesomeness. Capote weaves a complicated psychological story of two parolees who together commit a mass murder. A large part of the story involves the intense psychological relationship of the two felons that culminated in this cold-blooded crime. What stands out in Capote’s account of the murders is the fact that he succeeds in bringing out aspects of pain and suffering that got lost in juridical interpretation. Capote began researching for the book even before the murderers were captured and a lot of it was conducted while they were still under trial. He covered every single detail of the act, interviewing local residents and investigators assigned to the case and took down thousands of pages of notes. The fact that he could actually live the reality that he was about to document made In Cold Blood a seminal work on true crime and the first non-fiction novel ever written. Walter Benjamin’s famous statement, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” brings out the loss of pain and suffering at the hands of the juridical apparatus. In Cold Blood, pregnant with details of the murders, with graphic descriptions of the methods employed in committing the crimes, successfully brings out this pain. Capote manages to document the violence inflicted upon the family and betters it by capturing the violence implicit in the psyche of the perpetrators. This is where Benjamin’s thesis on the parallelism of civilization and barbarism applies to In Cold Blood, with violence inflicted upon the family representing the former and the psychic violence of the perpetrators representing the latter. It is precisely this barbarism that gets lost in the juridical narrative and that Capote brings out so vividly. The book spawned two movies, In Cold Blood (1967) and Capote (2006). While both were cinematic articulations of the same event, Capote, fueled by Philip Seymour Hoffman’ sublime impersonation of Truman Capote, succeeds in


terms of representation of reality. As a visual narrative, Capote, is dark, subtle and disturbing in its representation of the events as well as the psyche of the perpetrators. The film, as a text that is textured of violence and the ensuing pain, can be analyzed through both Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality and McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the massage/message.” In terms of representing the infliction of violence by the perpetrators and the pain thereby produced, first on the screen in the narratives of the criminals, and then reproduced and externalized onto the viewer, Capote conforms to both of the aforementioned concepts. These interpretations of the film as well as the text, however delineate essentially from Benjamin’s storyteller. So while Truman Capote assumes the role of the storyteller as the author of In Cold Blood, Bennett Miller does it as the director of Capote. And as narratives documenting crime, violence and pain, the book as well as the film transcend limitations of media and emerge as “storytellers” themselves. Law, in this sense, betrays experience by denying it pain and suffering in legal narratives. Benjamin probably realized this when he commented, “for never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly…..” To this extent, these media succeed in documenting experience where law, as providing the expressionless with expression according to Benjamin’s “tradition of the oppressed” thesis, fails. 

Mahim Singh