Murder on film

Teaching In Cold Blood (again), trigger warnings, “pornoviolence"

I spent the last month teaching In Cold Blood. This was maybe the tenth time I’ve taught it. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it. Since I started teaching these true crime classes, I teach it at least once a year, and although it’s probably not necessary, I reread it every time. A few years ago I wrote a book about it, which meant reading it a few more times, and also reading most of its considerable corpus. 

At this point, my copy¹ is nineteen years old, annotated by half a dozen different versions of myself, dog-eared and yellowed and held together with packing tape. I know it better than any other book, better than my own.² It’s starting to feel a little weird; I’m not sure anyone needs to read a book, especially a book about a brutal quadruple murder, as many times as I’ve read In Cold Blood. Lately I sometimes find myself brandishing my battered copy in class, holding forth about its use of classical tragic conventions or pioneering examination of the killer’s psychology, quoting it from memory and thumping the cover, like some preacher in the church of true crime.

One of the counterintuitive things about teaching is that the better you know a text, the harder it is to teach. It’s easy to forget what I might need to explain to a college student reading it for the first time. That’s especially true with historical context. In Cold Blood first appeared as a serial in The New Yorker fifty-nine years ago this fall. It’s a relic of a bygone culture. To discuss it, a class has to collectively try to understand what life was like in an era nobody in the room was alive to see.

One obvious example is the book’s use of gay and racist slurs. I warn the class about them in advance, but still, they’re jarring to the point that we have to address them, lest students assume Capote was endorsing their use. I’ll point out that they only appear in the killers’ dialogue, as a way of marking them as part of a criminal underworld, and gloss the historical context: Capote was among the first out gay American writers to achieve mainstream success, and he wrote In Cold Blood from 1959-1965, during the apex of the civil rights movement. To further complicate things, the character who uses slurs most frequently, Perry Smith, is both the only major character of color and the one at whom gay slurs are most frequently directed in the book; his sexuality has been a topic of enduring speculation.³

I also warn students in advance about the graphic violence of the course texts: in the syllabus, on the first day, and before we read or watch a particularly grisly example. That’s probably unnecessary—I’ve taught hundreds of true crime students, and never once has violence been an issue. I have zero interest in engaging in the trigger warning debate, but practically speaking, it can sometimes be hard to know what content you might need to warn students about in advance, and it ranges wildly depending on context. But I’ve sometimes joked that the one thing you never need a trigger warning for is murder. While it was a common debate in Capote’s era, now the notion of objecting to literary violence seems sort of quaint. For my generation, my students’ generation—really any generation since In Cold Blood—violent media, whether fictional or “true,” has become banal. One of the goals of the class is to get people to see and understand exactly that. When you grow up being bombarded by vivid representations of murder presented as entertainment, it’s hard to understand that they were once considered controversial.

Which hopefully justifies one of the stranger stretches of the class, when we start three straight classes by watching famous murders. They’re all from the years Capote was writing the book, which also happened to be a watershed era for filmic depictions of violence. 

The first is the shower scene from Psycho, the Hitchcock film based on the novel of the same name.⁴ We talk about how, in 1960, a year after the Clutter killings at the center of In Cold Blood, Hitchcock rewrote the rules for mainstream depictions of violence, and that the resulting controversy helped make the movie a critical darling and commercial blockbuster, establishing a template Capote would follow five years later.⁵

Then we watch two real murders. The first is Abraham Zapruder’s home video of JFK’s assassination in 1963—I show a version that seems to have been enhanced in various ways, including blurring out the bullet’s impact. We discuss how the American media handled the novel dilemma of what to do with video footage of the President being murdered. After a bidding war for the film rights, Zapruder sold them to Life the day after the assassination, on the condition that the frame showing the bullet actually hitting Kennedy be omitted from publication. Even in a cultural moment where civil rights protestors were being savagely beaten on the news, newspapers were running photos of a Buddhist monk self-immolating in Vietnam, and moviegoers were flocking to see fictional murders—and even though Life, then one of the most popular media outlets in America, would publish stills from the Zapruder film a week later—broadcasting a real murder to the public seemed unfathomable.

That attitude lasted one more day. The morning after Zapruder’s footage was sold—it wouldn’t be broadcast publicly for years—as JFK’s accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was being perp walked through a police station basement in Dallas, Jack Ruby shot him on live TV. Oswald’s shooting was the first actual murder ever broadcast on American television. It was shown by accident, but stations immediately began re-airing the footage.

A door had been opened. Capote walked through it. In Cold Blood was in some ways the Psycho of American literature: a mainstream work by a respected artist that used murder as entertainment, riding the ensuing controversy⁶ to unprecedented success, essentially creating a new genre. A year later, in the pages of Esquire, Tom Wolfe would accuse Capote of inventing “pornoviolence.” Now we call it true crime.

This week we’re on to the film adaptation of In Cold Blood. I’ve never taught it before—I had never seen the entire thing until recently—so I’m curious to see how that goes.

---

I mentioned last month that this series of true crime posts is an experiment. I had a hunch, which a quick look at the analytics just confirmed. As of this writing, traffic is up 21 percent, and my first true crime post is the most popular one by a wide margin. Which reminds me of something I tell my true crime classes on the first day: I don’t teach this subject because I like it. I teach it because you do.

---

Some assorted recommendations, true crime and otherwise:

• Over the years, multiple friends whose taste I respect—one of whom is a lifelong Baltimorean—have urged me to watch the ’90s police procedural Homicide: Life on the Street, but it wasn’t available to stream until it recently debuted on Peacock. I’m three seasons in, and it is indeed fantastic. An episode from the second season, “Bop Gun,” guest starring Robin Williams (and a very young Jake Gyllenhaal), might be the truest depiction I’ve ever seen of post-murder grief. It led me to David Simon’s piece remembering Williams, which explains that the episode saved the show from cancellation.

• I was not aware of the new Netflix “documentary”—those air quotes are in neon—series, Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War, until I was invited to discuss it on an NPR station in Phoenix. I don’t know where to begin; by the end of the first episode I’d settled into thinking it was a hilarious parody. I’ll post the link to the interview next month, once it’s live.

• On a long American Airlines flight recently, I was browsing the in-flight documentary options and stumbled upon Happy Campers, a film about the summer residents of a waterfront trailer park in Virginia that’s about to be bulldozed by a luxury developer. I went into it expecting the same condescending partisan horseshit nearly every artistic representation of working-class people has become. Boy, was I wrong. It’s so good it made me want to make a documentary.

• A lot of people were, predictably, up in arms about that Atlantic piece that said college students can’t read the way they used to. Also predictably, it seemed like the people most up in arms haven’t taught a book to college students recently. I just finished teaching a long and challenging book by 2024 standards to a hundred and thirty undergrads. For what it’s worth, the situation didn’t strike me as drastically different from 2004, when I started teaching. That was before smartphones, before they’d all been subjected to No Child Left Behind or the scourge of standardized tests or whatever other reasons The Atlantic blames. 

• I told myself I wouldn’t make fun of Portland until I’d lived here for a year, so I have two more months to go. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate other people doing it, and I’ve been enjoying the new web series Hassan Hates Portland, which is filmed in my general neighborhood.

• Last month, John Hamilton’s memoir Honest to God came out. I read an early draft of it years ago, when I was working with Grub Street’s Memoir Incubator, and recently read it again to write a blurb. It’s a hell of a good story, and he can really write.

1. I have a few, including a first edition I received as a gift long ago, but the one I actually read is the one in this post’s header photo, a Vintage International paperback with a vignetted photo of Holcomb underneath the killers’ eyes.

2. I recently opened my first book to check something and realized I can read it now as if it was written by someone else, because it was.

3. The book that article is about is very good, and devotes an entire chapter to the book’s “gay subtext”; I also discuss it briefly in mine. In my experience, students usually start asking questions about In Cold Blood’s obvious homoeroticism within the first fifty pages.

4. Which is based on the story of the actual serial killer Ed Gein.

5. There’s a recent documentary about the shower scene that I’ve heard is good; it’s on my to-watch list.

6. Judging by its reviews at the time, the violence of In Cold Blood was less controversial than Capote’s use of the term “nonfiction novel,” but that’s probably at least partly because of Psycho’s precedent.