Hijacking History

Like Spielberg, Bellocchio is driven by the idea that the reality of violence — ongoing in Munich, impending in Good Morning, Night — can sometimes remove even the most fervent partisan to a sphere beyond ideologies. The most curious element in Bellocchio’s film is its subplot. Chiara’s co-worker, Enzo, has written a screenplay called Good Morning, Night, whose narrative imagines a kidnapping much like the one the Red Brigades have set in motion. Chiara reads it and rejects it as a political critique because, she insists, “imagination never saved anyone.” But even as she argues with Enzo, we can see that empathy is operating on her, forcing her to rethink her old assumptions about the rectitude of violent political action. When Mariano, the leader of their small Red Brigades cell, announces that they have elected to execute their prisoner, she protests. “There are no limits in a revolution. Everything is allowed,” is Mariano’s answer, but his words sound hollow. They’re straw revolutionaries, only engaging to us when Mariano talks about his son, whom he’s forced himself to abandon, or when another of the group, Ernesto, longs for his girlfriend — the parts of their lives they’re supposed to be sacrificing to the cause. And the government ministers we see on the news aren’t living, breathing figures but stick men echoing policies that are in no way motivated by compassion or even loyalty. Among the partisans on either side, only Chiara, whose transformation is the turning point on which the movie rests, is fully alive. She alone is capable of acts of compassionate imagination, and that is her moral salvation. Imagination saves Avner, too, after nearly destroying him first; it saves him in the same way it saved Chiara, by returning him to his humanity.

The kind of imagination Capote critiques works in the opposite way. It imposes a distance between the truth of its subject and the manner in which a literary mind manipulates truth toward a literary end. Spielberg risks being accused of playing fast and loose with history by creating a character who quarrels with it. But Spielberg’s aim is to make us see — as Enzo’s screenplay helps make Chiara see — what our political blinders may have filtered out. Capote isn’t interested in the moral lives of Smith and Hickock, but in the lurid story of the murders they commit, however much his skillfulness as a stylist couches that fascination. He doesn’t choose to examine, as Spielberg and Bellocchio do, how violence can transform those who enact it. And he doesn’t appear to be morally aware, as they clearly are, of the precariousness of his own role as an imaginative chronicler of history — at least until the end of the picture, when he returns to Kansas to renew his friendship with Perry and watch (at Perry’s request) the execution of the two murderers. Smith’s gratitude for Capote’s presence appears to telescope the chilling distance he’s maintained from the young men’s fate, and to shake him to his core; their final hour leaves him in an almost paralyzed state — and a postscript reminds us that he never completed another book after In Cold Blood. He resides in deeper, more mysterious waters than Avner, but it’s clear that Capote also comes face to face with the implications of his actions. Avner acquires the depth of thought to throw those actions into doubt; in Capote’s case, the final unavoidable reality of Hickock and Smith brings him, perhaps, to view his own imagination with horror.