CI 5472 Final Paper
Thom Swiss
14 December 2008
Creating Monsters in Media
Whenever someone flips on a television show, or pops a film into the DVD player, she is instantly bombarded with vision of how people should be viewed, and are constantly having their values and opinions changed by how the media portrays people. While it seems like mostly women characters fall victim to being scrutinized and judged, those who are in charge of the editing of reality programming or those who take creative liberties with how they put together films or television shows decide who their audience will see as good, and who they will see as villainous. Through reality television shows, such as America’s Next Top Model and The Apprentice, and a film adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, one can see different ways in which monsters are created by the media.
Reality television is one area of the media where there is a good deal of editing of raw footage to enhance the drama within the scenes, interactions, and tensions between characters. This is done to make sure that the most sensational bits and pieces of the show make it into the homes of millions of viewers each week. In supermodel Tyra’s hit show, American Top Model (ANTM), thousands of girls try out to win a premier modeling agency contract, and a photo spread in a popular teen magazine. In 2005, Guy Trebay wrote an article about this “least-real” reality series in the New York Times stating that, “Each Wednesday a challenge is posed: Is Nik too shy or Kim too butch or Nicole too passive-aggressive or Lisa too quirky (and sloshed) to make it in the cutthroat world of high fashion modeling? . . . The truth is that the winner is never Nik or Kim or Nicole or Lisa.” Not only does Trebay mean in that the those who are more offbeat do not win in the show, but in the modeling world in general. When these contestants can be described by only one or two different defining characteristics, it just goes to show that the editors picked an angle to show these particular women from and concentrate on showing moments that enhance their typecast. In the most current season of ANTM, one of the girls named Elina was an animal rights activist, and was what most people would consider as a representation of a strong woman. She held her ground, let people know when she was upset or angry, and did not let others push her over. Because of her characteristics, she was made out to be a bitch in comparison to the rest of the girls (especially up against the innocent girl who was from a small town in Alaska, and the awkward girl whose family immigrated to the United States from France and was home schooled), because of how here beliefs tended to clash with the other women living in the same house as her. When looking at the media representations of how women are supposed to be portrayed on television and in films, Elina become the other type of women (the villain) that the media likes to represent to their audiences.
While researching the monsters within reality television, I found that there are many sites where authors of blogs and other sites have created their top-ten list of the contestants who they love to hate in television shows such as Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. The number one villain to date on almost every one of the lists was Omarosa from The Apprentice. Although I was not a follower of this program, Omarosa’s name was one that I was familiar with due to the publicity she was gaining from participating in the show. One description of her on a top-ten list was as follows: “The biggest love to hate reality television/celebrity is of course Omarosa from The Apprentice who refused to hold back or let anyone stand in her way. She swears she is a nice person, she just has a one rack mind and that is to be the best and she will run you over to accomplish that goal” (http://www.realitytvmagazine.com/omarosa/). Think about it: If Omarosa was a man, would he have gotten the same attention for going for the gold? Would he have made it to the top of this list? The men who are included on this list were ones who were very pushy verbally and physically. Apparently audiences in this modern day still are not completely ready to see a woman in a position of such power, so that she is made out to be the bad guy in the show. Since those who do the editing know (or believe they know) what their audience wants to see, they will make sure that every time Omarosa did something not stereotypical of the sexy, obedient housewife, they focused in on it.
This ten minute clip from the celebrity season of The Apprentice shows how people react to Omarosa’s fierce and pushy way of getting business done. Even though there are other women on the show who are trying to win the same competition could have easily been shown in a more negative light, the producers of the show used what they already knew of Omarosa from previous seasons to get the most sensational storyline possible.
In an article titled “How Reality TV Fakes it: Phony quotes, bogus crushes, enhanced villains,” authors James Poneiwozik and Jeanne McDowell discuss how those who produce reality television programs get their contestants to do and say what they want them to. An interesting find in this article had to do with how they edit storylines and even dub what contestants say in interviews. “There are many ways of using footage to shape a story. . . If a date was dull or lukewarm, the editors would juice the footage by running scenes out of order or out of context. To make it seem like a man was bored, they would cut from his date talking to a shot of him looking around and unresponsive--even though it was taken while she was in the restroom and he was alone.” While many people get sucked into a reality television addiction, it should be known that even though these events all may have happened at one point or another, they might not line up just how it does on the silver screen. The article also stated “viewers want suspense. The problem is that makers of reality TV have the power to imply or outright fabricate things about real people who have to carry their fake reputations into their real lives.” In reality television, those who do the editing hold the key to how the majority of the millions of viewers will view an individual who sign a contract to be a part of the series.
By taking Capote’s In Cold Blood and digging deeply into the text, viewing the films and reading between the lines, one can see the conversion of Perry Smith and Richard “Dick” Hickock from human beings with troubled lives to the monstrous forms, which they create themselves, with the help of the residents of Holcomb, Kansas and the directors of the films “In Cold Blood” and “Capote.” Throughout the novel, the audience also sees the inner struggles of Smith and how he reacts to Hickock’s obsession with going out of his way to kill stray dogs and Hickock’s tendencies leaning towards being a sexual predator. Smith is already under the impression that his partner in crime is a monster. Not only in Capote’s written words do we see these two as contemporary monsters, but by comparing the few films which directors made under the influence of the Clutter family murder, one can see another way in which Hickock and Smith are transformed into less than human. Each individual director of the three films, “Capote,” and “In Cold Blood” has a different take on how they want the murderers portrayed, and will ultimately influence their audiences’ view on the men who murdered an unsuspecting, innocent family. Do those who become monsters really even know of the changes that they are going through and are they able to see what they have become in the eyes of those who see them? Are they aware of their “evilness”? The long debated argument of nature versus nurture comes into play when trying to determine whether one creates a monster or if monstrous qualities and traits are apparent from birth. For audiences to distinguish the change from human to animalistic, one must have the ability to identify and recognize how local community members play an important role in the transformation, be able to see the psychological factors that come into play, and have the capability to make a distinction between the different view points concerning Hickock and Smith which directors Richard Brooks, and Bennett Millerbring up in their films.
Truman Capote’s introduction of the non-fiction novel showed the world how difficult it can be to make a strong distinction between what is good and what is evil. The new genre also brought about the idea of psychological killers; those who were often forgotten in classical literature now find themselves in the spotlight of more recent texts, such as Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Billie Louise Jones described Capote’s change in writing styles from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to In Cold Blood, as such: “[He] has moved from an explorer of the underside of the soul to an explorer of the underside of society. . . There, the monsters were of the mind; here, they—Perry Smith and Dick Hickock—are real” (106). What made Perry Smith and Dick Hickock much more horrifying to Capote’s audiences in comparison to other monsters, such as the monster of Frankenstein and Dracula, was that these men could have lived down the street from anyone; they could have been any of the readers’ neighbors at one point. Unlike Frankenstein and Dracula, these characters could actually come though the pages and continue to be monsters in the real world. For as hideous and terrifying these typical monsters look, many find it more difficult to remain not frightened of Smith and Hickock. These men were made of flesh and blood, rather than the creation of a novelist, which in turn made it possible for any family in America to have experienced what the Clutter family went through. It frightened Capote’s readers to witness such a crime because of how real it was, and it was even more difficult for his readers and the actual citizens of Holcomb to have a sense of closure with this murder because of how human Smith and Hickock looked to them.
From the time that Smith was a little boy, he has lived a rough life with little or no emotional support from his caretakers. He grew up in a large family, only to have all but one, his oldest sister Dorothy, abandon him at one point or another. Many of his siblings had committed suicide or died, and his mother was an alcoholic who drank herself to death. Even after all of this, Dorothy did leave him when she found out about what he did to the Clutters, explaining that she believed that he would “just as soon kill you as he would shake your hand” (1:19), and that he just shows his sensitive side to get people to sympathize with him. He had also had the drawback of being disfigured from a motorcycle accident, which left him with a very noticeable limp. He lived in an orphanage at one point and was beaten by the Sisters with a flashlight for wetting the bed. Perry Smith was also at a disadvantage because he was half Indian, which followed him all the way to death row at the Lansing jail. The warden at the jail thought of himself as doing Smith. He told Capote, “You know, I didn't know where to count your boy at first... him being half-Indian. But I did him a favor. I counted him as a white man.” Even in the 1960’s Americans were still slightly prejudice of those who did not share the same skin color as them, so to categorize him as white gave Smith a minor benefit. When he was born, he was not initially evil, and his sister even described him as “her little doll,” but somewhere along his unfortunate childhood and adolescence his disposition went sour.
For one to become a monster, it takes more than just the individual transformation. Many times it takes the force of a whole community to place a monstrous title on those who commit the crime for the convicted to actually lose their humanistic qualities and turn into an animal. The day that the Clutters were discovered by neighbors was a day that changed the whole atmosphere of the small town of Holcomb. Before the murders happened, the peaceful town did not have to think twice about locking their doors at night, but the following morning, everyone went out and changed their locks and became suspicious of those who they thought they knew. Brian Conniff wrote that before the capture of Smith and Hickock, the town’s “unfearful” “life could not be restored until after the killers had been found and punished” and that by changing their locks and being suspicious of everyone in their community, the citizens of Holcomb were “trying to keep out some kind of invader from ‘outside’ the community, some kind of creature as alien as it was frightning”(81). The townspeople were looking for their own monster, resembling that of the beast in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Conniffs states that like Smith’s sister, the neighborhood needed to “believe that Perry’s life [was] completely different from the lives of those other ‘respectable’ people,” and that they must “convince [themselves] that it is only people like Perry, ‘isolated’ and ‘animal,’ who are driven by a lonely search for distant ‘mirages’” (82). Naturally, people want to keep themselves completely separated from those who commit awful crimes, and have no relation with them, even if the murderer is of their own family, which in turn causes the outcasts to be pushed farther away. When the citizens of Holcomb saw Smith and Hickock for the first time, “just about everyone, anxious for the display of the ‘hidden animals,’ anticipated some kind of worthwhile spectacle . . . At the sight of Smith and Hickock, everyone simply fell silent, ‘as though amazed to find them humanly shaped’” (85). The public viewing of the men who killed their well-liked neighbors did not prove to be as comforting as they had hoped. Since they were “not so reassuringly ‘alien’” (86), it became much more difficult for the community to accept that they were caught and that they were safe again. Smith and Hickock looked so normal and civilized that Holcomb did not find closure in the guilty verdicts placed upon the men. Because of their isolation from the dreadful people, the citizens of Holcomb help in the transformation which Smith and Hickock go through. Though many people of this small town contributed to the creation of these monsters, one individual stands out more than the rest. Detective Alvin Dewey, the head of the case in Holcomb, makes the killers as animalistic as possible. While this is not on purpose, it is plausible for one to believe that there could be no one with human characteristic who would have done such an awful deed. When looking through crime scene photographs, he searches for clues that would lead him to the creatures that did this to his friends. When digging for clues, he investigates how the murder could have played out. Conniff writes, “The killer would have had to possess the kind of rationality that . . . distinguishes people like those of his community from animals and madmen” (83).
One major aspect that distorts this difference between the good and the bad was Smith’s immediate regret for what happened on the night of November 14, 1959. Towards the end of the robbery, Smith recalls during the interrogation scene not wanting to go back into the house. He said, “I though, Why don’t I walk off? Walk to the highway, hitch a ride. I sure Jesus didn’t want to go back in that house. And yet . . . It was like I wasn’t a part of it. More as though I was reading a story. And I had to know what was going to happen. Then end. So I went back upstairs” (240). There was something that drew him back in to commit the crime, but it becomes clear that Smith did not even want to finish the task at hand. Hollowell describes it as, “odd moments of quiet, moments of hesitation when the whole scheme might have been ended without anyone dying” (102). Smith just wanted to go home and get away from what they did. Smith shows concern for the Clutter family as he bound them with ropes by putting the mattress box on “the floor for the comfort of Mr. Clutter,” (241) and also placed a pillow under Kenyon’s head. During this scene, Smith also worries for the women of the house and does not trust Hickock to be with them alone. Smith tells Detective Dewey, “I didn’t want to leave him alone with the girl . . . Then he says to me, as we’re heading along the hall toward Nancy’s room, ‘I’m gonna bust that little girl.’ And I said, ‘Uh-huh. But you’ll have to kill me first.’ Now that’s something I despise. Anyone who can’t control themselves sexually” (243). This example shows one of the many characteristics of Hickock which Smith cannot stand. It is obvious that Smith does not trust Hickock one bit, and even Miller shows his audience that during an interview session that takes place in Death Row. Smith tells Capote, “[Hickock]'s naturally mendacious. Not to be trusted. If he had a hundred dollars he'd steal a stick of chewing gum.”
From the beginning of Smith and Hickock’s relationship, Smith was at one point impressed by Hickock’s fictional story, but always looks at him with a bit of disgust. Also in Miller’s “Capote,” the viewers can see right away the regret which Smith has about killing the Clutter family, because when with Capote, he cries over what he had done. Most monsters do not feel or show any regret or sadness over the crime they have committed, or guilt over the pain that they have inflicted on not only the immediately effected family, but on also the community which surrounds them. Many experts now believe that Smith had a psychological issue and that he was not in control over what he was doing. Smith said to Capote, “I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.” Some argue that this was a “brain explosion” and was unable to control his actions. What makes the line of distinction even hazier is when Smith is asked directly about whether or not he feels sorry for what he has done. He responds with, “Am I sorry? If that’s what you mean—I am not. I don’t feel anything about it. I wish I did. But nothing about it bothers me a bit. Half an hour after it happened, Dick was making jokes and I was laughing at them. Maybe we’re not human. I’m human enough to feel sorry for myself. But that’s all” (291). Smith flatly states that he is not human, and recognizes himself as a monster, just as the rest of Holcomb, Kansas does and everyone else who was aware of the gruesome crime. Did Smith come to this conclusion on his own terms, or were his self-images influenced by those who live in the community? For a man to hear that he is a monster for all of his life and treated poorly, eventually he will grow up to be that monster which everyone says he really is.
The films “Capote,” and “In Cold Blood,” show how the views of the audiences can be molded according to how the directors feel the murders should be portrayed. In Bennett Miller’s “Capote,” the audiences walk away with a sense of injustice. Because of Truman Capote’s close, almost intimate-like relationship with Smith, one almost wishes that in the end he would not have the death sentence carried out. On the other hand, Capote did not have the same relationship with Hickock that he had with Smith, so he was still portrayed as a rough, unlikable man, who the audience still thinks deserves the death penalty. On the other hand, in “In Cold Blood,” the director has his audience walking away from the film with the idea that justice was served and that these two evil monsters got what they deserved. This film closely follows the actual novel by Capote, but the director got the final say in how these two murders would be seen in the eyes of audiences for generations to come.
Whether it be reality television, primetime programming, or timeless literature that makes its way to Hollywood for the big screen, it is ultimately up to those who are in charge of what makes it out to the public to decide what or who should be considered evil. Many times it is because characters or contestants break the stereotypical norms that are supposed to confine these men and women into their places. In the multiple versions of Capote’s In Cold Blood, the audience is reminded of how these two men could have been anyone just walking down the street. What makes them monstrous is the fact that they do not look like murders, but more like one’s next-door neighbor. There are no telltale signs that outwardly show that these men are made of evil and would kill an entire family over a safe that they heard about from a third party while in jail. On the other hand, villains are created by the action of strong women, which ends up with them receiving the label “bitch” or “evil” just because they fight for what they believe in. It is from those men and women who are working behind the scenes that millions of media users find themselves identifying with or “loving to hate” specific characters on the screen.
