Movies in Brief

an urge to be known and/or loved. Yet even with the guileless, as an event begins to fade and the journalist returns again and again to check some obscure fact, the incident becomes in the teller’s mind what he is telling you it is. Thus in In Cold Blood, there is a unanimity of opinion among the people of Holcomb that the Clutters were what every family aspired to be. This despite the common knowledge that Bonnie Clutter was hopelessly unstable and the unacknowledged implication that death lent to Herbert Clutter a sympathy that he did not in life seem to merit.

Unlike the novelist, with his license to explore the unknown, the writer of non-fiction is proscribed by the laws of libel, which act like a giant “Detour” sign, forcing the writer into the path of equivocation. Every writer knows the. experience. Just last summer, I sweated out the possibility of a libel action for intimating something in a piece that I knew to be true. When writing about a subject who is a homosexual, a fact usually pertinent to the understanding of character, the writer must resort to such devices as describing the decor of his apartment. But when a writer is forced into this kind of hedging, the result can be, unless he is careful, either snide or sniggering. And if he is careful, he is in danger of catering to the “in” people, while creating a vast non sequitur for the rest of his audience.

RH

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Richard Hodgens

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an urge to be known and/or loved. Yet even with the guileless, as an event begins to fade and the journalist returns again and again to check some obscure fact, the incident becomes in the teller’s mind what he is telling you it is. Thus in In Cold Blood, there is a unanimity of opinion among the people of Holcomb that the Clutters were what every family aspired to be. This despite the common knowledge that Bonnie Clutter was hopelessly unstable and the unacknowledged implication that death lent to Herbert Clutter a sympathy that he did not in life seem to merit.

Unlike the novelist, with his license to explore the unknown, the writer of non-fiction is proscribed by the laws of libel, which act like a giant “Detour” sign, forcing the writer into the path of equivocation. Every writer knows the. experience. Just last summer, I sweated out the possibility of a libel action for intimating something in a piece that I knew to be true. When writing about a subject who is a homosexual, a fact usually pertinent to the understanding of character, the writer must resort to such devices as describing the decor of his apartment. But when a writer is forced into this kind of hedging, the result can be, unless he is careful, either snide or sniggering. And if he is careful, he is in danger of catering to the “in” people, while creating a vast non sequitur for the rest of his audience.