Essay on the film "Infamous"

Name: Ramiro Butvilofsky

Year: 4A
Trying to understand the human behaviour and existence is a difficult task that has

been in the minds of people since ancient ages. Nowadays we have different ways

to deal with this topic, thanks to human sciences and arts, like literature. An

interesting case to analyse this problem is in the film “Infamous”, published in 2006,

which tells us the story of the complex relationship between a famous writer and the

assassin of a whole family. It is a very useful movie because it involves literature,

while we can appreciate the evolution of the characters and its relation. In this essay

the following questions will be answered:

Do human sciences and literature provide different types of knowledge about

human existence and behaviour? (Argument 1).

Does art enlarge what its possible for us to think and know? (Argument 2).

Literature is a very powerful tool that, like most arts, tend to express ideas and

emotions in a very stylistic way. This may be the case of this movie, where the

protagonist, Truman Capote, tries to innovate with a new kind of literature, one that

is not a novel, neither a report, but like a mix of both. The reason behind his decision

was because he wanted to approach the case of the assassination of a family in a

more artistic way compared to a simple report. He wanted to give a different

sensation of the story and maybe a dissimilar idea of the murderers. Once Truman

gets to know both killers, he begins to interview both as to start writing his work. As

time passes, our protagonist appears to be forming a relationship between one of the

murderers, Perry Smith, whose past moves Truman due to how sad and unfair it

was. This in the long term harms our writer because what he creates with Perry is

not only a relation of interviewer and interviewee, but a relation of love, and we finally
know that Perry is sentenced to death. One of the main reasons that they create this

bond is because Perry in the past used to read the books of Truman, making to him

easier to understand the writer feelings and intentions. So, in the end we can say

that human sciences and literature provide different types of knowledge about

human existence and behaviour because probably analysing the case with a more

objective view (with sociology or psychology for example) will lead to disliking the

murder, but with literature you can create another reality for the character, up to the

point of understanding him.

As for the second argument, I want to start by saying that art is not just about what

are you expressing, but also how. This situation is obviously seen in this movie

because of the plot and how it was exposed to the viewers. In the beginning we

believe that it is impossible for us to sympathise with someone who has done such a

thing, but the way the story is written, Perry does not seem like a horrendous person,

plus the way he relates with Truman supports this feeling. Another interesting

situation where arts make us change what we know is the scene of the

assassination. While Perry is in the house of the ones about to being killed, Richard

Hickock, his partner, wants to rape one of the victims, but Perry, despite the fact that

the situation was already bad, he manages to avoid Richard raping the victim. Why

he did that maybe because of the Truman´s books he read in the past. These books

may contain moral implications that make Perry realize that what his companion was

doing was even more terrible, and that was not acceptable. So, we can say that art

enlarges what its possible for us to think and know, and that will depend on what we

comprehend of the artworks.

All in all, with all of that said, we can affirm that arts and human sciences may have

different approaches of same situations. But we must understand that in sciences,

objectivity is what matters more, while arts present a more subjective view. And arts

also enlarge what we think and know up to some extent.