Two-Faced Craft-Rafael Mendez

Being that putting down ideas on paper is an intriguing topic, it’s only natural that people make movies about the art of writing. In fact, many movies have been created that focus on this area of the arts. A lot of these bits of filmmaking reflect how writing is powerful enough to change somebody’s life. As a writer, I can definitely tell anyone who asks me that this is true. When I took up the craft of writing, which occurred at a very early age, it completely dominated and guided my life, not only helping me express myself so that others may relate, but also teaching me things about life itself that I would use in the future. This is the reason that two films on writing spoke to me on such a powerful level. The films I’m referring to are the film Capote and the film Freedom Writers. The two different ways these films deal with the way writing changes people struck me as vastly contrasting but equally believable.

The film Capote deals with the attempts of writer Truman Capote to create a book based on a group of killings that occurred in 1959 in Kansas. More importantly, though, it deals with how everything he had to go through to complete this book changed his writing career and his life. In the movie, Capote finds himself intrigued by an article on a duo of criminals who broke into the house of one Herbert W. Clutter and slaughtered him along with his whole family. He travels to Kansas to interview those he could on the killings, all this in the hopes of writing an article for the New Yorker. Taking a fellow writer he made when basking in the triumph of his famous novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, along with him, Capote finds himself caught in the maze that is the mind of one of the killers and finds such an intricate puzzle of information that he decides the killings can’t be covered in an article, and instead decides to write a book.

He becomes so obsessed with his piece that he continues to pay for the criminals’ appeals in the hopes that they will tell him how the killings occurred, an event that happens to be the only bit of information they’ve held back. Finally, in a desperate attempt, Capote decides to stop paying for the appeals, this only after he poured years and years of effort into getting inside the mind of one of the killers, to the point of developing a sentimental relationship with him. In fear, they reveal the important information. This is when Capote realizes that, to have an end for his book he needs to let the actual end of the story play out. Now knowing what he must do, Capote lets the trial go on. The criminals are convicted to hang and Capote is forced to watch the men whom he owes his greatest work of fiction drop from the gallows. This event destroys Capote, who realizes he’s alienated those he loved in the quest to write his book. On top of this, the fact that he had to convene with these men, who were awaiting the grim reaper, while he got to walk out free every day deeply affected him. After the events, Capote was never the same again. He also never wrote anything of consequence after In Cold Blood was published.

This way of expressing how writing changes someone shows a vast difference from the way it was portrayed in Freedom Writers. In this film, a teacher from the middle-high class of society decides to teach Freshman and Sophomore English at a public school. The students belong to the lower classes and live during the time of the Rodney King riots. This coupled with lingering hate between races that has always been there causes the students at this school to form cliques based on their culture. Cliques that harbor a deep hate for each other. However, Erin Gruwell, their new teacher, tries to teach them about writing. After several failures, she decides, as a desperate attempt, to ask the students to keep journals. She tells them that they must write everyday, but that the decision to share their work lies with them. Slowly but surely, these students begin to spill their hearts onto the pages, and, with time, they share what they write in class. The viewer then begins to see that these students start making better choices in their lives, and eventually break the boundaries formed by racial and cultural hate. The movie covers the jumping over of several hurdles in the lives of each student as well as their teacher. Many of the outcomes of the choices these young people make in the face of these challenges are clearly linked to their writing.

One more mountain to climb is presented to both the characters and the viewers, as the students near the end of sophomore year. The curriculum says they must take another class with another teacher when they advance. In protest to this, the formerly aggressive students unite and urge their teacher to talk to the head of the school board. In one last attempt, Erin Gruwell meets with the woman in charge and makes a passionate plea. Upon reading the published works of Gruwell’s usually under achieving class, which consists of a short book titled “Freedom Writers,” the woman decides that the students will stay with Gruwell for both junior and senior years. Many of these students then go on to be the first in their economically handicapped families to earn college degrees, and some even follow Gruwell when she goes on to teach at college.
Watching both these movies opened my eyes to the various effects and outcomes of writing. As a writer myself, I appreciated the two different views since they present how writing can be used as a tool or a noose. In the first film, the author found symbolic death in his writing, since the shock of what he had to go through obliterated the amazing artist Truman Capote was, while in the second film, the authors found life in their writing, breaking the stereotypes of society and the expectations of almost everyone by using pen and paper to make a difference in their lives.