Psychology is Everywhere

We have all heard of the Joker, right? The bad guy of Batman. I'm pretty sure that we can all agree that he is not attractive at all and even scares the little kids to death (not literally). In Cold Blood, they describe Dick with deformities in his face. Here I can make a stereotype that all characters with an ugly face (in a scary way) are the bad guys. How come? This is probably because the audience is not going to sympathy with the ugly character, but rather with the handsome one, or normal one. What I’ve learned in my psychology class is that we are more likely to confine with the people that are attractive, but at the same time similar to use. Most of the world population is born like any other human, not with deformities in our faces. So it's clear that it is more likely for us to sympathy with "normal" characters than with the "ugly" ones. As Capote states, "It was a though his head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center" (31). That’s clearly a description of an ugly face, leading to my conclusion that all bad guys in books and movies are the unattractive. 

Now taking an extreme change of topic, I realized that Dick and Perry are really religious. Kind of ironic since they are the Clutter's killers, don't you think? They can't be religious as they kill others, since they are going completely against God believes. As they were going through shops to buy the necessary materials for their planned murderer they kept talking about the nuns. Dick came out of the store empty handed and Perry said to him, "Maybe it's just as well. Nuns are a bad-luck bunch" (46). With this statement we know that they are not religious at all, but two pages later we find a verse of a song called In the Garden. It states:

"And He walks with me, and He talks with me,

And He tells me I am His own,

None other has ever known..." (48).

Clearly the capital He is referred to God, so I find this contradicting to the previous pages. 

Also what I realized is that Capote has a different way of structuring his ideas. He alternates between each sub chapter to talk about the Clutters family and the next about Perry and Dick. So as he is describing the last days of the Clutters, at the same time he is explaining how Dick and Perry are planning the murder as well as giving us some backup information about their past lives. On page 30, Capote finishes the paragraph by saying, “Now, on this final day of her life, Mrs. Clutter hung in the closet the calico housedress she had been wearing, and put on one of her trailing nightgowns and a fresh set of white socks,” and he starts the next one with, “ The two young men [Dick and Perry] had little in common, but they did not realize it, for they shared a number of surface traits” (30). So far the whole book follows this pattern, still I believe it`s going to be broken once the Clutter family is dead.