Through the looking glass.

While I haven't looked too extensively into the relationship between Truman Capote and Perry Smith I'm told that it went above and beyond the typical interactions of journalist and interviewee. Some say their relationship was only one of platonic friendship, others think that intimacy may have been involved. Either way, thinking about it has had me considering something over the past few days: At what point is the journalist in too deep?

I understand that your typical news journalist is meant to keep their distance from a story: Investigate, observe, report, move on. But in the course of reading the prescribed texts for this subject and exploring other material, it only becomes more apparent over time that literary journalism transcends what we typically expect of reporting the news.

In discussing a journalist's involvement with a story going from objective to subjective, I'm not really thinking about the Hunter S. Thompson style of deliberate immersion within the subject matter. Rather, I'm thinking about the times when a journalist is swept into the vortex of his or her story without ever intending to get to that point.

Recently I watched David Fincher's Zodiac again, the 2007 adaptation of Robert Graysmith's book of the same name. In typing that last sentence, I originally wrote "...of Robert Graysmith's novel or the same name," quickly deleted, unsure if novel was really the write word to use. Certainly it's an entertaining story, more entertaining than a lot of novels out there, but more than anything the book is an account the infamous unsolved murders in San Francisco that took place during the 1960s and 70s.

What I find most interesting about the story is that Graysmith, whose involvement with the case not only caused the end of his second marriage but also led to him receiving a handful of death threats, didn't start out as an investigative journalist at all. At the start of the Zodiac days, he was a newspaper cartoonist. How does a man go from that, to being in way too deep with a serial murderer investigation?

Just as Woodward and Bernstein's lives were in jeopardy during the Watergate scandal and just as Capote may have gotten closer than he should have to Perry Smith, Graysmith jeopardised his personal safety for the sake of a story. What does it mean when a journalist becomes a key element of the story they're investigating, particularly when that story has potentially dangerous implications for them? Is it really worth it? These men have been behind some of the most acclaimed pieces of literary journalism ever written, but does the end really justify the means?