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(JFK to Z)
"Cockamamie. That’s a, that’s a word
your generation hasn’t embraced yet. Maybe you ought to use
it once in a while, just to kinda keep it alive, ya know."
—Clint Eastwood, In the Line of Fire
It seemed that Oliver Stone’s JFK
(1991) would be a conspiracy buff’s dream come true. At last a
mainstream movie would expose the Warren Report’s inconsistencies
and reveal the real culprits, that unholy trinity of CIA renegades,
anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and the military-industrial complex.
I have wanted to believe President Kennedy was murdered as a
result of a conspiracy of some sort ever since the Warren
Report was issued in 1964. At bottom, Stone contends that
the assassination of John Kennedy was a coup d’etat. Yet
Stone’s movie actually started to erode my belief in a conspiracy,
especially by the ways its hero, Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner),
handled the single-bullet theory. Stone’s Garrison mocked, belittled,
and misrepresented the theory by claiming the bullet zigzagged,
stopped, and so on—and there’s nothing like throwing Arlen Specter’s
name in as the theory’s author for a cheap laugh.
This manner of dealing with the facts pervaded Garrison’s investigation
of the case against Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones). Innuendo passed
for evidence. The numbers of those involved in the conspiracy
increased geometrically. It’s almost laughable, nearly as much
as the hypotheses in Ruby (1992), had they been presented
so authoritatively.
In many ways, JFK aptly represents the essence of most
of the substantial conspiracy texts. They combine an uncritical
analysis of their own findings—that, for example, the CIA would
use Oswald as an agent, and a highly important one for that matter—with
an absolute skepticism of the Warren Commission’s evidence and
conclusions. On finishing these books, so many stand accused of
participating, directly and indirectly, in Kennedy’s murder that
you find yourself uncertain who the authors think did do it.
In Crossfire
(1989), the basis for much of Stone’s movie, author
Jim Marrs places Jack Ruby in many places on November 22, 1963—the
book depository, the Texas movie theater; at least we know he
was at the police station Friday night—but never can definitely
document them. Just mentioning incidents is enough, much as Marrs
and others speculate over David Ferrie’s itinerary before and
after the assassination and accept as fact the activities of an
Oswald double in the months before the shooting.
The object in JFK is to allow insinuations to stand for
truth: present that many allegations and you almost have to believe
a few are probable.
:::
Responding to critical responses from all directions, Stone called
JFK a "counter-myth" to the prevailing orthodoxy,
generally confirming an analysis by Norman Mailer in Vanity
Fair that the movie was more convincing bullshit than the
Warren Report’s bullshit. Stone’s admission also confirms the
feeling that JFK is more fiction than fact.
Partly, one cannot forget that the other book Stone used was
Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins. Further,
Costner’s characterization of Garrison doesn’t appear to try to
capture the compulsions driving the New Orleans District Attorney
to destroy the life of Clay Shaw. One senses that Stone deliberately
pushes his fictive interpretation over the facts. Why? The fictional
account is better and more convincing propaganda against a government
Stone strongly mistrusts and Americans have trusted too much.
Stone sees U.S. involvement in Vietnam as based on a broad government
deception starting with Kennedy’s death. It is not a matter of
conjecture to him that if Kennedy had lived we would have avoided
a full-scale war. It’s as if President Johnson and his military
advisors, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, merely caught up with
the massive deceptions they were supposed to have done at the
time of the assassination.
Propaganda for a righteous cause. An exposé of a long
history of government deception. A scream to oblivious citizens
that in the Cold War era we lost our democracy to a few men who
believed they knew what was best for us. Could I be honest with
myself and both reject Stone’s view of the assassination and still
believe JFK is a great movie?
I am still carried away by the unraveling of the conspiracy that
culminates in the monologue of Mr. X (Donald Sutherland) in one
of JFK’s best scenes. Stone’s use of black-and-white film,
near-documentary footage, and his quick and ingenious editing
all heighten the activities of the conspirators and drive home
their guilt. The film’s opening encapsulated history (from Eisenhower’s
military-industrial complex speech to the shots at twelve-thirty
p.m.) and the use of flashbacks when witnesses and investigators
speak are the best-realized parts of the film. Many of these techniques
would later provide the narrative drive for Stone’s Natural
Born Killers and Nixon. They also give JFK an
authentic look and support its compelling argument.
At a deeper level, Stone captures the post-assassination mood
of our country. Beyond the shock and mourning, the United States
suffered a breakdown. It may have been long overdue, with Kennedy’s
death serving to crystallize a prevailing mood, but the state
of America-to-come is symbolized in a brief shot of an epileptic
in the opening sequence. Fifteen minutes before the motorcade
reaches Dealey Plaza, a man falls into the street, semi-conscious,
shivering, helpless. An ambulance comes and whisks him away. Such
would America become. Semi-conscious, helpless, as the nation’s
leaders took us away to Vietnam, to Watergate, to near oblivion.
:::
A young, handsome, virile political leader is struck in the head
and mortally wounded amidst a large crowd after a political rally.
He’s later pronounced dead at the hospital. The politician had
been warned to stay away from the city. A cursory investigation
gives no indication of a conspiracy. Witnesses to the assassination
and alleged plot are afraid to come forward. A right-wing militaristic
group had recruited assassins for some generals in the government
who feared this politician would oust them. In the end, the generals
avoid prison and many of those who pointed to a conspiracy are
themselves thrown in jail or are killed mysteriously.
These are the elements of the 1969 film Z, directed by
Costa-Gavras and based on a novel and events in Greece in the
mid-1960s. Z makes no apology for its anti-government stance.
It makes us indignant at a military junta that cuts down its main
political opponent, only called The Deputy (Yves Montand). JFK’s
superficial resemblance to the Costa-Gavras film might be coincidental,
but both share a mission and technique that make them superlative
thrillers capable of rousing audiences to identify with their
designs, and JFK has undoubtedly absorbed Z’s lessons
in the ways to effectively combine truth, fiction, and propaganda.
All of Costa-Gavras’s films specialize in these three elements,
including his best known English-language films, Missing
(1982) and Betrayed (1988). Like Z, Missing
takes on a military junta with CIA backing, in this case Chile’s.
Betrayed follows an ultra-right wing group in America’s
heartland. Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio (1989) brushes against
events the events in Betrayed, both dealing in their fashion
with the murder of a controversial talk-show host. Stone might
be America’s Costa-Gavras—he at least carried Costa-Gavras’s banner
through the 1990s when The Music Box (1990) and Mad
City (1997) lacked punch—although Stone seems less conscious
of his liberal message or even the political impact of his movies.
In addition to these similarities of setting between JFK
and Z, there are many links among the conspirators and
assassins. The man who strikes the fatal blow to the political
leader in Z is seen at one point trying to pick up a pinball-playing
teenage boy. JFK’s plotters are pervasively gay, from Clay
Shaw to David Ferrie (Joe Pesci) to Willie O’Keefe (Kevin Bacon).
Even Lee Oswald (Gary Oldman) attends one of Shaw’s extravagant
all-male bashes. Each director’s use of homosexuality highlights
how riffraff, outcasts, and the socially repugnant have carried
out the assassination. One way or another, their participation
sullies even more the (militaristic and macho) men who have ordered
the murder.
The casting of their heroes and villains is also played fully
for propagandistic effects. Stone’s characterization of Garrison
is so transparent that his Garrison nearly resembles the Examining
Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in Z, a man driven
solely by the ideals of justice. A more authentic Jim Garrison
would have gotten in the way of Stone’s message and stymied the
force of his propaganda or—as he prefers to call it—myth.
:::
In the pre-release marketing of JFK, a line was used that
never appeared later: "The story that won’t go away."
In other words, the story of the death of John F. Kennedy will
be told to generations to come until Justice is attained and society
has given conspiracy theory its imprimatur. This may never lead
to indictments against the killer crossfire team on Dealey Plaza
or the group who made Oswald a patsy, but it will lead to public
acknowledgment, with the help of newly unclassified documents,
that specific generals and chiefs-of-staff ordered the president’s
murder.
Curiously, the letter "Z" was used as graffiti by the
followers of the slain Greek politician to imply, "He is
alive." He will not be forgotten. The people will not let
his story die. He will inspire the nation to overthrow the junta.
Both films ask us to believe their stories—in Stone’s words,
to believe their version instead of the government’s version.
In the post-Strangelove era, it would seem out of the question
to accept the government’s version of anything. Nor would anyone
sympathetic to the artist be inclined to accept any authority
but the artist’s. In a sense, Oliver Stone turned John
Ford’s "print the myth" on its head in JFK using
the model of Costa-Gavras’s Z.
Yet Stone goes further than mere propaganda. He’s upped Z’s
anti-government ante by forcing us to chose between his stated
view of JFK’s intentions—namely, his theory of the assassination—and
the final product. In fifty or a hundred years, when the intensity
and seeming importance of the apparent conspiracy to wrest power
from John Kennedy’s administration has subsided, people will only
see in JFK an event of America’s past and its emotional
impact on our country. They will also witness a taut thriller
and innovative techniques to create and further the suspense and
meaning of events.
If forced to choose, I must reject what Stone wanted to do and
accept what he accomplished. As Z also proved, the aesthetic
will not die.
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