Friday's Old Fashioned: JFK (1991)

Things in America have only gotten truthier in the decade since I originally posted this drivel on JFK and so, after the events of last weekend, I dusted the review off, revised it, and am reposting it.

In the 2002 review of “JFK” (1991) for his Great Movies series, Roger Ebert recounted that not long after Oliver Stone’s ultra-incendiary three-hour epic was released, he was excoriated by Walter Cronkite for extolling a movie without “a shred of truth in it.” That’s one way to put it. The invaluable Adam Nayman was a bit blunter in his assessment on Letterboxd in 2023: “this film was full of shit.” (Nayman’s review is much more nuanced than that.) I can understand Cronkite’s frustration. After all, “(t)he shadow of suspicion became a way of reading our history,” film critic David Thomson told The Wrap in 2013 regarding the ostensible conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. “Once the mood set in, it became all too easy for any horrible event to just get fed into the hopper.” Huh. You don’t say? Of course, Cronkite admonishing Ebert and his colleagues for giving positives notices to a motion picture about the conspiracy is not the same as admonishing the conspiracy itself.  “I believe films are the wrong medium for fact,” Ebert wrote. “Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions.” Post-truth was not declared the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries until 2016, a quarter-century after the release of “JFK,” but few films have embodied the thorny, troubling emotions of our post-truth society quite like “JFK.”

Whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John F. Kennedy, for the last sixty-odd years, the majority of Americans, by varying percentages, have believed that in some way, shape, or for, he did not. That, as Ebert wrote, has been “our national state of mind since Nov. 22, 1963,” and with “JFK,” Stone reflected that mood by concocting “a thick gumbo of truths, half-truths, unverifiable hypotheses, and pure rant...(ladled) out indiscriminately.” In writing those words for The New Yorker in January 1992, Terrence Rafferty meant to critique but I read them as a compliment, effectively summarizing the figurative stew in which we have been splashing around for the last decade-plus of exhausting American life. Rafferty might have argued that the movie’s “hysterical manner and slipshod handling of the facts actually have the effect of diminishing the credibility of the case for conspiracy,” but that is to suggest Stone is mounting a case in the first place. As Stone said repeatedly at the time and in the years since, he was not crafting a bootleg legal case nor reporting a story; he was presenting a counter myth. 

It is the counter myth that Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin Lee considered when writing about “JFK” in 2008. “From the opening newsreel Stone presents a myth,” they explain, “one that pervades this stage of his career: government as oppressive patriarch, motivated largely by military and capitalistic interests and operating largely out of view of a public blinkered by patriotic propaganda.” Indeed, Stone seizes on the conspiracy theories peddled by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in what is either a devious way to launder a real-life tinfoil hatter or to subvert the notion of a cinematic hero, depending on how you, the viewer, feel about it all) to incite propaganda of his own, promoting the idea that a coup d’etat within the utmost reaches of the government sought to bring Kennedy down.

Stone promotes this plot by injecting brief black & white flashback sequences, like Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Howard) telling a room of conspirators that if they get him into the Oval Office then he’ll give them their damn war (as in, Vietnam). These invented flashbacks are often placed around actual archival footage, deliberately intended to muddy the viewing waters. In writing about Stone’s “seamless blend(ing) (of) documentary footage and re-creations” for Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin pegged it as a “smoke and mirrors act”, and that is true.

It can be argued that this smoke and mirrors act is intended to confuse the audience, to make it difficult to discern what’s real from what isn’t, which leaves everything in question. But while that it is an act of flagrant irresponsibility for some, to others, like me, it is, strictly from a filmmaking standpoint, propagandist or not, a commendation. As Randy Laist, an associate professor of English at Goodwin College, put it for a seriously academic treatise on the film: “More so than any particular theory about who shot JFK, the thesis of Stone’s film is that reality itself has been assassinated, under circumstances that we can only reconstruct out of a montage of images, ambivalently real and/or unreal – the fragments of a hyperreal mediascape.”

Hyperreal is a term credited to French theorist Jean Baudrillard, inevitably name-checked in Laist’s piece, who ascribed the difference between a modern and postmodern society as a “mode of representation in which ideas represent reality and truth.” In a postmodern society, he reckoned, “subjects lose contact with the real and fragment and dissolve.” That’s what happens as you watch “JFK.” If Stone’s previous films, as Laist notes, were born more a narrative realism, in “JFK”, he battered such realism to bits, primarily through ferociously kinetic, Oscar-winning editing by Pietro Scalia and Joe Hutshing, and via John Williams’s relentless harangue of brass and strings, a leitmotif for our national paranoia, an aesthetic so overpowering that it sweeps you up and pulls you into its myriad obfuscations and embellishments in spite of yourself. What’s real and what isn’t ceases to be the point; all you have left is the emotion that Stone deliberately engenders. You feel angry; you feel mistrustful; you feel like you have not been told everything; you feel like the government, that convenient catch-all, wants to keep you in the dark. “On that level,” wrote Ebert, “it is completely factual.”