I was in the tenth grade
when the World Trade Center fell. I remember being in Mr. Kuhrt’s World History
class. Someone rushed in and told him to turn on the television. The first
tower had been hit, but no one knew what was going on, the gravity of the situation
that would forever change things for us. We knew that the building was on fire,
on one of the higher stories. We didn’t know that someone had flown an airplane
into it, or that a second airplane was minutes away from colliding into the
other tower.
Every September 11th
I dig up the footage from Youtube and show it to my students. For them, the
event is on its way to being as distant as the Kennedy assassination is from
me. Not quite yet, but soon, it will be long enough ago in history that children
will cease to be emotionally affected by it in the same way that we who saw it
unfold were so affected. Most of my middle school students weren’t even born
yet. Students who graduated from high school in 2015 were about four or five
when it happened. Being aware of it was terrifying, not knowing what was going
to happen was terrifying. That day is a reminder that history was once real
time, the present, unfolding before us, and the “we” of that former present did
not, in the moment, have the benefit of recollection. Staring down at
historical events, relegated to the page, gives us a false sense of superiority
over them, as though we somehow authored them. We know the ending. In a sense,
we don’t experience them as real events. It seems so simple, yet it’s so easy
to forget that an historical event was once a real moment in time, all possibilities,
pulsating and vibrant and brutal yet somehow naïve, each one graduated second being
converted into the past.
The assassination of
President Kennedy was the 9/11 of its generation. Or rather, the reverse of
that. My generation’s experience of 9/11 happening in real time is comparable
to what it must have been like to be alive on November 22, 1963, watching the
motorcade make its way through downtown Dallas. When I see the President slump
over after being hit, and I see Jackie Kennedy, frantically climbing onto the
back of the open car in absolute terror, I’m brought to a stony silence. What
must it have been like?
Oliver Stone’s JFK reminds us that movies are a vital,
urgent, necessary art form. Those of us who are too young to remember the
assassination of President Kennedy are met with the tragic reality of it only
through such compelling re-enactments as this film, which puts the actual
footage to effective use. Movies can awaken history to us even though most of
them are historically inaccurate, and whether or not Oliver Stone’s depiction
of the conspiracy theories behind the assassination of JFK are totally bonkers
or totally onto something, this film captures the absolute chaos into which we
were thrown on that horrible day in Dallas. Stone’s film pulsates with the
blood and the synapses of real time, turning “dead historical fact” into an
urgent, provocative, spine-tingling, terrifying mystery. At the very least, JFK reminds us that the government’s
reaction to Kennedy’s death was wholly inadequate, allowing for the perpetual
development of numerous conspiracy theories.
Once you get past Kevin
Costner’s bad Louisiana accent (he plays New Orleans district attorney Jim
Garrison), it’s hard not to be affected by the sincerity of his performance,
especially during the compelling courtroom speech he makes at the end. Atticus
Finch has become some kind of Messiah in the pop culture for his conscientious
liberalism in To Kill a Mockingbird.
But the Garrison character as depicted in JFK
reaches further, challenging our complacency about government, awakening a
deeper obligation to pay attention, to question, to use our own minds rather
than accept with docile, childish ignorance, the happy lie that government is
always honest, always seeking justice, always promoting truth. That’s our job
just as much as it is theirs, and when we turn away from our own duties, we do
so at our own peril.
I suppose this is less a
movie review than a preachy treatise on the effects of a Hollywood movie. Or
maybe, to put it in a better light, it’s an honest outpouring of the impression
Stone’s film left on me. JFK is a
magnificently entertaining, incredibly well-put-together piece of film. Stone’s
ability to weave together archive footage with re-enactments makes him probably
one of our greatest propagandists, and even if Stone’s theories about the
assassination are false, his style is
something to study. He knows how to make an arresting, spine-tingling,
deliciously paranoid political thriller. And moreover, his quest for truth
doesn’t ring false. The speech made by Garrison in the film’s denouement is as
much a direct line of communication from Oliver Stone as anything.
The movie met with
considerable criticism upon its release in 1991, and yet it was at least partly
responsible for a new policy of transparency regarding official government
documents about the Kennedy assassination. Stone’s film gives credence to the
dubiousness of certain elements of the esteemed Warren Commission, namely the
so-called “magic bullet,” which traveled with more finesse and effect than one
of those talking cartoon bullets in Who
Framed Roger Rabbit.
The only bad scene occurs
after Garrison learns of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. When he wakes up his
wife (played by Sissy Spacek) to tell her the news, she’s confronted with the
reality that her husband, plagued for years with public skepticism that has
affected her own feelings about his work, was right after all. Their feels of
validation turn into passionate kissing, and it is more than a little
off-putting to think that an assassination serves them as an aphrodisiac.
(Spacek, I should note, offers a stunning performance in an ultimately
thankless role as the classic worrying wife, one of Hollywood’s favorite stock
roles.)
Stone has gathered an
impressive array of actors to fill his cast of strange, fascinating characters:
Tommy Lee Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Joe Pesci, Michael Rooker, Wayne Knight, Kevin
Bacon, Gary Oldman, Jay O. Sanders, Ed Asner, Jack Lemon, Donald Sutherland,
Sally Kirkland, John Candy, Vincent D’Onofrio, Walter Matthau, and Brian Doyle
Murray.
