It is almost fifty seven years to the day since President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas on November 22nd 1963. Years later in 1992 director Oliver Stone and Warner Bros would release his tempestuously violent political conspiracy thriller JFK (1992).
Stone’s movie is now twenty eight years old. Taking seventy million dollars in domestic box office, the movie would then go on to make over two hundred million dollars worldwide.
Millions of people saw Stones ‘countermyth’ to the Warren Commission report; yet the descendants of those movie audiences have learned the wrong lessons from Stone’s movie. This is as much the movie’s fault as it paints interpretations and opinion as fact with great excess. What the movie also does is to highlight how we should approach para-political context and understanding within the modern world.
Today in the United States the Trump administration is attempting to subvert and destroy democracy and a legitimate election result with actions that can only be described as fascistic in nature. Yet over half of the Republican Party support the actions of Trump and his lawyers and many more voters believe in a conspiracy in which the Democrats, news agencies and an invisible ‘deep state’ conspiracy have moved together to prevent Trump from victory.
Also over the last few years conspiracy theories such as ‘QANON’ have risen up across continents. QANON, a theory cemented in anti- Semitism has attracted many to a specific belief that a set of people are in control of their lives and can be rooted out via the unification of a common cause. These theories do not require critical analysis, thought or dissection by believers. QANON is symptomatic of the way the proliferation of this type of media has been supported across many social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Only last month did these platforms begin to scrutinise the depth of misinformation on their websites.
QANON is more specific than other conspiracy theories because it is primarily linked to far right ideologies and process.
In 1992, Oliver Stone’s movie started a trade in conspiracy theories, with a plethora of books, television shows and researchers. It is not similar to QANON in that these responses are not linked to a political movement or leader whereas QANON followers endorse Donald Trump as a specific actor in the conspiracy.
Yet in the years since JFK was released it is clear that the movie is misunderstood by audiences and even Oliver Stone himself.
If you think of JFK as a horrifying political fable where the meaning holds more gravitas than the minutiae of the (widely debunked) conspiracy theories at play in the movie.
A fable is defined in the dictionary as:
A short story that tells a general truth or is only partly based on fact, or literature of this type
If we now view Stone’s movie through this prism then what should the movie teach us about today’s society and our understanding of politics, culture and historiographical projection?
JFK opens with a visual monologue narrated by Donald Sutherland, in this monologue Stone and writer Zachary Sklar outline some perfunctory history of the first decade of the cold war in which president Dwight D Eisenhower had began an aggressive set of espionage acts against the dictator Fidel Castro in Cuba.
We then witness Rose Cherami being violently thrown out of a moving vehicle which is juxtaposed with JFK and wife Jackie Kennedy arriving in Dallas.
Stone then re-enacts the events that day in Dealey plaza with a terrifying visual style and the use of cross cutting between real and dramatized footage.
We then move to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played with regal poise by Kevin Costner) who Stone uses as a proxy for the next three hours to detail his thoughts about what occurred on that day in 1963.
What follows is essentially a political horror movie where Stone puts forward the idea that Kennedy was murdered by a group of militaristic government officials aided by a set of Cuban exiles, fascist militants and branches of the intelligence community. A picture in which Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin and a broader conspiracy was at play.
Stone ultimately concludes that Kennedy was murdered because of a refusal to move forward in Vietnam and his ambition to reduce the paramilitary power of the Central Intelligence Agency.
JFK is an excellent movie, made during a time when pieces of film stock still had to be physically cut is astounding in a movie with thousands cuts and a variety of types of film used. As Stone builds to his case we witness horrifying images of medical evidence and the horrific Zapruder film. Stone’s movie is incredibly convincing.
Yet out of all the evidence he presents only a few pieces of evidence are credible. Lee Harvey Oswald was an FBI informant as Senate hearings revealed years later, the pristine bullet from the case is suspect at best and there were operations based in New Orleans and Miami in which a constant war against Cuba was raged by the CIA.
The rest of the movie is based on opinion and conjecture based on horrendously bad sources like Jim Marrs’ book Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy. Marrs has written some of the most historically inaccurate books on the planet and is not a reliable source. Jim Garrison himself was a wildly different man in real life than how he was portrayed in the movie.
Stone also runs rough shot over his portrayal of the LGBTQ community in New Orleans with little respect or intersectional afterthought.
If that is the case then why does this movie now have value as a fable or myth?
The answer lies in the way the movie forces us to address the nationalist myths we ascribe to our history which prevents us from building a better society and leaves the door open to the fascism we now see being realised by men like Donald Trump and his lawyers.
What is the factual subtext surrounding Stone’s movie?
During World War Two President Franklin D Roosevelt as part of the alliance the USSR and the United Kingdom had outlined to the horrific leader Joseph Stalin that after the war he would seek to draw down US troop numbers in Europe. Roosevelt had also indicated before the United States entered the war that he would not seek to assist Churchill in maintaining the British Empire once the war was over. The United States was seemingly moving away from militarism.
Roosevelt perished on 12th April 1945, only months before the end of the war against Hitler.
The USA domestically during this time was an apartheid state with black people facing violence, political subjugation and cruelty. With indigenous populations facing economic violence and cruelty via land reform and educational ethnic cleansing via social policies.
Also before the war and during Hitler’s rise to power in Germany the US industrialist Henry Ford was well known for his love of the Third Reich and in later years lawsuits would be brought against these companies for their involvement in using slave labour in a German subsidiary plant used by Ford in Cologne.
During this lawsuit it was claimed that although the plant was taken by the Nazi regime that Ford was still complicit in the deaths of the many Jewish people who were used as forced labour within the camp.
It is also well known that there was a Nazi movement within the United States so much so they even went as far to hold a rally in 1939 at Madison Square Garden six months before Hitler invaded Poland.
So as Roosevelt dies in 1945, with this domestic history behind him and the election of Harry Truman to the office of President, US foreign policy aims begin to change distinctly.
Truman would authorise the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima whilst at home Japanese citizens had their businesses forcibly removed as they were placed into internment camps.
Into this history walks Dwight D Eisenhower with his new head of espionage operations Allen Dulles.
Dulles had served in in the Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland during World War two, it is also open to interpretation as to how much he supressed the reports of Jewish escapees of the holocaust given to him by Jewish people who managed to escape the horrors of Germany. As Dwight D Eisenhower came to power Dulles rose as head of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency.
One of his first actions was to help to ferment a coup in Iran in 1958 against Mossadegh’s government as the US backed Shah would become a US proxy in Iran for decades to come. This action is one whose repercussions we all still feel to this day as the Shah would eventually be replaced by fundamentalist leaders.
Dulles would then turn his attention to maintaining US corporate interests in Guatemala, Dulles was also instrumental in the CIA’s involvement in the destabilization of Patrice Lamumba’s reign in the Congo prior to his assassination. Lamumba rejected the imperialist claims placed upon his country by Belgium and was seen by Dulles and Eisenhower as a communist.
As Kennedy came to power Dulles was still looking toward continuing Eisenhower’s policy of aggressive action against Fidel Castro (who ironically visited Harlem just prior to Kennedy’s inauguration).
This would culminate in The Bay of Pigs attack of 1962, in which Kennedy would then refuse to send air support to the Cuban brigade of exiles resulting in Dulles being fired from his position.
It is also of note that after World War 2 The Korean war began, US incursions into South American politics and on the world stage increased and proxy wars like Vietnam would continue for decades to come. Yet this period is still never described as being one of continual war.
During the civil rights era Martin Luther King and Malcolm X would be murdered with both men being watched and spied on by J Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation.
So this all points toward the subtext which Oliver Stone’s movie addresses directly. For Stone the fascistic and societal problems at the core of the inception and history of the USA are his subtext. Yet, he approaches them in a fantastical fashion which enhances the depth and weight of the history.
Whilst Stone is also too comfortable with JFK, a man whose domestic reform programs would be surpassed by his successor in terms of black civil rights and someone who set in motion statutes that would be brought to bare in Vietnam in later years involving the movement of Vietnamese people out of their own lands. Kennedy also backed the assassination of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem on his watch.
So whilst Stone can be accused of idolising Kennedy too much he does not shy away from the broader realities he simply creates a myth or fable of Kennedy for the audience to learn from.
You can criticise Stone’s approach as a fictional retelling of history, yet why is it that historical facts need to be mythologised so governmental power and discourse is monolithic in nature?
The historical events and history referenced above points to a very different USA than the one in which people who believe in American exceptionalism subscribe too. One in which the greatest generation defeated Hitler and the USA became a prosperous and happy place during the 1950’s. A time in which a terror group (The Ku Klux Klan) operated freely for decades (British writer Akala even makes reference to a university tutor telling the Klan helped to reduce crime rates via killing black people)
Even at the formation of the USA many of the people who were instrumental in drawing up the building blocks of the United States were themselves slave owners and willing participants in the genocide of indigenous communities.
What Oliver Stone’s movie does is to look toward the truths behind our history so that we can ensure our rights are maintained as citizens and the older violations of our rights are destroyed.
This pamphlet (see above) was handed out in the days leading up to Kennedy’s assassination and worryingly the same claims levelled against Kennedy here are still levelled against politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
Even Joe Biden who is essentially a moderate Republican has these claims levelled against him.
Donald Trump is now seeking to usurp democracy via seemingly legal recourse, yet if the United States had learned to guard against fascism, the type of which is now openly on display the country would now not be on the verge of a societal conflict to sustain democracy in the midst of threats that have been represented from the days of World War Two and before.
If the United States had learned that imperialist excursions led by men of suspicious resolve only help to foster war and death, as the rights of black men and women are still left unresolved to this day. Then the country would face a brighter future rather than one marked in division and the fear of conflict.
As Costner even makes reference to in his sermon like repost at the end of the movie:
The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it
We see this now play out decades later on Fox News and the rantings of Rudy Giuliani.
It is ironic that with a movie so full of subterfuge and mistruths is the one which fundamentally asks us to confront the myths of our past for the truth of the future.
This is not specific to the United States.
The United Kingdom has the same problems in that any critical assessment of history is regarded as being hateful toward the country. That somehow a reductive view of history somehow benefits both political progressivism and thought.
Oliver Stone’s JFK is not a factual movie. But like the fables of yore it has a message in which we still have not understood to this day.
Until we do then many more wars will be fought, minorities will suffer and the fascism Stone warns of will always be a threat within the western world. Sadly it is to this day.
Bibliography- Natives, Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala
The Devil’s Chessboard- David Talbot
Kennedy’s Wars, Berlin Laos, Cuba and Vietnam by Lawrence Freedman
The Untold History of The United States- by Oilver Stone and Peter Kuznick