How JFK changed the way we think about authority

Sub­tle as a stom­ach ulcer, para­noid as hell, and lib­er­al with what­ev­er the actu­al truth might be, JFK nev­er­the­less remains Oliv­er Stone’s mas­ter­piece. The direc­tor is back this month with Snow­den, his biopic of the epony­mous NSA whistle­blow­er, although he hasn’t been in true fire­brand mode for a while. Regard­less of whether or not Stone’s lat­est is capa­ble of reignit­ing the sound and fury of his best work, it’s unlike­ly to top what he achieved with JFK – a man­ic, exhil­a­rat­ing opus which drew increduli­ty and dis­dain even before it was released.

The film, a more than three-hour sprawl through New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Garrison’s (Kevin Cost­ner) attempts to bring some­body to tri­al for the assas­si­na­tion of the tit­u­lar Pres­i­dent, osten­si­bly amounts to a meld­ing of the count­less con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that have been sug­gest­ed since Pres­i­dent Kennedy was mur­dered in Dal­las on 22 Novem­ber 1963. As a result, JFK was heav­i­ly crit­i­cised, pri­mar­i­ly by those who couldn’t believe the direc­tor had appar­ent­ly been so blasé with ​‘the truth’; Wash­ing­ton Post Nation­al Secu­ri­ty cor­re­spon­dent George Lard­ner cas­ti­gat­ed Stone for being ​“slop­py with his­to­ry,” while leg­endary broad­cast jour­nal­ist Wal­ter Cronkite berat­ed Roger Ebert for his appraisal of a film that, in Cronkite’s view, didn’t con­tain a ​“sin­gle shred of truth.”

But while it’s cer­tain­ly true that JFK’s fac­tu­al com­pass is all over the place, it remains sharply on point. If it’s his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy you want, read a his­to­ry book. If you want to under­stand a nation’s anx­i­eties about how its gov­ern­ment behaves made man­i­fest and turned into art, watch JFK, where Stone and his crew – name­ly co-writer Zachary Sklar, DoP Robert Richard­son and edi­tors Joe Hut­shing and Pietro Scalia – bril­liant­ly high­light the doubts and fears held by mil­lions of US citizens.

From the fre­net­ic edit­ing, to the shot selec­tion – whether tight­ly locked on Jack Lemmon’s eyes or fram­ing Gar­ri­son and his mys­tery infor­mant, X (an uncred­it­ed Don­ald Suther­land), on a park bench beneath a ver­tig­i­nous and iron­ic Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment – to the crazed bril­liance of an ensem­ble cast that includes Tom­my Lee Jones, Joe Pesci and John Can­dy, to John Williams’ score, every aspect of the film is designed to ampli­fy the dra­mat­ic tension.

Con­tro­ver­sial­ly, the film also helped pave the way for the Assas­si­na­tions Records Col­lec­tion Act of 1992 aka the JFK Records Act. Dur­ing inter­views for his new book, ​‘The Oliv­er Stone Expe­ri­ence’, author Matt Zoller Seitz was told by Stone that he had received a death-bed con­fes­sion from one of Kennedy’s secu­ri­ty team, claim­ing that Kennedy’s mur­der was an inside job and that, ​“some­body from his own team… had fired on the Pres­i­dent.” Such con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry-fuelling rev­e­la­tions are 10-a-pen­ny, of course, and although Stone has called it ​“plau­si­ble” and ​“very authen­tic”, it’s unlike­ly that we will ever know the full details of what hap­pened that day at Dealey Plaza.

If that seems a giv­en, then think of how much less we might know were it not for Stone’s film. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly less about the intri­ca­cies of the case or the key play­ers involved, but cer­tain­ly less about our­selves and West­ern soci­ety, where our faith in democ­ra­cy is test­ed almost dai­ly by a gov­ern­ment seem­ing­ly intent on with­hold­ing cer­tain sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion, atro­phy­ing our lib­er­ty in the process. Quot­ing Amer­i­can nat­u­ral­ist Edward Abbey, Gar­ri­son states that, ​“a patri­ot must always be ready to defend his coun­try against his gov­ern­ment.” JFK, in its own hyper­bol­ic way, does just that.