JFK Revis­it­ed: Through the Look­ing Glass – first-look review

Less revis­it­ed, more rehashed. Oliv­er Stone returns from a bit of a direc­to­r­i­al hia­tus to don an ill-fit­ting linen suit and take a quizzi­cal stroll once more around Dealey Plaza in search of the real truth behind America’s great shame: the assas­si­na­tion of John F Kennedy in 1963.

This info-dump doc­u­men­tary, nar­rat­ed 50/50 by Whoopi Gold­berg(!) and Don­ald Suther­land, plays a lit­tle like a plush Blu-ray extra to Stone’s 1991 con­spir­a­cy-mind­ed court­room dra­ma in which he – via the efforts of New Orleans DA Jim Gar­ri­son – made the (reject­ed) case that Lee Har­vey Oswald was not a lone gun­man, and that nefar­i­ous state actors must have been involved in the killing.

We’re liv­ing in a moment where dan­ger­ous and often lunatic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries have seeped into main­stream life via their inces­sant pro­lif­er­a­tion through online chan­nels. It’s inter­est­ing, then, to have a film which, from all angles, feels like it’s ped­alling some­thing close to a tin-hat con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, albeit one in which the ​“facts” that are pre­sent­ed come do across with a strong sem­blance of aca­d­e­m­ic authen­tic­i­ty. Stone’s film serves to mud­dy that line between a noble search for finite truth (or some­thing as close to that as pos­si­ble), and the metic­u­lous actions of those whose only pur­pose is to dis­tort and confuse.

In tone and style the film has the slight­ly creaky vibe of a luxe His­to­ry Chan­nel pre­sen­ta­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly with its wall-to-wall sound­track of omi­nous orches­tral arpeg­gios and talk­ing heads set against inter­ro­ga­tion-room black back­drops. It’s a film which talks in the lan­guage of agit­prop non­sense like 2005’s online ⁹⁄₁₁ doc, Loose Change.

Stone lines up a rogues gallery of authors, researchers and pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors to artic­u­late his assump­tions, and the film runs through fan favourites such as the ​“Mag­ic Bul­let” the­o­ry, the doc­tored images of Oswald doing out­law gun pos­es in his gar­den, and the stray rifle bul­let that was con­ve­nient­ly found on JFK’s hos­pi­tal gur­ney (which one pathol­o­gist claims just fell out of his back).

The first half of the film retains a foren­sic eye on details direct­ly relat­ing to the assas­si­na­tion, many of which fur­ther refute the find­ings of the War­ren Report from Sep­tem­ber 1964 which claimed there was no evi­dence of foul play. The film then shifts towards its own char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion of pipe-smok­ing CIA chief Allen Dulles, who Stone believes not only manip­u­lat­ed the War­ren Report from the inside but was behind the major­i­ty of US mil­i­tary inter­ven­tions and black ops mis­sions, and was work­ing inde­pen­dent­ly from the pres­i­den­tial office.

The con­clu­sion: that Dulles played a part in the assas­si­na­tion, moti­vat­ed by JFK’s apa­thy towards send­ing US troops to Viet­nam and Cuba to crush the com­mu­nist scourge.

In the moment, it makes for a com­pelling case, but Stone’s refusal to draw from a sin­gle con­sent­ing voice or make room for any alter­na­tive read­ings makes the film much more easy to shrug-off as an enter­tain­ing­ly crack­pot diver­sion. Less invit­ing is the sug­ges­tion that JFK sym­bol­is­es the ful­crum of pub­lic dis­trust in gov­ern­ment agen­cies that came to an ugly head at the tail end of the 2010s. For Stone, Trump is America’s just desserts, and it’s a sen­ti­ment that leaves a nasty taste on the tongue.

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