Article 6330 of alt.conspiracy:
From: jxxl@taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies,alt.conspiracy
Subject: "JFK" -- Punishing the Establishment
Message-ID: <3675@huxley.cs.nps.navy.mil>
Date: 23 Dec 91 16:07:30 GMT
Sender: jxxl@taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil
Organization: Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey CA
Lines: 231


"JFK" is  more  than  a  movie.    It's also a populist political
event, the public airing of the Great Democracy's dirty  laundry.
In  my  mind, the movie as drama and the movie as event should be
considered separately.  


                          The Drama
                          ---------


"JFK"  is a brilliant and complex political thriller in which the
plot overpowers the characters involved.   When  it's  everyone's
story--the murder of the popularly-elected president--it can't be
any one's  story.  So Jim Garrison, the DA of New Orleans and the
only person to try anyone for the assassination, is made to stand
in for Everyman, a man who becomes so obsessed  with  discovering
the truth  that  he  forgets  the  rest  of his life.  Adequately
played by Kevin Costner (though I found myself yearning for Jimmy
Stewart's  intensity  of  performance  in  "Mr.  Smith  Goes   to
Washington"), he's a homage to the "conspiracy nuts" without whom
this film  could  not have been made.  (I'm reminded of the scene
in "Annie Hall" where Alvie  free  associates  about  the  Warren
Report while his wife is begging him to make love.) 

The drama  is bracketed by two crucial scenes.  An early sequence
demonstrates the reaction of the public to the assassination, the
utter shock felt by ordinary people at the death of  a  president
who charmed his admirers like perhaps no other.  This sequence is
bound  to  resonate  deeply  with  people  who  lived through the
experience, but it's also important for a younger  generation  to
understand  the  pain  that gave birth to the search for truth in
this case.  I watched this scene and wondered  why  I  had  never
seen it before.  

The film concludes with Garrison's closing arguments in the trial
of  Clay Shaw. The lengthy speech is an eloquent and occasionally
emotional summation of the rights and  responsibilities  of  free
citizens   in   a   democracy,   and   how  they  relate  to  the
assassination.  I wish I could remember more of this scene but  I
was by this time suffering massive sensory overload because...  

In  between  the  two  scenes  is  the  story  of  Jim Garrison's
investigation into the assassination of JFK  and  the  subsequent
trial  of  Clay Shaw, a three-hour tommy gun burst of information
and ideas, a relentless montage of  facts  and  speculation  that
astonishes by  its breadth and virtuosity.  Director Oliver Stone
skillfully blends the contemporaneous action with  still  photos,
news  reels, flashbacks, the Zapruder film, alternate versions of
events--the film probably has more seams than any film ever made,
yet flows seamlessly and naturally toward its conclusion.  It's a
technical tour de force.  The location  work--Dealey  Plaza,  the
Texas   School   Book   Depository,  New  Orleans--is  especially
effective in establishing verisimilitude.  I always felt  like  I
was seeing  the  real events unfolding.  And despite the constant
blending of scenes from different  times,  the  story  was  never
confusing.   Each  category of shot seemed to have a visual style
to set it apart.  The flashbacks, for example, are in  black  and
white,  with  the camera always moving, making the scene a little
hazy, leaving only the remembered detail.  Still, there's  a  lot
there;  it's the kind of film that will continue to reveal itself
on repeated viewings.  

The story is a great one, really dozens of strange  tales  rolled
into one.   You have to wonder why Hollywood, ever hungry for new
and relevant material, passed it by for so long.   Is  it  simply
that the  time  wasn't  right  until  now?    There  are  no dull
moments.  The film grabs  hold  of  you  and  never  lets  loose,
delivering one spine chill after another.  

Along  the  way  are  great  characters  and  a  number  of  fine
performances,  best  of  which  may  be  Gary  Oldman's   uncanny
portrayal  of  one of the most enigmatic figures in modern times,
Lee Harvey Oswald. Joe Pesci is good as the bizarre David Ferrie,
but not as intense as in his career-making role in  "GoodFellas."
John  Candy  plays  hipster  attorney  Dean Andrews and I think I
spotted  him  as  Dallas  cop  Marrion  Baker  in  one   of   the
flashbacks.   Tommy  Lee  Jones  is excellent as Clay Shaw; ditto
Kevin Bacon as a male prostitute.  There are  also  a  number  of
interesting cameos...  

Could I fault this movie (as a movie)?  (That's obligatory, isn't
it?)  Costner's  Garrison would make more sense as a character if
he grew into his scepticism more.    Growth  is  hinted  at  but,
really,   the   graph  is  flat--there's  never  any  doubt  that
convincing proof of a conspiracy will be found.   Compare  "JFK,"
in  this  respect, with "All the President's Men." In the latter,
the effect of piling on the layers  of  a  deepening  mystery  is
better paced and maybe more exciting.  

Sissy  Spacek is fine as Garrison's wife, but her character seems
to exist only as an index of  Garrison's  emotional  estrangement
from his  family.    In  the  end,  after  Bobby Kennedy has been
killed, she can admit that her husband was right all  along  but,
still,  it's  not  clear whether she thought the sacrifice of his
attention worth it.  

I also didn't care for the  extravagent  homosexual  romp  scene,
particularly  since the real Clay Shaw was a bondage freak with a
leather and chains lounge.  The subterranean  hostility  inherent
in  Shaw's true predilictions makes a better fit dramatically, so
why chuck it?  Perhaps Stone made the mistake of relaxing himself
with a Ken Russell picture  the  evening  before  he  wrote  that
scene.  

But  these are all secondary questions when, in fact, the plot is
the real star of the movie, and it sings.  

I give "JFK" $5.50 on the $0 to $6.25 scale.  

                           The Event
                           ---------

While watching "JFK,"  it  became  immediately  obvious  why  the
political establishment has convulsed in reaction.  The film is a
ham-fisted belly blow to our conventional belief in how the power
to rule  America is established.  Most people leaving the theater
will feel at least  some  paranoia  about  the  government;  some
people will feel a lot of paranoia.  

However,  not  all of the reaction has been negative, as shown by
these excerpts from an editorial in the San Francisco Examiner: 

* First consider whether you believe the Warren  Report.  If  you
don't,  consider  seeing..."JFK," which depicts the assassination
as a coup d'etat staged by a vast conspiracy.    But  if  you  do
believe  the  Warren Report, there may be even more reason to see
the movie--to challenge your assumptions about Nov. 22, 1963, and
after.  

Writer-producer Stone's theories...may or  may  not  hold  water.
But they make us consider the possibilities.  

There's  plenty  of  evidence the Warren Commission's lone-gunman
theory doesn't solve the case.  If there isn't a  national  soul-
searching over  what really happened, why isn't there?  We should
want the truth.* 

(It's ironic that a paper that refused to run  ads  for  "Citizen
Kane"  in  1941,  a paper that runs a weekly editorial by William
Randolph Hearst Jr.  that could not  be  any  more  laudatory  of
Washington's conservative rulers, would "get" a film like "JFK.") 

The disease,  of which "JFK" is a symptom, is deeply-rooted.  The
establishment  botched  the  investigation  so  badly,  and  have
continued  to  pigheadedly  defend their preposterous conclusions
(as embodied in the Warren Report), that private  citizens,  with
the  liability  of inadequate resources and official apathy, have
had to step in to fill the  void.    It's  no  wonder  that  this
haphazard volunteer investigative force has produced its share of
hokum.  It's the nature of the beast.  But they've also turned up
a  lot  of  solid  evidence,  evidence that the Warren Commission
never considered.  They've turned  the  Warren  Report  over  and
over,  and what you're left with is that a whole lot of extremely
unlikely events had to have occurred in quick succession for  the
Report to be correct.  One or maybe two of these things, we could
accept.   But  when  so  many  aspects  of  the  Report require a
suspension of disbelief, reasonable people cry foul.  At the same
time,  we  have  a  long  record  of  missing  evidence,  altered
evidence,  planted evidence, destroyed evidence, forged evidence,
secret  evidence,  censored   evidence,   witnesses   threatened,
witnesses killed.   At some point, it can't all be explained away
by coincidence and human error.  There's more going on  than  the
government admits.  

But  while  it's  easy  to discredit the citizen investigators by
highlighting   their   errors   or   their   occasionally   silly
conclusions,  it's very hard to consider the totality of evidence
that challenges the Warren Report  and  dismiss  it  all  with  a
shrug.  It's  too  compelling.   But you will not find the Warren
principals--Commissioner  and  ex-President  Gerald  Ford,  staff
attorneys    David   Benin   or   Senator   Arlen   Spector,   or
others--rebutting   the   evidence   that    contradicts    their
conclusions.    They're   beyond  defending  the  truth;  they're
defending their reputations.  No one of them wants to be party to
a process that finds them culpable in  such  an  abject  failure.
Their  appeal anymore is to people who are looking for any excuse
to believe that the government never lies.  

Still, "JFK" needs to be put into perspective.    Though  it  may
extend  beyond  the  film  world  in  importance,  it  is  not  a
documentary and must succeed as  a  film  first  and  a  proposed
historical revision  second.   It has to have a plot, characters,
and a dramatic structure.  The main character  is  Jim  Garrison,
and  his  investigation/trial  becomes  the  plot on which a wild
array of fact and speculation hangs.  Much  artistic  license  is
taken to  weave  the mass of material into a coherent whole.  One
character   is   a   composite    of    real    characters    and
speculation--Kevin Bacon's Willie O'Keefe.  Donald Sutherland's X
was  invented  to  provide eyewitness confirmation of what is, in
fact, only Garrison's opinion.    Garrison's  point  of  view  is
fleshed  out  and affirmed by having him know things that weren't
discovered until after the story's time frame.  In  general,  the
drama  is fleshed out with extrapolated conversations and scenes,
e.g.  no one has confessed faking the photos of Oswald,  but  the
faking is shown.   Does all this license matter?  Purists will be
bothered because the film allows people to  believe  things  that
aren't necessarily true.  But, on the whole, moving people from a
position  of knowing too little to knowing too much is probably a
net gain.  Because  the  center  of  the  story  has  never  been
discovered,  the fringes are not that far from the middle ground.
The main point of the film is not to tell Garrison's story;  it's
to present  a  unified  theory  of the assassination.  Garrison's
only real purpose is as a spokesman for those who want  to  learn
the truth.  

There  is  an  important  difference between Garrison, the film's
icon, and Garrison, the real person, though.  The  real  Garrison
rejected  the possibility that organized crime played any role in
the assassination.  But at the same  time,  Garrison  appears  to
have  been  on  New Orleans' petty graft gravy train, courtesy of
Carlos Marcello, the formerly powerful Mafia boss of Louisiana, a
notoriously corrupt state.  This  caused  Garrison  to  overlook,
perhaps  intentionally,  the  strong  possibility  that  Marcello
played a role in the assassination.   Critics  of  Garrison  have
even  suggested  that  the  entire  trial  was a sham invented to
deflect attention away from the mob; though bringing the nation's
attention to bear on New Orleans would  be  a  dangerous  way  of
trying  to divert attention from Marcello, particularly since the
government's lethargy (in wanting more answers  than  the  Warren
Commission provided)  demanded no counteraction.  And since David
Ferrie had admitted (to the FBI) ties to  Marcello,  putting  the
spotlight  on  Ferrie could not have caused Marcello any comfort,
regardless of his guilt or innocence.  Stone shores up Garrison's
blind spot a little by inserting references  to  lower-level  mob
involvement.   They  become  part of the film's complex mosaic of
detail.  

But Stone probably made the right move in pointing the finger  at
government  conspiracy,  if  the film is to be a means and not an
end.   For  there's  no  doubt  that  the  government  is  hiding
something,  though  perhaps  not  government  complicity  in  the
assassination.  But as long as they continue to deny the  obvious
and  bury the truth, citizens have every right to fear the worst.
It's a just punishment for the establishment's crime  of  letting
the president's killers go free.  Stone is really trying to force
the government's  hand  with  this  film.    He could have picked
another plausible scenario--the assassination as a Mafia hit, for
instance, or an act of vengeance  by  anti-Castro  Cubans,  or  a
balanced  blend  of CIA/Mafia complicity--but that would not have
exerted the maximum pressure on the government to tell what  they
know.   If  the  establishment  doesn't  like the film's message,
that's fine.  They have the power to change perception.  If  they
want  to  prove  Stone  or  anyone else wrong they are welcome to
expose their secret documents to the light  of  day.    As  Stone
writes in a New York Times article: 

The   issue   of  our  times--as  the  media  keep  repeating--is
democracy.  

The real issue is trusting the people with their real history.  

The real issue is opening all  the  files  of  the  House  Select
Committee on Assassinations, embargoed until 2029, today.  

The  real issue is opening all CIA, FBI and military intelligence
files, held for all eternity, on Oswald, Ruby, Kennedy and Dallas
1963. All of them--without the crucial parts blacked out.  

Only then can we start to have a real democracy.  "JFK" strikes a
blow for that open debate.  

John 



