By CHRIS VOGNAR
Movie Critic
Published: 01
June 2013 10:20 PM
Updated: 02
June 2013 02:05 AM
Conspiracy theorists, like cultural critics, live to connect
the dots. What looks like a coincidence to one person becomes another shard of
evidence or thematic through-line to another. The dark corners exist to be
explored, the currents of conventional wisdom defied. Interpretation and
implication become as vital as hard proof.
So it is for those decoding how the Kennedy
assassination reverberated through pop culture. Sure, you’ll find some
intriguing movies and stories that address the assassination directly. But to
my mind, they’re nowhere near as compelling as the works infused with the fear
and the rush of cinematic paranoia, particularly the films of the early 1970s
in which no official version of the truth — no explanation for murder — is to
be trusted.
Some movies, including 1992’s Love Field and
1993’s In the Line of Fire, explore the sense of mourning and regret
stemming from the assassination. The conspiracy movies, including
1974’s The Parallax View and The Conversation and
1975’s Three Days of the Condor, exude suspicion and despair.
Most of these movies don’t directly approach the
assassination, though some inch closer to that dark November day than others.
Most are more like the stray ricochet that nicked James Tague as he stood under
the Triple Underpass. They suggest rather than explain. They embrace the
mystery and menace of a new world in which nothing can be taken for granted.
“There are a lot of references to the Kennedy assassination,
both direct and indirect, in late ’60s and ’70s movies,” says Rick Worland, a
Southern Methodist University professor who teaches a course on ’70s film.
“There’s a general sense that nothing is to be trusted anymore, that the power structures
— whether it’s corporate, military or government — are just corrupt and
dangerous.”
The most direct of these films is the clunky and
creepy Executive Action (1973), a sort of dry run for the madly
entertaining JFK that Oliver Stone directed 18 years later. Culling
from the myriad nonfiction book speculations of the ’60s, the film posits a
group of wealthy power players (portrayed by, among others, Hollywood stars Burt
Lancaster and Robert Ryan), who see President John F. Kennedy as bad for
business. Mixing documentary footage and backroom plotting, Executive
Action is the bizarre “Hey gang, let’s put on a show!” assassination
movie, complete with rehearsals in the middle of the desert. It plays a little
like JFK’s older, boring cousin.
Then you have the more oblique approaches — some of which
still manage, in their own way, to be quite direct. The most sinister of these
is The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 movie based on Loren Singer’s
1970 novel. The film begins with the Independence Day assassination of a
free-thinking senator, followed by an ominous shot of a seven-member
assassination committee (shades of the Warren Commission), sitting before a
wall that looks like a coffin, proclaiming their official findings: The
assassin “acted entirely alone, motivated by a misguided sense of patriotism
and a psychotic desire for public recognition.”
What unfolds next could have sprung from the mind
of the most fervent and imaginative JFK conspiracy theorist. Witnesses to the
assassination are methodically bumped off (shades of Executive
Action andJFK). A reckless newspaper reporter (Warren Beatty) discovers
what he believes to be a corporate training program for assassins — which
might actually be a corporate training program for patsies. Cue the Oswald
apologists.
By the time the Parallax novel was published, America
The noise grew louder in 1975 when the Zapruder film of the
JFK assassination was broadcast on ABC’s Good Night America, hosted by a
scrappy young Geraldo Rivera. This was the first time most of the public had
seen the assassination footage, and the shock was palpable for Americans seeing
the president shot in the head on their TV screens.
“It turned out to have an impact like filmmakers all along
have wanted their documentaries to have,” says Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth
Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
It cranked the suspicion levels even higher. It also helped
bring the cultural conspiracy subtext to the surface by buoying arguments for
multiple shooters and against magic bullets. Old myths were expanded, new ones
created. Both would soon get a high-profile workout within a three-year period:
Don DeLillo’s chilling novel Libra was published in 1988, followed in
1991 by the bombastic fantasia of Stone’s film JFK.
These works share a great deal of conspiracy content:
anti-Castro Cubans enraged by the failure of the Bay of Pigs; shady CIA
operatives cooking up murderous schemes in darkened rooms; a confused and
drifting Lee Harvey Oswald, manipulated by the above like a puppet; and, of
course, the Zapruder film, without which neither story would exist.
But the contrasting tones are a testament to how disparate
voices can shape the same conspiratorial material. Libra, like so much of
DeLillo’s work, is cool, detached and postmodern, far different from Stephen
King’s recent page-turner 11/22/63 .
It’s as much a study of conspiracy’s mechanisms as a brief for what might have
actually happened. Oswald is the protagonist, but the figure we relate to most
is Nicholas Branch, the “curator” contracted by the CIA
to sift through daunting mountains of information, evidence and speculation.
His conclusion: “The conspiracy against the president was a rambling affair
that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance.”
Speaking of rambling affairs, JFK is still the
800-pound gorilla of Kennedy assassination movies. Fueled by Stone’s moral
certitude and broad strokes of agitprop, it takes the basic premise
of Executive Action and cranks it up to 11.
In the movie’s view, there was nothing chancy about the
assassination. It was a coup d’état that reached all the way to Lyndon Baines
Johnson and advanced with the purpose of fueling the Vietnam War. Complicating
matters further, JFK is also a highly engaging piece of moviemaking,
filled with star turns and the highest level of craft. I still enjoy it
immensely, mostly because I know better than to mistake it for history. (It
also proved to be a gift for Seinfeld, which enlisted former Mets star
Keith Hernandez for an inspired parody of the famous “back and to the left”
scene.)
Such stories grip us for much the same reason that we
gravitate to the theories they espouse. “Conspiracy theories make order out of
chaos,” SMU ’s Worland says. “They present an
explanation, even if the explanation scares us. They present a logical or at
least a rational explanation for something frightening and chaotic.”
In other words, they help us connect the dots — even when
the trail may very well be illusory.
Follow Chris Vognar on Twitter at @chrisvognar.
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