On the 50th anniversary of his assassination, I wanted to reflect a bit on the many different ways we have seen John F. Kennedy on the screen, in his lifetime, his assassination, and in countless fiction films and documentaries ever since. It's not especially a comprehensive discussion; if you want an interesting book on the subject of the assassination, you can check out a copy of my friend Art Simon's Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film. But this is more or less just what has come to mind as this anniversary has approached.
"We all killed Kennedy."
"I shouted out 'who killed the Kennedys?'
when after all, it was you and me."
The first quote comes from Doug Hall of Ant Farm, a radical art/media group that created a series of challenging independent video art works about media culture. The line comes near the end of a video collaboration with T.R. Uthco (get it?), called The Eternal Frame. The video involves the group recreating the motorcade that went through Dallas -- except with only one car, carrying the President and Mrs. Kennedy, and Texas Governor Connolly and his wife. After the final recreation is completed, with people watching the car go by and crying as they conflated present and past, an obviously fake reproduction with the real thing, Doug Hall, who played Kennedy -- referred to as "the Artist-President" because he's not the real thing and because he seems very aware of his and Kennedy's own existence now only as an image -- is being asked to reflect on the exercise, and also on Kennedy's death. When asked if he knew who killed the President, he responds: I don't care anymore. It doesn't matter. We all killed Kennedy.
The second quote you probably know very well; it's sung by Mick Jagger, in one of his most notorious guises, in the Rolling Stones classic "Sympathy for the Devil." (Jagger said the phrase came from a line from French symbolist poet Baudelaire.) I don't think I'd fully appreciated the implications of the line until after Princess Diana's tragic death: it was the obsessive desire the public had for images of the Princess that led to the circumstances that put her in that car being chased by tabloids, leading to a terrible accident that left her dead. And that, I think, is what Jagger meant by those lines. Because Kennedy and become a media icon, the first Television President, and because the public had such a strong desire to see him and be close to him, Kennedy was more exposed in Dallas than he should have been. (His increased visibility also was likely a source of anger for his enemies, inspiring at the very least the contemplation of killing him -- I'm no conspiracy buff, but let's face it, most leaders draw the ire of people who wish to kill them.)
Kennedy began to make a name for himself in the midfifties, even challenging Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic party nomination in 1956. The media love affair with Kennedy began even before the famous tv debates against Richard Nixon (who had been pretty good at using media prior to these debates). In 1960, a crew from Time-Life began following around the two main candidates seeking to win the Wisconsin primary election for the Democrats, Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. What made this crew different was that the equipment was innovative, having created the ability to record images with synchronous sound but still using lightweight cameras. The result: Primary, a film that not only helped Kennedy, but helped put a new group on the map: Drew Associates, led by Robert Drew and with camera work by some of the legends of the American Direct Cinema movement. (Go here for a short clip that helps situate the film in its specific context.) Drew and his team -- Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker -- made numerous films, broadcast either on ABC or on local stations that Time-Life owned, after Kennedy entered the White House. The most notable one was Crisis: Behind a Presidential Committment , which concerned the integration of the University of Alabama. (JFK is not the real star in the film; his brother Bobby, as Attorney General, is, along with his aide working in Birmingham, Nick Katzenbach.) Kennedy admitted, "we would be nowhere without [television]."
It was JFK's enormous popularity, created in no small measure by television, that allowed him to be put in the cross-hairs in Dallas. And his death at a young age has led him to become even more of an icon of the tragedy of youth, alongside Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and others who leave us to fill in the blanks as to what their lives could have been. The eternal frame, indeed.
Obviously, the most famous images of the assassination came from the camera of Abraham Zapruder, because it gives us the horrific shot that Kennedy took to the head that without question killed him. (You can click here to see what comes up if you put a search of "Zapruder film" at YouTube.) As Simon observes in his discussion of the film and its use by Time-Life, by the Warren Commission, the New Orleans trial of Clay Shaw (dramatized in Oliver Stone's controversial film), and in other contexts, that these few frames were once thought to be an "unimpeachable" witness to the murder, but ultimately, we are unable really to come to any conclusions about what happened. This film became the most famous home movie ever made. (Yes, even more famous than Justin Bieber's early videos.) And in a sense because of that, the images of the assassination don't lead us to the truth. We project too much of what we want to see in them. The irony of Stone's film is that he very carefully manipulates the viewer even as he shows how the public could be manipulated in 1963.
Kennedy's assassination generated many historic images, as did his funeral. It was covered nationwide, and in a sense paved the way for the ways that the networks covered the funerals of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. The funeral gave us young JFK junior in that legendary pose, saluting as his father's casket passed him.
Since 1963 there have been numerous considerations of the assassination. Obviously, there have been numerous news stories about possible conspiracies leading to Kennedy's death. The publishing world is loaded (as it were) with books about the assassination, and the internet has been a boon to the buffs, who can connect to one another much more easily now than ever before. Oliver Stone's JFK is probably the most notorious film from Hollywood, but the assassination also was used by the avant-garde. I mentioned Ant Farm; also, noted avant-garde film-maker Bruce Conner presented images of Kennedy for his film Report. In this film, Conner intersperses images of Kennedy arriving at Love Field with other images of that day with a sound track of a news broadcast covering Kennedy's assassination. The film ends with an earlier report of what happened with Kennedy at Love Field, including an eerie moment when Kennedy has, impromptu, gone over to a crowd of supporters to shake their hands, much to the surprise and dismay of the Secret Service. The word "report" does not just refer to news reports but also to the sound of gunfire, a clever pun.
Why so many images of Kennedy, of his death? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that so much of the information collected by the authorities over two separate investigations -- the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late seventies -- is sealed up, and no plans have been made to release them. When you keep things in secret, invoking whatever excuses governments use, you just play right into the hands of Conspiracy Theory Guy. We can never know the truth of those events because too many people question everyone's evidence. There's no real trust established. The assassination ushered in a new era -- no, not just "THE Sixties," as many aging boomers like to tell ya -- but one in which average citizens were able to try producing a counter-narrative to the Official Story. As marginalized as the assassination buffs may have been, they are the early wave of those interpreting mass mediated images critically, especially those that support an assessment of a crime that the critics deem improbable. Nowadays, everyone has a forum to share unsolicited opinions, and everyone can break down other discourses to try to seize the ole talking stick, but such a practice existed in crude form fifty years ago.
Like I said, this is no definitive consideration. But amid the saturation of anniversary specials all over mass media, it's worth understanding what all these images really mean.
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