by Jan Stevens
Because many of us are so close to the "cold hard facts" and their accompanying nomenclature
surrounding the Kennedy assassination, we may often overlook the incredible impact
it has long had on our culture and its art forms. As the most pivotal solo crime of this century (second only to the Holocaust), the president's murder has had
its mark felt deeply in American and European films, novels, plays, pop music, (which
will be discussed in a future article) graphic arts, editorial cartoons and paintings.
The familiar images pour forth and are forever etched upon our minds: young John-John's
final salute, the Jack Beers photo of Oswald's execution, Jackie and the surviving
brothers leading the funeral procession, Zapruder and others' films; the list goes
on and is personal to each of us. However, too rarely do we, as researchers, consider
the effect that those historical four days has made on our consciousness--as reflected
in the artistic forms in which it has been expressed these past thirty-three years. Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film
by Art Simon (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996) does just that, and does
it exceedingly well. Simon, a film studies professor at New Jersey's Montclair
State College, tackles the subject with deep insight, intellectual prowess regarding
his material, and a powerful command of the JFK case.
The book begins with "A History of Assassination Literature" and make no mistake--Simon
has done his reading into the works of Weisberg, Meagher, Lane, Buchanan, Summers
et al -- as well as the extensive role of LIFE
magazine, the New York Times
and other major media in the case through the years. Through-out this work, it
is clear that Simon has followed the "assassination debates" (his phrase) a long
time, as he continually brings us back to the work of the research community in its
various stages, and the often resulting cultural and political back-lash and victories
that have occurred over the years. With sociological and even learned psychological
observations, Simon skillfully refreshes the reader with comparative analyses--and
does it with-out pretentiousness. Sure, it's a bit high brow at times, but he makes it readily accessible, for the most part. . He notes critical reaction to the Warren
Report
and the media's coverage of same and has good insight into some of the early cover-age
of the case provided by soft-porn magazines like Gallery
, Penthouse
, and Playboy
. This is briefly tied into several points Simon makes about the crass aspects of
the murder as commercialism and sensationalism, (as depicted by some of the less
scrupulous over the years) and the similarities to the attraction of some pornography
is briefly discussed .
Without getting too
deeply into the mechanics of the JFK case and the particulars of the specific investigations
and theories, it is evident that Simon is aware of them. He is rich in references
to not only mainstream assassination works (and also lesser -known but landmark articles by Bruce Cockburn, Jacob Cohen and others) but is also able to draw from
a rich palette of academically- oriented materials, even quoting Freudian and Jungian
psychology treatises, as well as various professional journals. It all makes sense: the insights he brings to the relationships between media reportage, artistic expression,
and JFK researchers' work is riveting. It sometimes may take a bit of effort for
the less scholastically oriented to follow the colorful quilts of thought woven in Simon's complex prose, but is quite rewarding nevertheless.
Dangerous Knowledge
follows the case developments as an ongoing media story from the earliest writings
on through the post- Garrison period (and the resulting "social illegitimacy,"
to use his words, of the assassination discourse in the public eye) and beyond.
It brings together a most satisfying chronicle of the intense activities in the 1970s, beginning
with the televised release of the Groden version of the Zapruder film and culminating
with the HSCA Report. Besides a few deserved swipes at CBS and Time/Life, even
a few of Posner's Case Closed
distortions get injected here, and Simon is quite agile in dismissing them as the
desperate yet crafty attempts they often are. Along the way, the book continually
stresses the importance of the visual image --
how "buffs" (a term he often uses, yet not disparagingly--he seems to be one of us)
have relied on it to disprove the official version. And often , how the images them-selves--actual
films and even created artifact--sometimes replace objective "reality" in many minds. It is another vehicle that makes this book (and the JFK case) unique.
Commenting on a thesis appearing in the film journal The Cinematic Apparatus ,
Simon writes that all too often, "...[C]camera vision asserts its superiority over
the power of the human organ. The photographic image, despite its differences from
the world it represents --its lack of real depth, the limits of the frame or of color--has been taken as a faithful representation, its differences disavowed. And it in turn
has reasserted the dominance of the visible, and improvement on, or guarantor of
human vision."2
In much of his commentary, the author subtly prepares us for what is to come: his
in-depth look at some of the pivotal works of art and film from the Andy Warhol prints
of the 1960s through to the major assassination films.
In this reviewer's opinion, Simon spends far too much time on the infamous Warhol
silkscreens of Jackie Kennedy, a few which get reprinted here. (But why?) There
are a scant seven illustrations in the book, including an unnecessary duplication
of the cover, and two pages
of the aforementioned Jackie artwork of Warhol's. Simon even quotes the radical
60s artist's disinterest and neutrality concerning the death of JFK--yet goes on
and on about these works' creative and societal significance. As art critique (a
field I am not unfamiliar with) it still reasonably held my interest. As far as being germane
to the cultural output of the assassination as subject matter, there are far better
choices.3
What has been called "alternative art" or even "anti-art" art is given attention
as well, with a chapter on sixties filmmaker Bruce Connor's stunning short subject
"Report". It is a remarkable work, and if you've never seen it, you should treat
yourself to a viewing if, indeed, it can still be located.
Simon compares the artistic convergence of the Warhol and other avant-garde influences
and provides an effective verbal picture of the film's content.4 It is unfortunate that another Connor work, a collage called "Untitled" is given
two glossy
pages here for its illustration (one half of one page which is blank) when it obviously
has absolutely nothing to do with assassination imagery. It is, of course, an example
of Connor's visual sense and choice of content, but a poor and rather surprising choice for a book which takes such care about other detailed matters.
The book then deals with a few minor conceptual videos that were visual commentaries
on the Zapruder footage, before going on to the Hollywood productions of "Winter
Kills", "Blow-Out", "The Parallax View", "Executive Action" and Oliver Stone's "JFK".
It is here that Professor Simon's film expertise and communicative acumen shine through.
In Part One, Simon presented the thesis that much JFK literature was rooted in
a rather liberal agenda, yet "clung to a faith in [governmental] institutions while
targeting the sinister forces manipulating them"5 In other words, writers castigated the government for the cover-up, yet looked pensively
to it for a plausible investigative solution. He contends, for example, that authors
Sylvia Meagher and Josiah Thompson were writing before
"post modern conspiracy" thinking took hold --ie., a viewpoint indicative of a broader,
yet more personalized and extremist sense of victimization bordering on what Richard
Hofstadter called "the paranoid style" in American politics. In the Seventies films and beyond, Simon articulates reasons a clear trend in this direction as, in part,
a product of the post-Watergate period. These sections of the author's cause-and-effect
reasoning that have an implicit strength without being overbearing, but it's way
too deep to go into here.
Issues like a "tendency [of researchers] to view historical conflict as struggles
between absolute good and absolute evil," as he writes, are brought into focus here
that have only relatively recently been discussed in JFK journals and Internet groups. While looking at what critics have accomplished, but at what cost, the author forces
us all to look at our community more carefully.
Back to the films: Simon presents a lengthy analysis of Executive Action
, calling it "neither a mystery or a quest narrative...[it] represents conspirators
who are essentially static, witnesses to history rather than agents of its change."6 The author notes how the film's main right-wing plotters, Farrington and Foster,
present visual lectures throughout -- as opposed to being intensely immersed in the
actions of,
say, Oswald's New Orleans activities. He contends that the film's reliance on their
watching
events take place diminishes their roles visually as the villainous protagonists
they are; even as the movie nears its conclusion, they watch passively as the assassination
events unfold on TV.7
What is most compelling here and throughout is Simon's continual display of familiarity
with assassination literature and its political viewpoints as reflected contemporaneously.
He distinguishes between the approaches of the sixties, seventies and eighties, etc. Conceptual frameworks are provided which are grounded in previous critical
commentary by authors and media pundits. There is a refreshing lack of bias as well
-- Simon is not interested in hitting us over the head with any theories (yet it
seems intrinsic to his various arguments that Oswald was not
the lone assassin).
The more aggressively hostile and activist political climate of the seventies, as
reflected in The Parallax View
is given similar treatment, with the author contending that the film acted "not as
an act of historiography, but as a political intervention." 8 As a narrative, the movie (like Executive Action )
blames not a government conspiracy but a type of "power control group," (the Parallax
Corporation --in EA it was far-right business-men and a few former
government types). This is a concept more familiar to later assassination newcomers
by way of Col. Fletcher Prouty's "Secret Team".
Lesser known than some of the others, Winter Kills
(from the Richard Condon book of the same name) was finally released in 1983, almost
five years after its completion. This black comedy9, which starred Jeff Bridges and John Huston, was a fictional account of a Kennedy-esque
president gunned down in a Philadelphia motorcade, and his brother's complex machinations
(and manipulation by others) in trying to find the truth, as opposed to the film's "Pickering Commis-sion's" Report conclusions of a lone assassin.. Solid background
about its plot, political ideas, and narrative-visual technique is provided.
Brian Depalma's film "Blow-Out" (1981) is presented, since its main character's
obsession with the photographic and acoustical evidence of a politician's murder10 seems to mirror so much of the critical community's reliance (and, currently, questions
of authenticity about) the recorded assassination images. Of the assassination films
discussed, and the ones alluded to (such as In the Line of Fire
) I would have liked to see at least two more noted: The 1975 film Three Days of the Condor
, a spy thriller with certain obvious, yet indirect relevance to the JFK case, and
the always- overlooked 1977 ABC-TV film, "The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald." Both
are part of the cinematic canon as regards the JFK murder and would fit in quite
well with Simon's brand of scholarship and cinematic expertise.
The book devotes only the last twenty-two pages to the Stone film, but they are
finely tuned and power-packed. Besides astute and effective analyses of Stone's
conceptual and political approach and portrayals of the case, such as those that
abounded in early 1992, Dangerous Knowledge
makes two points about JFK
which I believe are worth reiterating.
1)Simon notes that "in replacing the lone assassin theory with the theory of the
lone investigator [read: Garrison] the film diminished, at the level of narration
though not at the level of imagery, what is so historiographically important about
the assassination debate...Although in inter-views Stone acknowledged the collective efforts
of assassination critics and argued that the dramatic format required their consolidation
within the figure of Garrison, his failure to challenge the conventions of that format reinscribes the simple approach to causality that elsewhere JFK attempts to
counter."11It is a valid argument brought up partially elsewhere, but Simon tackles it head-on
and triumphs in this valid, supportive critique.
2) The books contends that, as in any number of war films (the type which one film
critic called the "last stand" picture), Stone's depiction of the loss of Garrison's
case against Shaw sets the audience up: "individual wartime losses are represented
in order to arouse sympathy for the general cause ... Whereas in 1969, the Garrison trial
served to divide assassination buffs and send the anti-Warren Commission critics
temporarily into retreat, its courtroom failures are resurrected in JFK to suggest
the power of the cover-up and the loneliness of the investigator."12 Simon thinks that Stone unites cinematic and intellectual processes by engaging
the viewer to become part of the investigative process. The infamous Costner stare
into the camera at the end of his court summation with the words "it's up to you"
puts the icing on the cake.
Observations like these --and even ones Simon makes about JFK
that were made before (but far less enigmatically than is done here) -- enliven
the book's contextual approach within the framework of the critical literature, the
appreciation for the artistic temperament, and the case for conspiracy. As far as
other assassination-related works of artistic expression, I just wish Simon had included
the aforementioned trading card illustrations, some of the more clever cartoons
(Doonesbury especially). a few other films like "Flash-point" and those previously
mentioned. Still, there's plenty here and Simon takes the reader inside the creative process ,
a difficult objective to accomplish when writing about any of the fine arts, and
still appeal to the comprehension of the per-haps non-artistically inclined lay person.
Reader, beware: this is not
a book to take with you to read at the beach for light summertime reading; Simon's
thought processes and sociopolitical savvy will, at times, tax your concentration--but
you will be amply rewarded for the effort.
There's serious insight and genuine food for thought here. Professor Simon's observations
of the thirty years of JFK assassination research (with impressive footnoting), as
reflected in art and the culture of film is fresh, convincing and satisfying. There is the author's finite choices of inclusion, and it is not the final word on the
subject, but there is an acute cultural awareness rendered in these pages that is alive
with passion for its subject. With a little bit of work once in a while, most readers
of Dangerous Knowledge
should come away far richer from the experience.
