“We are through the looking glass:” Watching Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) in the Information Age

On November 22, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. It’s an event that reverberates in American history, marking a cleavage between the optimism and glamour of the Camelot presidency and the descent into the tumultuous politics of the Sixties and beyond. The Sixties generation asks “Where were you when you heard that Kennedy had been shot?” the way my generation talks about where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001. And like 9/11 has and continues to, the Kennedy assassination breeds conspiracy theories, so momentous was the impact of such events and so unsatisfying the official narratives. An event like the Kennedy assassination isn’t just news or history: it’s mythmaking on a national and global scale.

Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, is an encapsulation of the appeal of that myth. It is a fever dream of counter-narrative and information overload. To watch JFK is less to watch a conventional Hollywood film and more to participate in the sharing of esoteric knowledge. That feels like an absurd thing to say about a massive Hollywood film featuring an A-list cast, but it’s also what marks JFK as such a singular experience. The closest thing I can compare it to is the documentaries of Adam Curtis. As I said about Curtis’s most recent series, TraumaZone, “You feel like you’re being shown some kind of secret knowledge, which I think is a key part of the appeal. [...], it’s almost like science fiction in the sense that the film feels almost like an alternate history compared with the narratives we’ve all been fed…” In JFK, Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison declares, “Now we are through the looking glass here people! White is black, and black is white.”

JFK feels so ahead of its time, anticipating, over three decades ago, the way that the Internet would shatter the concept of social consensus and singular narratives by offering enough information for anyone to chart their own path through current events, even as official channels insist ever more strenuously on the dangers of following such a path. When JFK originally came out, it was attacked vociferously by people both in Hollywood and connected to the government. Longtime Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Jack Valenti called it “a propaganda masterpiece and equally a hoax.” Others had worse things to say about Stone and the film.

Regardless of your take on the film’s accuracy, much of the anger that the film still generates, for and against its claims and the morality of its status as a work of art clearly stems from the emotionally volatile material it strikes upon: either you are prepared to believe that the people of America and the world have been lied to or you are disgusted with a filmmaker who would suggest such a thing. Either way, it gets its hooks in you.

However, what makes JFK still so compelling and a force to be reckoned with is first and foremost the filmmaking itself. Formally, it sweeps the viewer up in its own paranoid worldview in a way few films ever have. It’s hard to believe that the film could have been made before digital editing, so intricate and layered is its construction, shifting from black and white to colour, from documentary footage to recreation, in the space of seconds and minutes. Stone himself later commented that the film “was the beginning of a new era for me in terms of filmmaking because it's not just about a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. It's also about the way we look at our recent history.” In the era of YouTube and fan edits, it’s hard not to see Stone’s film as a kind of ground zero for contemporary historical video collage.

After a prologue narrated by Martin Sheen, which sets the stage and climaxes with the event of 11/22/63, the film follows the investigation into the Kennedy Assassination by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, played by Costner. Garrison remains the only prosecutor to bring a case to court in the matter of the Kennedy Assassination, implicating a wealthy businessman (and acknowledged contact of the Domestic Contact Service of the CIA) Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), although Shaw was acquitted in the end.

It’s a strange trajectory for a film, to conclude with Garrison’s failure to bring any conspirators to justice, but it shows how strong Stone’s filmmaking and the performances he gets from his actors are that we are left with the overwhelming feeling that we have witnessed something important. Costner’s famous closing argument to the jury in the 1969 trial is one of his greatest acting performances, a 15-minute-long monologue weaving evidence with emotional appeal, raising to a pitch of desperation and on the verge of tears as he begs the jury, “Do not forget your dying king!” It’s a rare courtroom scene that lets the prosecutor deliver their full argument to the jury, not just bits and pieces. We, the viewers, become the object of the lawyer’s appeal, rather than simply being passive observers.

Garrison’s closing argument is the climax of the film, but at the film’s heart lies another tour-de-force performance, Donald Sutherland as the mysterious “X”—in reality L. Fletcher Prouty, who worked as an advisor on the film, and whose book JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (1992) was my next step into the world of the Kennedy Assassination. Sutherland’s X guides Costner’s Garrison through the logic that would lead a government to consider such a “coup-d'etat,” in that “the organizing principle of any society is for war.” Garrison, and by extension the viewer, are able to explain the motive for Kennedy’s assassination in Kennedy’s opposition to CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother John, who along with other key figures in the security state argued for the deepening of American involvement in Vietnam, both overtly and clandestinely. For Stone, as much as for Garrison, this is personal; Stone himself served in the Vietnam War, and explored it in his films, Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).

The portrayal of America in Stone’s films is one of a nation that embodies both the best and worst of human potential, as he explores the greed of Wall Street (1987), the fall of another President in Nixon (1995), or the heroes of 9/11 in World Trade Center (2006). But JFK, even among Stone’s filmography, stands out as a film that has an incredible faith in America at the same time that it posits the American Military Industrial Complex as the seat of absolute duplicity. It is a film that could only be made by a disillusioned liberal, a man who clearly loves his country and is outraged at those who mar its reputation through their deceit.

Likewise, JFK is a film made by a man who truly loves and believes in the power of film to illuminate truth, even as he turns to every trick and tool that cinema has to manipulate and distort and suggest. Perhaps most notoriously, Stone’s film doesn’t distinguish between actual documentary footage and recreations, filming scenes to fill in the blanks. JFK gains its authority and power as much or more through the magic and entertainment of Hollywood cinema as it does through its actual revelations about the Kennedy assassination, many of which that could be found elsewhere.

The film also benefits from one of John Williams’ best scores, equally majestic, elegiac, and suspenseful. He captures the tone of waning American faith and paranoid speculation equally, drawing on dissonance and percussion more than usual. Has any composer ever loved and given pride of place to the French horn the way that Williams’ does here in his opening composition, which also recalls a military bugle fanfare? Later, the stately power of the films’ musical themes gives way to percussive and the noirish beats of “The Conspirators,” a theme that the film uses to great effect as the background to Donald Sutherland’s monologue. Williams grants the film an extra layer of Hollywood authority, having provided the music for so many of our modern myths, with Star Wars, Superman, and his numerous collaborations with Steven Spielberg. In its own way, JFK is the kind of film that could become a whole world for a young viewer much as those more traditional fantasies do.

Stone gathers together a remarkable supporting cast to support Costner. First and central to the film is his casting of Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged shooter and lone-gunman, who was murdered in police custody days after the assassination. Stone goes so far as to re-shoot historical footage of Oswald and insert Oldman, presenting a seamless image for the viewer, not daring to break the spell that his film casts. I’ve mentioned Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones, but rounding out the cast of characters in the mythos is Kevin Bacon, Jack Lemmon, Walter Mathau, Ed Asner (as Guy Bannister), John Candy, and most striking of all, Joe Pesci as David Ferrie, with his fake eyebrows and strange accent. Among Garrison’s family and staff are actors including Sissy Spacek as Liz Garrison, Michael Rooker, Jay O. Sanders, Wayne Knight, and Laurie Metcalf. By assembling a cast like this, Stone draws on the American belief in Hollywood and celebrity to solidify our faith: if a film can look like this and star so many notable actors, surely it cannot be all bunk?

Some will allege that the film endorses a reading that Garrison was motivated to prosecute Clay Shaw based on Shaw’s homosexuality, echoing a long-standing homophobic trope that homosexuals and other so-called deviants are out to corrupt America. This charge seems odd, given that Garrison’s own wife confronts him about this in the film. More importantly, to dwell on the suspects of the Shaw trial is to miss the forest for the trees. If Stone were trying solely to convince the audience of one particular theory into Kennedy’s assassination, he fails on its face, since the film itself lays out dozens of rabbit trails and conflicting evidence that it doesn’t follow or that contradict itself. This fact, “that Stone does not subscribe to all of Garrison's theories,” was a point that Roger Ebert writing in 1991 made as central to his defense and championing of the film. Stone has recently returned to the investigation in the 2021 documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which scarcely brings up the Shaw investigation and draws on documents made available since 1991, many due to the JFK Act, also known as the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, passed in great part due to the impact that Stone’s film had at the time. The role the film played in the declassification of at least some material related to the Kennedy assassination and Warren Commission's report supports the reading that Stone is interested in more than Garrison’s case against Shaw.

Above all JFK is a film that encourages its audiences not to simply take for granted what we are told, especially when great power is involved. Though at times characters may hector or lecture each other, these rhetorical flourishes are part of the evidence of the investigation, not the film’s form or effect on the viewer. The film itself does not hector or lecture the viewer. Instead, the film invites viewers to participate in the very act of making meaning out of the various pieces and threads we are presented with; we the viewers become co-investigators in the unraveling of the conspiracy. The film is primarily about assembling as many clues as possible for the viewer to sift through and begin to hold together.

Perhaps in the early 21st century we are more accustomed to such works of imaginative investigation, after facing events of equally momentous impact on our understanding of the world. We might find ourselves trying to make sense of the events of 9/11 or the origins and response to Covid-19. More than a few have been driven to believe conspiracy offers the best explanation. Sometimes we are faced with direct evidence of the fact that, at times, our governments do indeed lie to us, as anyone who bought the WMD pitch for the 2003 invasion of Iraq must confront in light of the manufactured evidence and media complicity in paving the way. Perhaps JFK feels less surprising now, in a world of YouTube conspiracies and non-stop culture war. Because we are all Oliver Stones now, trying to make sense of the world we are faced with through the looking glass that is our screens.

JFK (1991, USA)

Directed by Oliver Stone; screenplay by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, based on the books, On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs; starring Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Donald Sutherland, Martin Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Jack Lemmon, Walter Mathau, Ed Asner, John Candy, Michael Rooker, Jay O. Sanders, Wayne Knight, Laurie Metcalf.

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