Wasn't This Supposed To Be About Movies?
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
For a few years now, Slate has offered a year-end colloquy of critics to discuss the year in film. Sounds like a good idea--critics rarely talk to each other directly, and it's good to see them challenged. Needless to say, the whole thing too often turns into a shouting match about politics (with all parties playing on the same side of the net). This year, I don't even think there was a feint toward film talk before host David Edelstein started in.
This is too bad, since this sort of mindless talk is already widely available on the net. Don't these people realize no one cares to hear their political opinions--that they're lucky enough to get paid to talk about film as it is?
I won't go over every little line--what's the point, you've heard it before. But Jonathan Rosenbaum (a critic I respect) really goes overboard in trying to explain the usefulness of politics in the movies:
...serious questions about the assassination of John F. Kennedy were allowed to become front-page news the moment Oliver Stone decided to make a movie about them, and not a moment before.
This is insane.
For decades Americans had been openly questioning the facts behind JFK's death--well after it ceased being news, in fact. In truth, the Warren Commission did an honest and fairly successful job, essentially getting it right. (If it weren't for Jack Ruby's intervention, most of the mystery would have disappeared as the overwhelming evidence against Oswald was released in court.) There were many well-meaning but misinformed people (including a later Congressional investigation--so much for some official news blackout), and a large complement of crackpots (one of whom Oliver Stone decided to make a film about) who kept trying to claim something else happened, and they did an excellent job of fooling the American public.
But let's forget that lying crackpots essentially won the day. No matter what you believe, the idea that the whole thing was hidden from the public until Oliver Stone decided to make his delirious JFK (1991) is a crazy notion no matter how blinkered your worldview is.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:20 AM
3 Comments:
I recently visited the assassination museum in the book depository in Dallas. I hadn't known about the second Congressional investigation, held in the late 1970s.
They concluded that four shots were fired:
1. Fired by Oswald. The bullet missed.
2. Fired by Oswald. The bullet struck President Kennedy in the upper back, and continued on to hit and injure Governor Connolly.
3. Fired from the grassy knoll. The bullet missed.
4. Fired by Oswald. The bullet struck Kennedy in the head and killed him.
If you omit the third shot, this is essentially identical to the findings of the Warren Commission. The WC has the exact same view of shots 1,2,4 (although the WC wasn't as firm about the sequence of the three shots).
To me, the congressional commission's conclusions are absurd, based on Occam's razor. The main two reasons that the WC findings seem a priori improbable are (a) two men wounded by a single bullet and (b) the recoil of Kennedy's head seemingly going the wrong way. But both of those problems are still present in the Congressional investigation! So all the improbabilities are still there, plus the additional imaginary bullet from the grassy knoll, which left no evidence other than a noise on a tape that the WC said was an echo.
I'm not as convinced as you are that the WC was right. But I certainly would give at least 2-to-1 odds that they were. Which makes me a gullible American in the eyes of many people.
If you have any doubts about the basic conclusions of the Warren Commission, I suggest you read either Gerald Posner's Case Closed or Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, which both present the overwhelming affirmative evidence in favor of Oswald's three shots and better, take on the very bad evidence of the conspiracy theorists.
As to the unfortunate Congressional investigation, the dictabelt recording on which they based their third shot theory has been questioned on a number of grounds (including it didn't happen during the assassination), and I think must be rejected. Meanwhile, the single bullet hitting two men and Kennedy's recoil have both been explained very well--indeed, Bugliosi is at his best explaining how it truly would take a "magic bullet" to go through Kennedy and then not hit Connally. On the other hand, it's pretty hard to buy, as you say, that there was a second gunman shooting at Kennedy in the middle of a crowd and disappearing without leaving any evidence.
The most striking thing about the site in Dallas is how close together everything is. I always pictured the grassy knoll as "a small nearby hill". But it really means "the grass next to the sidewalk adjacent to the street where the motorcade is". From the so-called knoll, I could hit the president by throwing a rock.
But if I had done so, the dozens of people surrounding me in the mob would presumably have noticed me.
"Everyone remembers where he was when President Kennedy was assassinated, especially if he was in Dealy Plaza with a high-powered rifle."
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