JFK: THE HOLLYWOOD STORY
...ntrivances, they provide the linkage for the conspiracy. Hitler always said - The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it. “The important point to make about "JFK" is that Stone does not subscribe to all of Garrison's theories, and indeed rewrites history to supply his Garrison character with material he could not have possessed at the time of these events. He uses Garrison as the symbolic center of his film because Garrison, in all the United States in all the years since 1963, is the only man who has attempted to bring anyone into court in connection with the fishiest political murder of our time.” (Roger Ebert, in an article for The Chicago Sun Times). We cannot deny that today’s film industry involves a high amount of money and expectations. By using actors well known, like Kevin Costner, Kevin Bacon, Sissy Spacek and other big names, Oliver Stone seems to create a bigger credibility with the audience, making us more believers in what is being presented. As a filmmaker, Stone uses techniques to persuade, confuse and explain facts, they being true or pure Hollywood drama. Intercalating footage, people and pictures of the assassination, with fictional footages and actors, we become hypnotized and confused with the fast pace editing and manipulating images. The story given by the government on the assassination was that “a single lone assassin was responsible for the murder - Lee Harvey Oswald - he fired only three shots in 5.6 seconds from a manual bolt action rifle with a poorly aligned scope. The first bullet missed, wounding bystander James Tague. The second bullet was The Magic Bullet - it caused seven wounds - two to Kennedy and five to Governor Connally - not only did it do this, but it paused 1.6 seconds in midair before entering Connally. This single bullet, after entering and re-entering two men ends up INTACT on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital - the final bullet strikes Kennedy in the head - supposedly all shots came from behind the motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Our villainous Lee Harvey Oswald walks from the building and supposedly decides to kill a Dallas police officer, J.D. Tippit - police take Oswald into custody - unlike all other political assassins in history, Oswald denies any crimes - before he gets to tell his history, a patriotic nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, shoots Oswald live on television while surrounded by cops in the basement of the Dallas police station - Oswald's dead - the first rule of assassination - kill the assassin.” (This explanation was taken from Oliver Stone’s web site at www.oliverstone.com) Now, if our brains are in the right place, we can easily ask ourselves: “what?” And that is what Oliver Stone, among many others have done; speculating the murder that until this day is unclear to the world. I, myself, believe the theory to be near impossible, as Garrison said in JFK, fancy physics can prove even that an elephant can hang from a cliff with his tale attached to a daisy and not fall… Oliver Stone creates a conspiracy motif, embellishing and polishing the real events. The film depiction of events must grab the viewer's attention, keep him fixed in his seat, make him identify with the action and principal characters, and induce him to tell his neighbors to buy a ticket for the next performance. As Robert S. Robins, Professor of Political Science at Tulane University in New Orleans, observes: “The entertainment resources of the paranoid message are unrivaled. It offers puzzles, drama, passion, heroes, villains, and struggle. If the story line can be tied to an historical event, especially one that involves romantic characters and unexpected death, then fiction, history, and popular delusion can be joined in the pursuit of profit. The story, moreover, need never end. If evidence appears that refutes the conspiracy, the suppliers of the discrediting material will themselves be accused of being part of the conspiracy. The paranoid explanatory system is a closed one. Only confirmatory evidence is accepted. Contradictions are dismissed as being naive or, more likely, part of the conspiracy itself.” Paranoia in the dictionary is described as a mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions and the projection of personal conflicts, which are ascribed to the supposed hostility of others; chronic functional psychosis of insidious development, characterized by persistent, unalterable, logically reasoned delusions, commonly of persecution and grandeur. One viewer said told Dr. Robert S. Robins that he and his companion “walked out of the movie feeling like we had just undergone a powerful paranoia induction.” Films are not simply entertainment; they are also cultural, intellectual, and political influences. The effect, however, is not so much to change people's minds as to solidify and exaggerate beliefs and attitudes already held. Films do not create cultural trends, but they do accelerate and exaggerate them. A survey and analysis of viewer reaction to JFK demonstrated that this film and others like it can produce "markedly altered emotional states, belief changes spread across specific political issues, and ... an impact on politically relevant behavioral changes. [JFK viewers] reported emotional changes, [became] significantly more angry and less hopeful...Those who had seen the movie were significantly more likely to believe [the various conspiracies depicted in the film]."(John McAdams for http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm) Films of this sort are called docudramas because they dramatize historical events and historical characters and ...