Jessica Lewis
Fall 2008 Final
A Review of Oliver Stone’s JFK
“So, you want to know, who killed the President and connived in the cover-up? Everybody! High officials in the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas constabulary, all three armed services, Big Business and the White House. Everybody done it — everybody but Lee Harvey Oswald.” - Time Magazine, Dec. 23, 1991
It is a given that Hollywood takes liberty with facts. In Oliver Stone’s JFK, Hollywood turns history backwards and upside down. Jim Garrison, the movie's hero as a notorious former district attorney in New Orleans, had a famous comment about the assassination in the movies dialog:
“The key to the whole case is through the looking glass. Black is white and white is black. I don't want to be cryptic, but that's the way it is. “
Ironically, I believe that is the key to understanding the movie. In scene after scene, the idea communicated by the movie is contradicting with the historical record, at least for those who don’t give into Oliver Stone’s Hollywood conspiracy on a major event in American history.
Since the movie industry’s beginning, it has generated evangelists of all kinds. Charlie Chaplin's films toward the end of his career advocated world peace, Louis B. Mayer high-lighted middle-class value, and John Wayne embodied the American spirit. Oliver Stone's main idea, he has claimed, is to "start to change things" by "looking at the '60s not as history but as a seminal decade for the postwar generation coming into power in the '90s." Stone cites Shakespeare to detail the ideas of his inspiration: "What is past is prologue. To forget that past is to be condemned to relive it." Still Stone's cinematic endorsement to history almost seems fanatical at times,
Stones highest point of creativity was during Vietnam, where he served as an infantryman. He was honored with Academy Awards for directing two war films from that period, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of...