Because it’s Christmas, the Washington Post has dumped upon its hapless readers several thousand words of breathless prose from film critic Ann Hornaday in the form of a frenzied dithyramb on the very unlikely subject of “America’s Most Dangerous Movie”, Oliver Stone’s JFK, quite possibly the most morally repulsive “major” film ever made in the USA, with the possible exception of D. W. Griffith’s notorious Birth of a Nation.
If Ann were whooping it up over virtually any other morally and/or aesthetically challenged piece of crap Hollywood has produced—and their name is Legion, for they are many—I would find it easy to hold my peace. Another stupid review of another stupid film. So what? Such is the way of Hollywood. But JFK is different. It is a film flogging an utterly grotesque pack of lies about one of the most shocking events in American history, a film glorifying one of the most shameless and corrupt hustlers in American history, New Orleans district attorney James Garrison, who ruined any number of lives in his blind pursuit of notoriety, and would have ruined many more had he so been allowed, gruesomely exploiting the American judicial system in a near-endless display of naked egoism, a display almost equaled by that of his chronicler, Oliver Stone.
And the worst of it is, Ann applauds all this. It’s a good thing!
Stone’s film has been absorbed into the national bloodstream in other ways. When “JFK” was released, postmodernism — with its notions of subjective truths and multiple realities — had not taken much hold outside academia. Thirty years later, when conspiracy culture has migrated from an arcane parlor game to the steps of the U.S. Capitol — when healthy skepticism has curdled into darker extremes of institutional mistrust — whole swaths of American society seem to have taken up permanent residence in the rabbit holes that Stone plumbed so persuasively.
It is significant that both “JFK” and the World Wide Web were launched in 1991, setting them on a mutual trajectory that now feels eerily inevitable (the movie’s digressive structure uncannily mirrored a then-novel phenomenon called “hypertext”). “JFK” did not invent alternative facts, deepfakes or Deep State paranoia. But its form and content surely anticipated them, and helped usher in an era when audiences would increasingly accept them as reality.
If you read the article for, I don’t know, 70 or 80 column inches or so, you’ll discover Ann uncomfortably admitting that, well, almost nothing in the film is, you know, true, but, hey, that’s not really what the film’s about!
What’s more, they [people who think the film is a pack of vicious lies] overlook what might be the most enduring value of Stone’s film. “JFK” is less about John F. Kennedy in 1963 or Jim Garrison in 1969 than Oliver Stone in 1991: a man whose primal wound — being lied to about why he went to war — had never healed, a man whose prodigious gifts as a storyteller naturally fused with the unresolved loss and deep-seated doubts of his contemporaries, a man whose dog just died. By the time Costner’s Garrison delivers his summation in “JFK,” he barely refers to Shaw or Kennedy: He is making a plea on behalf of a generation that had never gotten accountability after the official lies and betrayals that had conditioned most of their lives.
Uh, so why didn’t Stone make a film about that?
The odds are about a million to one that Ann is well on the “left” of the political spectrum in the good old USA, but it’s a bit of a wonder that—unless she’s, you know, really, really stupid—it hasn’t occurred to her that this essay could easily be rewritten as a dithyramb to a far more recent film, Tucker Carlson’s notorious “documentary” on the January 6 Capitol Hill riot. Hey, hasn’t poor Tucker been “lied to”? Isn’t he suffering from the “primal wound” so common in DC of not being as famous as he’d like to be?
The notion that “passion” trumps truth is deeply corrupting. I hope I don’t end up quoting David Hume’s famous take on “the passions” in every other post, but it’s certainly apropos here:
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
Yes, reason alone without the passions is lifeless and without purpose, but the passions without reason are, though lively, without purpose as well, other than their own fulfillment, leaving us no different from the beasts—no different, really, than the tiny vermin who infect us, who, too, only do as they must, and if we must suffer and die so they may flourish—well, so what?
It is reason alone that can give our lives a moral dimension, a “value”. Values do not exist in Nature, who does not value anything, not even “success”, for life and death are one to her. Deifying the passions deifies power, as Foucault discovered, who, after a lifetime of “exposing” the bourgeois, found himself naked.
Perhaps poor Ann didn’t “mean” all the meanings I’m forcing on her here, but there’s really no excuse for glorifying such a huge assemblage of vicious lies, for any reason. Ann writes that she was overwhelmed by the film when she first saw it, thirty years ago. Perhaps is should have occurred to her that, thirty years ago, she was a dope—or, perhaps, just aestethico-ethically “unformed”.
UPDATE
I have just discovered that there is significant backstory to Ann’s Oliver Stone/JFK story, of which I was, as usual, blissfully unaware. Fellow WashPost columnist Max Boot had posted, the day before Ann’s post, a thoroughly intelligent attack on both Stone and JFK, Oliver Stone just can’t stop spreading lies about JFK’s assassination, emphasizing, appropriately enough, both Stone’s continuing obsession with vicious nonsense and authoritarian rulers like Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin. (Stone may not be the only director in Hollywood to think that the world would be run better if there were only one man in charge of everything, but he’s probably the one who’s most vocal about it.)
It’s seems that Max and Ann’s posts were running on separate tracks (well, probably), so that neither is a reply to the other. Ann, a long-time fan of the film, was celebrating (unfortunately) the 30th anniversary of the film’s release, while Max was expressing his disappointment over a Nov. 22. 2021 airing of a Showtime special prepared by Stone, full of the usual despicable nonsense. So read Max to learn all the things Ann should have told you.
Special Double Full Disclosure Afterwords!
Like Oliver Stone, I too went to Vietnam, though I guess I differed from him in knowing I was being lied to. I just took it for granted that I would be “lucky”, and, luckily, I was. I will also say that Stone’s Platoon, despite its hilariously awful homoerotic subtext, is still easily the best Vietnam War film I’ve ever seen. Stone was in the infantry, while I was in the artillery, which is a much easier gig.
I have never met Ann Hornaday, but back in the early oughties we exchanged emails for a month or two. She had written a film review for the Post that unfortunately mangled an obscure line from Hamlet, about “an engineer hoist with his own petard”, which I snickeringly corrected via email. Ann, a little surprisingly, acknowledged the accuracy of my correction, and I responded with—I hope—an apology for my jeering tone. We chatted back and forth in an increasingly congenial manner until at some point she remarked, to my surprise, that we were related! At least by marriage—she was a niece of my mom’s brother’s wife, and she had met my uncle on several occasions, though I’m still not sure how he might have said, in effect, “One of my sisters is married to a man named Vanneman who has a son named Alan”. Anyway, after going back and forth a bit more I thought it was appropriate for me to suggest that we have lunch together. Well, that ended it, which, considering how we differ on JFK, was probably just as well.
