Film / JFK

"To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of men."

— Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in the first words that appear onscreen

JFK is a 1991 film directed and co-written by Oliver Stone about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and its aftermath, based around the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). After reading the Warren Report and finding it unsatisfactory, Garrison decides to launch an investigation on his own. After reviewing witness reports and interviewing some people on his own, Garrison becomes convinced Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, and that all of the suspicious events seem to be circling a Texas businessman named Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), who goes by the alias Clay Bertrand. Shaw has connections to Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman), the CIA, the FBI, and others.

After his case gains publicity, Garrison is invited to Washington, D.C. for a confidential meeting. The man (Donald Sutherland), who goes only by the name "X", says that Garrison is closer to the truth than he thinks, and gives him background information regarding his suspicions that JFK was killed by a conspiracy involving the CIA, the military, and business interests (the "Military-Industrial Complex") in order to, among other things, stop him from bringing The Vietnam War and the Cold War to an end for unknown goals.

Invigorated by this new information, Garrison arrests Shaw for conspiracy and puts him on trial, detailing his entire theory about the assassination and the various inconsistencies with the "official story", most famously the theory of the "magic bullet". Despite his passionate push at the trial (and, as was later revealed, the belief by jury members that there was a conspiracy) Shaw is acquitted of all charges.

The film was and still is intensely controversial for its liberal use of Artistic License in depicting the events of and around Garrison's investigation, when in reality the movie is not meant to be the definitive investigation into Kennedy's death, but rather an allegory of the general public's frustration over not knowing the actual truth about the assassination. Or so Stone says, but in other interviews, well... Stone released an annotated screenplay with all of the references.

The movie was a major critical and box office success, winning two Academy Awards (for editing and cinematography), and was nominated for six more, losing Best Picture to The Silence of the Lambs.

Based on the books On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire by Jim Marrs.

Not to be confused with Killing Kennedy, the docudrama about JFK and Oswald which has Oswald as the lone gunman.

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This film provides examples of:

• Arc Words: "Operation Mongoose".^note The real Operation Mongoose was the CIA's unsuccessful terror campaign to try and destabilize Castro's government, punctuated by occasional assassination attempts on Castro.
• Artistic License – History: It would be easier to list what the film didn't get wrong, and that's just considering information not tied to the JFK assassination. Even Oliver Stone has stated regret at not making the film's fictional status clearer.
  • Several historians have taken Stone to task on the movie for massively changing real life events. For example, Garrison never delivered an in-court summation of the trial and they cite numerous mistakes Stone made in the film.
  • When Garrison outlines what he believed happened in Dallas, he describes the outcomes of six shots. Nearly everyone at the scene (~80%) described only three, while another 10% heard only two, and only around 10% claimed four or more.
  • In pointing out the supposed superimposed photo of Oswald holding the rifle, the film does not include the facts that Marina Oswald herself said that she took the photo, nor that she took several such photos (only one of which is commonly cited as supposedly being doctored), nor that photo bore 11 scratch imperfections unique to Oswald's own camera, nor that investigators have successfully recreated the photo as early as 1967.
• "Be Quiet!" Nudge: More like a Groin Attack punch by Clay as David starts to describe how they could kill JFK.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The final line of Garrison's closing statement at the trial of Clay Shaw ("It's up to you") is delivered directly to the camera.
• Bury Your Gays: David Ferrie is hunted down and forcibly overdosed on drugs by agents of the conspiracy. In real life, he died of an aneurysm after years of poor health.
• Camp Gay: Clay Shaw. Mrs. Garrison even questions whether Jim is going after Shaw because he is gay at one point. He denies this. However, Shaw only behaves this way during the party. Otherwise, he's Straight Gay, if a little upper crust effete (naturally, as during the era he couldn't be open about it).
  Willie: He never snap in a million years.^note By "snap", he means the 'gay finger snap'.
• Casting Gag: Jim Garrison himself makes a brief cameo as Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, the namesake of the commission investigating the Kennedy assassination and which ended with the official "Oswald acted alone" determination.
• Character Title: Sort of. The movie is named after John F. Kennedy (specifically his initials) as his assassination serves as the gist of the story.

• Composite Character: Several, including Willie, the male prostitute played by Kevin Bacon. (See here for details.)
• Contrived Coincidence: Mr X cites the multiple cases of agencies behaving against protocol and the unusual timing of him being sent to the South Pole on a mundane diplomatic excursion shortly prior to the assassination as reasons he suspects that Oswald being made a patsy for JFK's death was part of a coverup for a black-op.
  Mr X: Even if we had not allowed the bubbletop to be removed from the limousine, we'd've put at least 100 to 200 agents on the sidewalks, without question. I mean, only a month before in Dallas, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was spit on and hit; there'd already been several attempts on de Gaulle's life in France. We would have arrived days ahead, studied the route, checked all the buildings. Never would have allowed all those wide-open windows overlooking Dealy, never! We would have had our own snipers covering the area - the minute a window went up, they'd have been on the radio. We would've been watching the crowds - packages, rolled up newspapers, a coat over an arm. Never would have allowed a man to open an umbrella along the way! Never would have allowed that limousine to slow down to 10 miles an hour, much less take that unusual curve at Houston and Elm! You would have felt an army presence in the streets that day. But none of this happened. It was a violation of the most basic protection codes we have, and it's the best indication of a massive plot based in Dallas.
  • Lampshaded directly in the same scene:-
  Mr X: Many strange things were happening, and your Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with them. We had the entire Cabinet on a trip to the Far East. We had one third of a combat division returning from Germany in the air above the United States at the time of the shooting. At 12:34 pm, the entire telephone system went dead in Washington for a solid hour. And on the plane back to Washington, word was radioed from the White House Situations Room to Lyndon Johnson that one individual performed the assassination. Does that sound like a bunch of coincidences to you, Mr. Garrison? Not for one moment. The cabinet was out of the country to get their perceptions out of the way. Troops were in the air for possible riot control. The phones didn't work to keep the wrong stories from spreading if anything went wrong with the plan. Nothing was left to chance. He could not be allowed to escape alive.

• Deliberately Monochrome: A large number of the flashback sequences.
• Distinction Without a Difference: One clip of an interview with Oswald about three months before the events in Dallas^note He was arrested in New Orleans for a brawl with a gang of anti-Castro Cuban militants and somehow got into a television debate as a result. has him stating about his political beliefs: "I am not a Communist. I am a Marxist-Leninist."^note There is actually a difference between the two, with Marxism-Leninism being the mainstream form of communism as opposed to Marx's actual ideas, but in 1963, most people would think it's semantics.
• Double Think: When decrying the "magic bullet" theory, Garrison focuses on the implausibility of a single bullet entering Connelly's back, shattering his rib, exiting his chest, turning right to shatter his wrist before making a "dramatic u-turn" to burying itself in Connelly's left thigh in "almost pristine" condition^note The film ignores that photos of the "magic bullet" exist, showing it looking exactly like a bullet that's bounced through that much of a human body would look like. Yet, in his summation positing six shots Garrison claims two misses, three that hit Kennedy (throat, back, and head), and... one that hit Connelly.^note Without the extenuating circumstance of the bullet being slowed and tumbled by first hitting JFK actually makes the "magic bullet" even more magical in Garrison's theory.
• Gay Conservative: Willie O'Keefe, who's in jail for gay prostitution, hated JFK for being soft on Communism and for helping civil rights.
• Gilligan Cut: We get to see Dean Andrews talking to Clay Bertrand immediately after he tells Garrison he never met him.
• Government Conspiracy: "X" and (eventually) Garrison, believe this is part of what killed Kennedy.
• Historical Figures in Archival Media: The film uses footage and photographs taken of Kennedy on the day of the assassination.
• Historical Hero Upgrade:
  • The real Jim Garrison tried to railroad an innocent man, Shaw, after his investigation came up empty. The trial was a fiasco and many of his theory's particulars (namely, that Oswald, Shaw and Ferrie were not only co-conspirators but involved in a love triangle) were by all accounts preposterous, leading more than a few writers to accuse Garrison of homophobia. The movie makes a passing mention to Garrison's later indictment on bribery and corruption charges, but passes them off as a smear concocted by the Government Conspiracy to discredit him (which, to be fair, the real Garrison insisted as well). Indeed, many conspiracy theorists, that is people who doubted the Warren Commission, protested Garrison's trial and prosecution, along with his well-attested character flaws, as tarnishing any genuine grounds for criticism of the official report.
  • Depending on your POV, JFK himself is given one of these. The real Kennedy was, for the most part, a typical Cold War liberal that took a hard line on Cuba and Vietnam, but Stone portrays him as a radical progressive and Lyndon Johnson as a manipulative super-villain who rams the Tonkin Gulf resolution through Congress to get elected. In fact, Kennedy's record on Vietnam is much more mixed, and open to interpretation. He had de facto committed the US to South Vietnam by the time he was assassinated, and the CIA-backed coup that killed Ngo Dinh Diem and plunged South Vietnam into chaos had already taken place (though Kennedy expressed regret about the coup after it happened). The snippet of Kennedy telling Walter Cronkite that "in the last analysis, it's (South Vietnam's) war" is taken out of context from a longer interview where he also tells Cronkite that withdrawing American troops from Vietnam would be a mistake. That said, Kennedy made comments to his advisers indicating that he hoped he could withdraw troops from Vietnam in the future, but suspected he couldn't until after the 1964 election because Republicans would turn it into a campaign issue.
  • The opening narration also stresses Kennedy's support for the Civil Rights Movement, which was largely lukewarm until the last months of his presidency (his speech sampled in the film came in June 1963, just five months before his death) and peacemaking efforts with the Soviet Union while ignoring his brinksmanship over Cuba (which is blamed, naturally, on the CIA "lying" to Kennedy) and Berlin, along with the increases in military spending and armaments production which occurred during his administration. Conversely, there's no acknowledgment of Lyndon Johnson's work in actually passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, as the film defines him entirely through his actions in Vietnam.
  • Jack Lemmon's character, Jack Martin, is portrayed as twitchy and evasive but basically honest. In real life, he had, prior to the events of the movie, worked as an abortion provider, and bragged about beating a murder rap when one of his unfortunate "patients" died. His claims about the assassination were also much less credible.
  • "Mr. X" is based on L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel and conspiracy theorist who served as an adviser to the film. The movie not only exaggerates his military role (he was not involved with Presidential security as "X" claims, nor was his role on the Joint Chiefs of Staff as important as the movie suggests) but ignores his less savory beliefs. Prouty was also an all-purpose conspiracy theorist who, among other claims, believed that the Jonestown Massacre was a government hoax, that Princess Diana was murdered by the CIA, and associated with the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying Liberty Lobby. More within the realms of standard Hollywood History, he didn't meet Garrison until years after Clay Shaw's trial.
• Historical Villain Upgrade:
  • Clay Shaw was, in real life, a Renaissance Man whose achievements in architecture, business and theater (he wrote several plays, one of them at age 16) are nigh-legendary, and who openly supported and backed John F. Kennedy. This film's Clay Shaw is a Depraved Homosexual lunatic with ties to various far-right groups before the assassination. Shaw was admired as a philanthropist and patron of the arts (he was friends with Tennessee Williams). Also there's no firm evidence he'd ever even met David Ferrie or Lee Harvey Oswald.
  • Dean Andrews is presented as a sinister manipulator. The real Dean Andrews was described repeatedly as a Large Ham who wouldn't harm a fly.
  • As mentioned above, Lyndon Baines Johnson gets this big time.
• Humans Are Warriors: Befitting his background as a high-ranking intelligence agent, Mr. X believes this, believing that humanity and government as we know it exist because of war, and the state's ability to wage war translates to holding power over the people. He uses this to provide a possible outline of the conspiracy's motives, and how the then-ongoing Vietnam War ties into it.
• I Have Many Names: Clay Shaw, alias Clay Bertrand. The film presents this as being common knowledge among New Orleans's gay community, but the real Shaw never used that name - it was a combination of Dean Andrews playing a prank on Jim Garrison and Garrison's own belief that when gay men use an alias, they only change their last names. Seriously.
• It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans: One of Garrison's investigators interviews an informant during a Mardi Gras parade.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Near the end of his monologue, Mr. X says "Don't take my word for it—don't believe me. Do your own work, your own thinking."
• The Mafia: Another possible contributor to the assassination and cover-up.
• Manipulative Editing: Garrison's breakdown of the Zapruder Film posits, "The third shot, Frame 232, hits Kennedy in the back pulling him downward and forward." Ignoring that the real Zapruder film shows Kennedy still clutching his throat until at least Frame 260, the film fabricates a corresponding forward lurch by interspersing one filmed by Stone in conscious imitation of the grainy Zapruder film with a slow-motion clip from the actual Zapruder film which at proper speed merely shows Kennedy gradually collapsing towards his wife with no hint of being struck between his initial neck wound and the fatal head-shot.
• Mr. Exposition: "X" and Garrison. X's monologue lasts over 15 minutes, and Garrison's closing statement at the trial lasts over 20. And yet, thanks to Oliver Stone's direction, it never feels slow.
• Narrator: Martin Sheen narrates the opening montage.
• Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy: Both Garrison's hypothesis for the assassination, and Mr. X's unconfirmed suspicions, involve a vast plot to assassinate JFK, conceived and undertaken by a number of high-ranking officials and members of the military industrial complex as well as criminals, mercenaries and black ops soldiers.
  "Mr. X": As early as 1961, they knew Kennedy wasn't going to go to war in South-East Asia. Like Caesar, he is surrounded by enemies and something's underway, but it has no face - yet everybody in the loop knows."
• Off on a Technicality: Much of the information about Clay Shaw is thrown out (particularly the fact that he used the alias "Clay Bertrand" while participating in his shady deals) because he didn't have a lawyer present while he was being booked.^note In fact, his lawyer was in the police station but was involved with other officials, while Shaw was at the booking desk. The movie says this wasn't legally sound, and then implies that it may have been part of the Government Conspiracy to keep Shaw from being convicted. In real life, the judge took over questioning when the booking officer was called in and determined that he had badly violated procedure; in turn, the jurors reported in their statements that they were disgusted by Garrison's lack of evidence (their deliberations, including bathroom breaks, lasted a half-hour).
• Overt Rendezvous: Garrison and "X" meet in a public park in Washington D.C.
• Politically Correct History:
  • Averted. The film makes it quite clear that Kennedy was not popular in the South. Some gentlemen in the bar are actually seen cheering when they hear that he has been assassinated.
  • In addition, the movie doesn't portray Kennedy as being a saint, either. He's said to fund military development only in districts he needs to win his next election.
• Posthumous Character: Oswald dies soon after the movie begins, but that doesn't prevent him from appearing in a large number of flashbacks and faux documentary footage.
• Properly Paranoid: Jim Garrison starts feeling paranoid about what he's getting into even before he finds bugs planted in his offices.^note For the record, his office was never bugged in real life. Possibly David Ferrie, too.
• "Rashomon"-Style: The film is told largely in flashback by unreliable narrators recounting various versions of events leading up to the Kennedy assassination. The role of Lee Harvey Oswald, in particular, is portrayed variously as lone assassin, innocent patsy, and part of a conspiracy, depending on the point of view of the person narrating that version of events.
• Reality Is Unrealistic:
  • When shooting a flashback to visualize a character seeing smoke come from a rifle at "the grassy knoll" during the shooting, Oliver Stone had to use a smoke machine because modern rifles don't emit enough smoke, ironically disproving some of the claimed evidence for a second gunman there in doing so.
  • Unintentional example: one scene features Garrison and one of his staff in the Depository with a gun identical to Oswald's. The staffer quotes the supposed time stated by the Warren Report for Oswald's shots, 5.6 seconds,^note The report actually gives Oswald closer to eight seconds. and then goes through the motions of firing three shots while Garrison times him. Garrison then announces his time as "Six, seven seconds." As numerous people who've timed the scene have reported, Garrison's staffer actually makes the shots in 5.6 seconds.^note It took 2.3 seconds to work the bolt action for Oswald's rifle, so assuming he had the first round chambered in advance, he actually only needed 4.6 seconds.
• Re-Cut: Oliver Stone later released a Director's Cut that ran for 206 minutes. More details here http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=93992.
• Rewind, Replay, Repeat: One of the most famous examples during Garrison's closing statement, when he puts the footage of Kennedy being shot in the head on a loop to emphasize the direction:
  "Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left."^note It turns out this does not mean anything-the impact of a bullet can make one's head go either way, no matter the direction it was fired from. In JFK's case, his head actually does move infinitesimally forward before the force of the his skull exploding slightly forward and to the right sends his head back and to the left.
• A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: David Ferrie refers to the Kennedy assassination as "a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma" when trying to convince Jim Garrison to drop his investigation during a paranoia-fueled rant.
• Sanity Slippage: David Ferrie, in spades.
• Shout-Out:
  • Sir Walter Scott: "Oh! what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!"
  • Lee Harvey Oswald's capture at the theater is compared to Josef K's from The Trial.^note The part where he drew a gun and opened fire on the cops is "conveniently" left out, as is the part that the police were arresting him for the murder of police officer J.D. Tippet, with the assassination charges coming only later.
  • Alfred Lord Tennyson: "Authority forgets a dying king."
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare:
  • "One may smile, and smile, and be a villain."
  • "Like Caesar, he is surrounded by enemies …"
• Spiritual Successor: To Executive Action, the first film to outline a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, using the exact same "triangulated fire" theory, complete with the third shot hitting Connally but not Kennedy.
• Straight Gay:
  • David Ferrie.
  • Willie O'Keefe. He swishes when walking up to meet Garrison, but becomes a stereotypical Southern racist railing against JFK at one point.
  • Clay Shaw, according to O'Keefe, calling him a "butch john", saying that he wasn't a limp wrist, and wouldn't snap in a million years.
• Totally Radical: Dean Andrews talks in a mishmash of slang, much of which dates to the '50s. This, at least, was Truth in Television; Andrews was known for being jocular to a fault.
• Who Shot JFK?: The Movie. Ultimately, the film leaves the answer up to the viewer, other than "It was totally a conspiracy, we swear".

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