JFK’S killing greased wheels for Qanon and virus-deniers
Oliver Stone’s JFK in the age of Qanon, Covid denialism and anti-vax conspiracy theories is a very different experience from watching it when the film arrived in cinemas three decades ago.
The movie’s conspiratorial bent and the liberties it takes with history to advance both its plot, and its contention that President John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in 1963 was the end result of a vast conspiracy, created controversy when it was released. But the critical response was mostly positive. Its Roten Tomatoes score is 88 per cent, and on Metacritic it boasts a rating of 72 indicating “generally favourable” reviews. It appeared in several critics’ end-of-year top 10 lists and was nominated for eight Oscars, winning two (for cinematography and film editing).
The box office returns were handsome — the global gross of $205m (£148m) made it the sixth biggest film of 1991, despite its bladder-busting three-hour run time. I contributed to the total when it came out, and while its contention that the conspiracy went all the way up to Vice President Lyndon B Johnson looked like a stretch, its lambasting of the Warren Commission Johnson established to investigate the assassination and its insistence that Oswald couldn’t have acted alone hit home. Like a persistent majority of Americans — and polls show it reaches across ethnic groups, genders and political persuasions — I bought into the idea that there must have been more at work than a lone shooter; a disturbed, dysfunctional individual who took advantage of the easy availability of firearms in his country and used his military training to write his name into the history books. It’s a theory that’s spawned hundreds of books and a pop culture trope. Countless shows and movies dealing with time travel, or parallel worlds, or general weirdness have visited and revisited the event, most recently Neflix’s Umbrella Academy.
The Kennedy conspiracy theory has become a respectable conspiracy theory. Almost. And the film reinforced that. But it isn’t and today’s virulent conspiracies make clear that the thinking it encourages is problematic.
There might not, on the face of it, appear to be much of a link between the Kennedy conspiracy and Qanon. One holds that some combination of people who might have had cause to want Kennedy dead — the mob, the military-industrial complex, anti-castro Cubans, the CIA, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, communists, pro-castro Cubans, the Russians, Lyndon B Johnson according to Stone, Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s father according to Donald Trump — put Lee Harvey Oswald up as a patsy while their man hid behind the famous grassy knoll, did the deed and escaped in the chaos that followed.
The other claims that Trump was fighting a secret war against a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles, including prominent figures in the Democratic Party who were protected by “deep state” operatives. It’s easy to see the problems with the former just from the length of that list and the fact that the case, at its core, is backed by litle more than the feeling that one man simply couldn’t have, on his own, changed history as Oswald did.
But it looks positively rational compared to the craziness of the later, which is a venomous internet-driven fiction concocted by extreme right-wingers without the faintest grounding in reality. The same goes for Covid-denialism and the hysterical claims of the global anti-vax mob. Yet the type of thinking that fuels the Kennedy theory even now, ater government papers have been released, ballistics experts and, yes, physicists, have looked at the evidence and concluded that the fatal bullet came from the Texas Book Depository building where Oswald set himself up, isn’t all that different. There was a genuine conspiracy just a few years ater Kennedy was killed that did go all the way up to the president of the day, not just the vice president, in the form of Richard Nixon. Its aim was to break into and bug the offices of the Democratic National Commitee in the Watergate building.