Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film

Part Three

He felt connected to the events on \he screen. It; was like secret instructions entering the network of signals and broadcast bands, the whole busy air of transmission. Marina was asleep. They were 1'UIU1lng a message through the night into his skin. Frank Sinatra sets up ahigh-powered rifle in the window and walts for the train to arrive. Lee knew he would fall. It was, in the end, a movie.l In Libra, his brilliant work ofassassination fiction, Don DeLillo illustrates t1us often-remarked-upon incident of October 19, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald, watching television with his wife on a Saturday night, sees Suddenly, Lewis Allen's 1954 film about an attempt to assassinate the president. The movie presents Frank Sinatra as a returned and troubled veteran, a would-be assassin who impersonates a Secret Service agent. Commandeering the house of a widowed mother whose husband has died in combat, the killers set up their shooter's nest in the family living room. Perched on a grassy knoll, the house overlooks the railroad station at which the president's train IS scheduledto stop. Assassination critics onboth sides of the conspiracy debate cIted t1us historical coincidence, only implying what DeLIllo openly imagined- the crnema as subtle motivator, source of identIfication, and ideological transmisslOn.2 In this case, the desIre to assign the cinema some sinister psychic capacity may indeed be best suited to fiction, because subsequent research by assassination critiCS suggested that Suddenly was in fact not broadcast in the Dallas area on the night of October 19.3 Nonetheless, the tantalizing coincidence this scene offered to wnters and its presence rn stories about Oswald registered agenuine faith in the suggestive powers ofnarrative film. It lent one more aspect to the cubist portrait ofOswald, here the impressionable movie watcher whose personal mission and histoncal identity are reflected back to him by the cinematic mirror. Suddenly was not the onlyfilm reinvested with the meanmgs that emerged from the assassination debates. Indeed, while the buffs cited Oswald's possible connections to Suddenly, the producers of The Manchurtan Candidate cited the approval bestowed on them by JFK.4 Perhaps the outstanding example of Hollywood's returning vet and cold war scenarios, The Manchurian Candtdate (1962) is as significant here for its exhibition history as 161 for its storyofRaymond Shaw, the brainwashed assassin programmed to kill a presidential candidate. Kept off television for most of the two decades following its release, it was long rumored to be sequestered by Its star, Frank Sinatra, ostensibly because its subject matter resonated too closely with the echoes of tragedy and conspiracy surrounding the death of JFK. It thus became something of a Hollywood eqmvalent to the Zapruder footage, its content considered too shocking for broadcast or too liable to reopen the nation's emotional wounds. When in 1988 the film was released in theaters nationwide and then cablecast on televiSion, these reasons for its absence rurned out to be apocryphal.5 Still, this rationale for its starus as absent text had clearly been influenced by the assassination debates. Not only its "suspicious " disappearance from the movie and television screen, but also the public's ability to contend with the inflammatory aspects of the film's plot became mseparable from questions about a possible conspiracy that were raised during the period ofthe film's absence. Indeed, the rerelease publicity used to market The Manchurtan Candidate in 1988 played on these factors, declaring the film "Once Unbelievable, Now Unthinkable." The rhetoric of this publicity suggested that in the quarter-cenmry that had passed, the sinister implications of the assassination literamre had been sufficiently digested ' ifnot legitimized, for the film's tale ofconspiracy, incest, and internal subversion now to resemble shockmg news more than science fiction. Still other films, made after Keunedy's death, offered oblique references to the assassination or had their more violent moments read in hindsight through the prism of the JFK controversy. At the end ofArthur Penn's The Chase (1965), for example, Bubber Reeves is taken into custody by Sheriff Calder, only to be murdered Oswald-style on the courthouse steps. The film's narrative and mlse-en-scc::ne run parallel to aspects of the assassination : a southern town populated by hate and handguns, death at the police station, Calder's cowboy hat matching that worn by the deputy sheriffwho accompanied Oswald, Calder's wife named Ruby, the grieving mother and...