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Chapter 8 Executive Action Befare the issues of the assassination debate were featured as central narrative elements for a Hollywood film, they were deployed parodically III Bnan De Palma's Greettngs III 1968. There is an extraordinary scene partway through this film: Lloyd, one of the lead characters, is obsessed with the Kennedy assassination. In an attempt to venfy or disprove the findings of the Warren Commission, he maps the bullet trajectories and the location ofKennedy's wounds on a live model, the naked body of a girlfriend. As she lies on her back apparently asleep, Lloyd reads aloud the wound measurements and affixes the precise markings to her body. He then removes his own shirt, already prepared with the bullet holes in place, and fits it onto the prone woman, discovering, to his delight, that the shirt holes andwound markings do not match up. "Thewhole thing is a blatant falsIfication!" he shouts. "I'll crack this case wide open!" De Palma plays the scene for laughs, mockmg Lloyd's obsessive enthusiasm for conspiracy, just as elsewhere in Greetings he somewhat benignly ridicules Lloyd's interest in the grassy knoll photographs and his bookstore encounter with a conspiracy buff. Indeed, one senses that had a more mature De Palma used the scene III a later film, the emphasis would have been on pathology rather than prank, its menacing implications more fully explored . Still, in uncarmy fashion, the scene figures the intersection of discourses that informed the assassination debate in 1968: the amateur sleuth, the semiotics of entrance and exit wounds, the displacement of bodies, and the cohabitation of assassination and soft-core images. Surrounding Lloyd on his bed is the relevant literature: the "Reasonable Doubt" issue ofLife magazine from 1966, Harold Weisberg's Whitewash) the New York Review of Books) a bogus Issue of Ftlm Comment with the phallic magic bullet on Its cover. The principle of maximum viSibility has been pursued to its extreme conclusion, the coroner's slab having been replaced by the bed. The concealed body ofthe president, knowable only through autopsy materials, has been replaced by a live female body, the truths ofwhich have been culturally guaranteed by porn's epistemology ofthe visible. Although De Palma's Greenwich Village frolic may reside on the margins of mainstream cinema, it marked one of the first direct incorporations of assassination discourse III American narrative film. Despite its mocking gesture toward the buffs, it captured the overlapping social spaces of assassina165 tion researchers and other strains ofthe sixties' counterculture. In Greetings, the assassination becomes one of several historical sigmfiers - Vietnam, draft evasion, Antonioni's Blow-Up - which punctuate a series ofcomic episodes . By the early seventies, however, the climate had been created for feature-length films fully organized around the dissent ofassassination critics , a climate that ushered in a far more serious tone than accompanied the images ofGreetings. Seventies' Conspiracy Cinema Several films produced in the seventies have in fact been assigned by other critics to a genre of conspiracy cinema. In their book Camera Potitica, Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner situate Executive Action and The Parallax View alongside such films as Klute (1971), Three Days ofthe Comror (1975), All the Presuient's Men (1976), and Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) in a group that represents the efforts and failures ofseventies' American liberalism .1 Inscribed in these films, they argue, is the dilemma of a liberal social critique which persists in privileging the individual over the structure in its asseSsment ofpower and its story ofthe causes ofand solutions to SOCIal and economic problems. For these writers, the seventies were characterized by a "liberal statism;' best exemplified by a reformist approach to social welfare which collided with a reemerging populIst movement suspicious ofbiggovernment . Without the inclination or the vocabulary to call for changes in the system, liberalism could offer no radical alternative to the statist approaches that had alienated many and that could not, given its focus on the individual , effect the necessary political transformations. Kellner and Ryan thus argue that conspiracy films present power in one of two ways, neither of which grasps its specific structure, but both ofwhich conform to the liberal view. These films "turn the systemic concealment of real power structures into a personalized account of secret intrigue;' often by reducing large power blocs or particular interests to the motives of a criminal few.2 Furthermore , these films also depict the object of critique as some opaque or ultimately unnamable agent, such that "there is no...

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