In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 9 The Parallax View/Winter Kills/Blow Out The final image ofExecutiveAction comprises a postscript: the eighteen photographs that appear on the screen are the faces of material witnesses to JFK's murder who died, many under mysterious circumstances, between 1963 and 1967. Written text informs the viewer that the odds of these people's dying during this time, as calculated by Lloyds ofLondon, were one hundred thousand trillion to one. The Puallax View After its opening scene ofpolitical assassination, this is precisely where the narrative ofTheParallax View picks up: with the fear ofan eyewitness, horribly confident that such odds exclude her, that ofthe one hundred thousand trillion she is the one. Alan J. Pakula's 1974 film has two beginnings. The first is set atop the Seattle space needle where Senator Charles Carroll, a promising political figure and a narrative surrogate for both JFK and Robert Kennedy, is assassmated by two gunmen. Present during the shooting are Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), a television reporter; and Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), a rogue newspaper writer. From the chaos of the murder scene there is a cut to a long shot which slowly tracks in toward the image of the blue nbbon government commission appointed to investigate the senator's death. It is ofcourse the film's version of the Warren Commission, and its chairman solemnly armounces that Senator Carroll was killed bya lone gunman who acted out of a "misguided sense of patriotism and a psychotic desire for public recognition?' In hopes ofputting an end to the "irresponsible exploitative speculations put forward by the press;' the commission declares there was no conspiracy. The narrative begins again three years later, when Carter shows up at Frady's door. She is terrified that someone is trying to kill her, that the next mysterious death to claim awitness to the Carroll assassination is earmarked for her. This scene initiates the film's central discourse on vision, one figured primarily by a mise-en-scene that obscures dramatic action through intervening glass, curtains, fences, and most importantly, a consistently shadowsoaked frame. Carter is targeted because she appears in photographs taken at the scene of the assassination, the film's equivalent to the Zapruder footage , and she tells Frady that the deaths of those picmred has risen to six. 183 Referring to the space needle, he says to her: "Did you see anything up there? Well either did I. And beheve me I looked. We all looked." She then replies with a question that haunts the rest of the film: "You mean, if you didn't see it, it's not there?"1 When Carter is in fact the next to die, Frady's quest, and the film's structuring trajectory, are set ill motion - to identify and then to infiltrate the agency or organization (Parallax) responsible for the murders of the assassination witnesses. Moreover, her death, and the narrative issuing from this scene, constitute the film's primary statement concerning the assassination debate: the suggestion that the criminalsource ofthe JFK assassination continues to function, that the case IS still open, not because the Warren Commission offered an inadequate solution to the crime, but because the conspiracy itself was not a solitary murder of a president. The conspiracy remams ongoing, informing, if not dictating, the contemporary political process. The film suggests this toward the beginning byjuxtaposing elements that referto both Kennedy assassinations. SenatorCarrolldies on the floor and is framed in a pose that deliberately mimics that of Robert Kennedy lying on the kitchen floor at the Ambassador HoteV The message is clear: the assassillations that characterized the decade were not separate incidents, but rather a continuing line of political subversion. That line began in Dallas. The film's reference to the JFK assassination is not achieved by so literal a parallel, but rather through a peculiar scene which appears to have little relevance to the mystery about to unfold. Frady ventures to a small northwestern town to learn about the death ofanother eyewitness, who allegedly drowned while salmon fishmg. Within minutes he is goaded into a barroom brawl with the sheriff's deputy, a fight that succeeds in destroying half the tavern. Significantly, it is a western-style saloon with the men in cowboy hats and bolo ties and waitress-hookers outfitted as cowgirls. It is, in other words, Frady's encounter with Dallas justice, a trip back ill time to some menacing place. Frady's long hair and hip indIvidualism are immediately at odds...

Share