Reading Capitalist Realism

Like Some Dummy Corporation You Just Move around the Board: Contemporary Hollywood Production in Virtual Time and Space

Like Some Dummy Corporation You Just Move around the Board Contemporary Hollywood Production in Virtual Time and Space j . d . c o n n o r i. Early in Oliver Stone’s JFK (Warner Bros., 1991), Jim Garrison is conducting his infamous “walking tour” through “the heart of the United States government’s intelligence community in New Orleans” and explaining how it is that ex-FBI man and staunch anticommunist Guy Banister is mixed up with ostensible communist Lee Harvey Oswald. As Garrison tells the tale of a magical building with two addresses, one belonging to Banister’s office, one that appears on Oswald’s proCastro leaflets, we are treated to a high-contrast black-and-white pseudo-flashback to a very particular moment, where we can see, if we are paying careful attention, Oswald catch sight of Clay Shaw, aka Clay Bertrand, aka Tommy Lee Jones, walking down the street. Stone is remaking some television footage that was shot on August 16, 1963.1 The furtive eyeline match is the barest hint of what is to come in JFK, a bizarre homosexual plot to destroy King Kennedy, a Freudian slaughter by the primal horde that Michael Rogin has so incisively unpacked.2 These are the rewards of something like audience paranoia, but when Stone’s manic editing met up with the intense and protracted home viewing that DVD made possible, it turned out that there was a second figure off in the distance, a fluttering banner reading “Tax Free.” Like most such pieces of free-floating signification in contemporary cinema, it was duly enrolled in the IMDb, under the heading “goofs.”3 l i k e s o m e d u m m y c o r p o r a t i o n 1 4 1 The rationale for its enlistment is simple: in 1963, there was no program to rebate taxes to international visitors to New Orleans. The banner is part of a program promoting tax-free shopping in Louisiana begun in 1987; it is thoroughly anachronistic. And yet, as Jerome Christensen has argued, Stone’s film is a remarkably intense allegory of TimeWarner’s corporate agonies circa 1991.4 At its heart is the conspiracy of the folks from Warner against those from Time. The Time, Inc.’ers thought they were purchasing Warner Communications; in reality, they were being subverted at every step. In addition to the evidence he marshals, it turns out that Kennedy’s real assassins are from ACME, that the Garrison children watch the WB cartoon “Dripalong Daffy,” that the agreed-upon alibi for David Ferrie’s trip to Texas is that he is going “duck hunting,” that Kennedy was killed in a “turkey shoot,” etc., etc. Seen in this light, the sign is not a goof at all, but part of what Christensen calls Warner’s “humiliation” of Time. Coming on the heels of the grand, hotly litigated but ultimately taxfree merger, the banner is a corporate badge of honor. Yet there is even more to it than that. As Eugene Schreiber, then the chairman of Louisiana Tax Free Shopping and the managing director of the New Orleans World Trade Center, explained, “The idea JFK’s Clay Shaw, head of the International Trade Mart ( JFK, Oliver Stone; Warner Bros., 1991). 1 4 2 j . d . c o n n o r for Tax Free Shopping in Louisiana arose at a meeting of the World Trade Center’s International Business Committee in early 1987 as an additional way to promote both tourism and retail trade throughout the state, as was done in many countries in Europe. We felt that being the first state in the United States to offer it would create significant attention and publicity.”5 The World Trade Center was formed in 1985 through the merger of two longstanding New Orleans organizations, the International House and the International Trade Mart, and in the 1950s the director of the International Trade Mart was Clay Shaw, the man we see walking down the street in JFK. Indeed, Oswald chose to hand out his leaflets in front of the Mart ostensibly because the Trade Mart and its leadership were major funders of New Orleans anti-Castro organizations.6 JFK makes this link clear, repeatedly: When Garrison’s investigator first learns, to his astonishment, that Clay Bertrand is Clay Shaw, he puts it this way: “Clay Bertrand is Clay Shaw, the...