JFK series

(On Cable TV, November 2021) I’m not sure about you, but my tolerance and sympathy toward conspiracy theories have fallen sharply over the past few years, now that they’ve become one of the most dangerous strands of political discourse in American politics. It used to be that conspiracy theories were the domain of a few crackpots, but they could be enjoyed as an escapist way of imagining a fictional retelling of the world in which everything made sense. Now that the crackpot hordes are more numerous and actively inflicting damage to the civil institutions, well, the fun has gone out of it. So, I’m approaching Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited in a far less indulgent way than I did for his original film. Theories about JFK’s assassination are not the Rosetta stones of the modern crackpot movement like they used to be, but they’re a central text and rehashing them at this point seems like a cross between a half-hearted reunion tour and a bunch of old crazy people shouting incoherently at their surrounding. While this documentary may lure viewers in by promising them a look at evidence unearthed in the past thirty years, much of the film is the same old breathless ranting. Conducted at a breakneck pace between Stone’s narration, “expert” talking heads, archival clippings and ominous effects, JFK Revisited quickly becomes a caffeine-addled rant jumping between not-so-damning pieces of !!!EVIDENCE!!!, paranoid thinking, overactive pattern recognition and indiscriminate doubt. You can probably get a more entertaining and cohesive experience talking to a dishevelled nutcase at the local watering hole. It’s tiresome and not exactly effective at making its own thesis. One thing that seems completely evacuated of the entire discussion, for instance, is how humans do not always act rationally or impeccably in situations of crisis. There are many things that could be explained away by “the president got shot, people were under stress, innocent mistakes were made” that are here presented as nefarious proofs of… something by… people. Because, at the end of JFK revisited, you can believe anything about everything: No coherent thesis is offered, no compelling new piece of evidence, nothing to convince anyone: It’s specious groupthink aimed at those already convinced that there was something going on, and who will seize on anything to prove to themselves that they are right. And that brings me right back to my first point — I don’t have any sympathy for that kind of confabulation any more. Not when the price to pay for conspiracist thinking is a corrupt administration, a failing democracy, irrefutable excess deaths in the middle of a mitigable pandemic and an overall corrosion of civil discourse. I’m done with conspiracy theorists, and I’m not so incredibly disappointed that Stone would fuel those crackpots for personal gain. (I’ll note once again that the only conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination I halfway entertain is the one, outlined in Bonar Menninger’s Mortal Error, in which the president was killed by a shot accidentally fired by a panicking secret agent riding in the motorcade — but that’s because it appeals to my darkest sense of humour, and explains so much by simple dint of people being so incredibly embarrassed.)