Oliver Stone, Film, and Memory




"Notwithstanding Oliver Stone’s recent description of prestigious Warner Bros. as an organization of "cocksucker vampires," it does seem that the lavish bankrolling of a studio film supporting the four-shots-from-the-grassy-knoll theory has started a lot of talk. The Times, for example, titled [their] article "Substance and Style Criticized in J.F.K.," when neither the style nor the substance of Stone’s film had yet been viewed by anybody. The Washington Post and Time, twin pillars of credibility, have been poo-pooing Stone’s assassination theory with uncharacteristic fervor for months, apparently on the basis of a stolen first-draft script of the film.

In the scenario favored by [the mindset of Stone’s supporters], a public awakened to the possible collusion of the Mafia, the CIA, and even J. Edgar Hoover in the murder of an American President is a public that will march on down to the government and put a stop to this sort of thing. "One purpose of our movie," Stone asseverates in a letter to The Washington Post, "is to see that in at least one instance, history does not repeat itself."



Stone’s treatment of the Vietnam War, Wall Street and the Doors has made many people wary of his broad-brush technique, and his melodramatic penchant for personifying Good and Evil in absolute terms. And in a more general sense, some just naturally resent having a history they can remember tailored into a two-or-three hour entertainment that may, things being what they are, come to represent "historical memory" for still others whose memories begin after the events being pictured. This resentment takes on a certain edge when the entertainment in question costs $20 to $40 million to produce, and anywhere between $5 and $20 million to advertise: its claims and representations can’t be meaningfully contested by a review or a letter to an editor. Young people do not read books, and so whichever interpretation of the long-ago recent past reaches the screen first tends to be definitive.

The representation of "living history" can never satisfy the people who lived through it, either at the centre or on the periphery. Every human memory is an incessant editor uniquely adapted to the primordial wishes of its owner. Visual evidence and visual fiction can both play havoc with what we think we have stored in our neocortex. Many zears after the Kennedy assassination, a poll revealed that an overwhelming number of Americans – at least as many as believe the Dallas events were part of a conspiracy – believed they had seen the assassination live on television, though the Zapruder film was in a vault at Time-Life until five years later.



Like so much of modern life unanticipated by the Constitution, the saturation booking of 2000 theaters for a single director’s version of Gandhi or Jesus Christ or the shooting of JFK is something we just have to live with, along with the easy purchase of Uzis and Ak-47’s. It’s part of the touching megalomania of film directors to imagine that people should only quibble with this state of things after the finished product is on display for $7.50 a pop.

- Gary Indiana, "Being and Nothingness American Style," (Let it Bleed, Essays 1985-1995)

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