JFK - Back When Conspiracy Theories Were Fun

I find myself watching JFK (or at least the beginning hour or so as I go to sleep at night) once a month because it’s almost always on a streaming service I have (currently on HBO Max). Each time I watch it, I plan on watching Nixon soon after, but rarely get around to it, as Nixon is almost never on a streaming service. And because of my idiotic principles, I refuse to rent it or buy it on digital because I already own it on DVD…and the basic premise of this site concerns movies I physically own, so I finally got the DVD out and watched Nixon the old fashioned way. But first, some thoughts on conspiracy culture and JFK.

Back When Conspiracy Theories Were Fun

JFK had a huge effect on me when I first watched it. I already fancied myself a history buff and was proud of my knowledge of the era. My stupid high school mind was not ready for the all out attack of this film. I became obsessed with the JFK assassination which resulted in reading a few books and writing way too many essays on it once I got to college. 

At the time, I just wanted to believe every bit of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy fever dream. I wanted to know who those hoboes were that were arrested by the train station. Who killed Lee Bowers? How many fake Oswalds were there? Did Clay Shaw really admit to being Clay Bertrand? Was X a real person? And on and on and on.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve calmed down, though I still think that head shot came from the front. But I’m no longer making people look at fucked up pictures of David Ferrie like I did to my intro to speech class in college…definitely got a few bewildered looks that day. 

I still want to believe everything in the Stone movie, but common sense (and light research) show that a lot of it is pure fiction/fantasy. JFK is a perfect example of how a conspiracy can scratch an itch you didn’t even know you had. 

Take an accepted historical event or common fact, present the unknown “truth” behind it, follow that rabbit hole to the center of the fucking planet. It’s very satisfying. Watching JFK the first time, I felt like part of some secret club finding out all kinds of cool secret shit the CIA never wanted me to know. But just being aware of the “truth” isn’t enough. Then I had to read some books so I could throw out some extra facts that weren’t in the movie to prove I was more in the know than your basic conspiracy theorist. Eventually, though, I had to accept that there isn’t “truth” out there, only belief. And that’s when this shit gets scary.

I finally accepted that there will never be the evidence I need to prove exactly what happened on that day. The closest thing I’ll ever get to that is suspending my disbelief and rewatching JFK, which is exactly why I’ve watched it so many times. This is when conspiracy theories were fun and mostly harmless. But at some point, the conspiracies got crazier and the facts were even more ignored, and it became dangerously close to becoming mainstream. 

People would often give me weird looks when I would go deep on the JFK stuff while we were hanging out, and rightfully so. I was being a fucking weirdo about something that didn’t really matter and could never be proven. But now, mainly thanks to the internet, instead of ranting and raving at sane people who will eventually calm you down (hopefully), now all the conspiracy theorists find an online echo chamber and things get too dark. 

It’s as if being a conspiracy theorist went from being a hobby to a deranged profession. JFK didn’t necessarily create this problem, but it’s tied into it by bringing a major conspiracy theory into pop culture. I feel like this is one of the most acceptable conspiracy theories out there thanks to this film. 

These days, I watch JFK for entertainment purposes and as a cautionary tale for going too deep into a theory. The cast is insane; you have guys like John Candy and Vincent D’Onofrio showing up for just a few moments. It’s hard to find a scene that doesn’t have a recognizable actor in it. And most of them are fucking going for it. Kevin Bacon talking shit to Kevin Costner is a standout moment, and Joe Pesci deserved an Oscar nom just for how he smoked during his first scene with Costner. For a three hour movie that has a dozen plot threads and red herrings, JFK never drags and is always entertaining thanks to Stone’s frenetic style and the aforementioned cast. 

Because of those elements, I can turn my brain off and enjoy it all. When I want to engage with the film a bit more, these days I focus on Costner’s home life in the film. The first few times I watched it (before I had a family of my own, by the way), I wrote off Sissy Spacek and all their kids as the typical hindrance to the hero’s devotion to the “right” thing to do. Watching now, I see Spacek as the real hero of the film, putting up with Costner’s crazy shit. If I ditched my wife on Easter and left her to take all the kids to a busy restaurant, I wouldn’t be here typing this nonsense right now. In this film, though, Costner just brushes it off to “not checking the calendar.” As if Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t wipe off the silver body paint and come into the office on another Sunday? Come on!

That’s the story of the film that gets lost in all the magic bullet and “back and to the left” (and realizing that Newman was in the magic bullet scene and the Keith Hernandez magic loogie scene in Seinfeld) stuff. Now I watch this and see the damage fully committing to a conspiracy theory can cause. The victory at the end of the film isn’t that the jury agreed a conspiracy existed and Costner brought about the only trial for it; it’s that Costner, even though he swears to keep fighting (but he doesn’t sound nearly as convincing as he did in his closing argument), walks away from the crowd with his wife and son. And now instead of reading a book or writing an essay (um…aside from this one just this one time) or going down a reddit rabbit hole, I walk away from it, too.