Oliver Stone and the lasting impact of America’s most dangerous movie

[Jon Banks]

The Washington Post has an in-depth feature story about the 30th anniversary of Oliver Stone's 1991, 'JFK movie.

‘JFK’ at 30: Oliver Stone and the lasting impact of America’s most dangerous movie

"Stone’s vision of what would have happened had Kennedy lived — that he would have stopped the war in Vietnam, aggressively pursued civil rights at home and ended the Cold War with the Soviet Union — has been called the mother of all counterfactuals. The same might be said of our ideas about Kennedy and his death, and what they would be without “JFK.” Stone took care to distinguish his most purely speculative sequences in a film populated by unreliable narrators, flawed memories and competing versions of the truth. But “JFK’s” images were so convincing, and infiltrated viewers’ imaginations so thoroughly, that the film morphed from one filmmaker’s alternative interpretation of events into the events themselves. Storytelling was internalized as public memory, which itself became a form of consensus history.

The impact the film’s detractors feared most — its power to sway hearts and minds — might be the least quantifiable. According to a 2017 poll by FiveThirtyEight, public opinion about Kennedy’s assassination stayed relatively constant before and after “JFK’s” release; if anything, the numbers of people who believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone has risen. Still, among those who believe Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy, the CIA usually occupies a central role.

Stone’s film has been absorbed into the national bloodstream in other ways. When “JFK” was released, postmodernism — with its notions of subjective truths and multiple realities — had not taken much hold outside academia. Thirty years later, when conspiracy culture has migrated from an arcane parlor game to the steps of the U.S. Capitol — when healthy skepticism has curdled into darker extremes of institutional mistrust — whole swaths of American society seem to have taken up permanent residence in the rabbit holes that Stone plumbed so persuasively.

It is significant that both “JFK” and the World Wide Web were launched in 1991, setting them on a mutual trajectory that now feels eerily inevitable (the movie’s digressive structure uncannily mirrored a then-novel phenomenon called “hypertext”). “JFK” did not invent alternative facts, deepfakes or Deep State paranoia. But its form and content surely anticipated them, and helped usher in an era when audiences would increasingly accept them as reality.

If “JFK’s” cultural influence remains open to interpretation, its off-screen impact is beyond dispute. In 1992, largely in response to the film, the U.S. Congress passed the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which led to the release of millions of documents pertaining to subjects far beyond the assassination itself — an unalloyed good for scholarship and democratic transparency..."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/22/oliver-stone-jfk-anniversary/

[Robert Reeves]

I think it's kinda weird that people like this Fred Litwin guy pops up every now and then. People that develop an identity of having once believed in a conspiracy,  to then make a gigantic public song and dance spectacular event about now believing only in a long shooter arrangement. There's definitely an attention agenda, not sure for which purpose, though. What exactly does a person like Fred Litwin benefit from by swapping sides and now saying Oswald alone shot JFK? maybe that unique status of crossed to the dark side makes him more interesting to the media & their bosses (at the CIA). Just kidding, it's Christmas!

I respect Oliver Stone & Jim Garrison, because they laid it all out on the line and let every effer see which flag they're flying. I am dubious about people that so solidly change their mind and go all out to show how they now know the truth. Illogical.

[Robert LeRuyet]

Good points. I think it works as a cheap "credibility indicator". A reformed anything is usually seen as someone who knows what his previous  addiction/religion/opinion etc. was really about (because he knew it so well that he could better judge it objectively) and he is sooooo honest he can admit when he was wrong (unlike all the other dishonest, self deluding types). Not to mention increase book sales. Reminds me of the types we see on YT of how they were once atheists but have now embraced Christianity.

[Robert Reeves]

As opposed to JFK conspiracy theorists who at times resemble a cult.

And some lone-shooter theorists resemble a cutn

[John Iacoletti]

Good points. I think it works as a cheap "credibility indicator". A reformed anything is usually seen as someone who knows what his previous  addiction/religion/opinion etc. was really about (because he knew it so well that he could better judge it objectively) and he is sooooo honest he can admit when he was wrong (unlike all the other dishonest, self deluding types). Not to mention increase book sales. Reminds me of the types we see on YT of how they were once atheists but have now embraced Christianity.

Bingo.  People can form opinions for good or bad reasons.  I just accepted the government's narrative out of ignorance, but then I started examining the underlying evidence and and more I learned the more I realized just what a house of cards it is.