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Oliver Stone’s JFK

History, Historiography and Representation in the Postmodern Society of the Spectacle




Von Marc Eberle




Contents



1. Introduction

2. JFK and the Crisis of Representation

3. JFK and History

4. Generation Gap, Credibility Gap: The Assassination Event as Cultural Watershed

5. Possible Worlds and Ambiguous Index

6. Conclusion

Bibliography


I. Introduction
When JFK was released it caused a controversial debate whether Stone's film distorted history and was a piece of paranoid propaganda or whether it should be given the same historical status as the report of the Warren Commission. While the first thesis implied questions about the legitimacy of such a tendentious production, the director himself saw his work in the light of the latter proposition: "Our film's mythology is different, and, hopefully, it will replace the Warren Commission Report, as Gone With the Wind replaced Uncle Tom's Cabin and was in turn replaced by Roots and The Civil War"(quoted in Simon 1996: 206).
The striking phenomenon here is that JFK itself, as well as the debates fought over it, so much resemble the original debates following the assassination. Unlike the form of other political struggles of the 1960s such as the civil rights movement or protests against the war in Vietnam, the debate concerning the Kennedy assassination was not fought in the street but mostly in a rather discursive field. That field was dominated by visual representation and characterized by a complex struggle over access to and interpretation of film and photographic imagery. The debate raised crucial questions about who should assume the authorship of history: "...the state's voice in the Warren Commission, the commission's critics, [or] the press" (Simon 1996: 2)? The fact-fiction debate in journalism, documentary or nonfiction film and other mediated representations, which evolved around that time, can be seen in close connection to socio-political changes that were triggered by historical events such as the Kennedy assassination. The debates on the Kennedy assassination and JFK itself, both in its content and form, mirror quite clearly the remarks of Michel Foucault about the often invisible politics of looking: "Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes" (quoted in Simon 1996: 2).
According to this, this essay shall focus on the crisis of representation becoming obvious in JFK, the film's relation to history and the ongoing debate on historiography respectively. Furthermore, it shall attempt to explore crucial socio-political changes of the time as well as shifts in media representation to illuminate Stone's assertion that the Kennedy assassination marked a watershed in American history. Moreover, throughout this essay, it shall be attempted to examine Stone's strategies of communicating his hypothetical assertions to the audience, and in turn evaluate what these strategies reveal about the film's approach to the subjects it deals with.


II. JFK and the crisis of representation

"When I came to print the negative an odd thing struck my eye. Something standing in the cross street and invisible to me was reflected in a factory window and then reflected once more in the rear view mirror attached to the truck door ... Since then I have enlarged this small section of my negative enormously. The grain of the film all but obliterates the features of the image. It is obscured. By any possible reckoning it is hopelessly ambiguous".

(Frampton quoted in Simon 1996: 31)


Traced through JFK as well as through the actual assassination case is both a faith and a crisis in representation. Stone proceeds in a manner that restores the belief in photographic images and at the same time illuminates the dangers of an uncritical faith in such imagery. The narrative of JFK attempts to tie together the disparate strands of the complex assassination case in the figure of Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). Yet the form of the film -the intricate and diverse collage of images and the nonlinear montage of disparate time frames and its rapid alterations of visual perspectives- frequently functions as a destabilizing counterpoint to a narration that strives for intelligibility. While the voice-over monologues of X (Donald Sutherland) and Garrison attempt to gather the narrative strands into a seamless continuity, the images frequently contradict what is being narrated and push ambiguity into the foreground. And it is precisely the paradoxical relation of epistemological certainty and anxiety which is inscribed in the tension between voice track and image track. It is due to the lack of a consistent pattern for the deployment of different film stocks (black-and-white, color, different speeds and formats) that this instability of the image track is construed: Flashbacks that speculate on possible events-Ruby being admitted access to the Dallas police station through a back door, or Oswald's palm prints being pressed onto the alleged murder rifle- are rendered in black-and-white. Whereas other speculations -Oswald with Ferrie at the Carousel Club or the manipulation of the Life magazine cover- are rendered in color. According to Pat Dowell the resulting effect of this is an alertness of the audience rather than an uncritical taking for granted and a total belief in the truth of the representation: "Stone tries to put the pieces together again, but lets each one keep its provenance- each one is tagged visually with its place of origin, appearing in a different color, size, or grain- so that the audience will not mistake the screen for a window on the past" (Dowell 1992:10).
Nevertheless, aside from the assassination case history is JFK's subject. And according to the postmodernist view of a varied set of histories Stone creates multiple histories and renders an all-encompassing truth as myth by infusing political, even philosophical meaning upon his fast paced style which draws on the style of commercials and music videos: "The editing of JFK is an epistemological assertion about the world, a statement about what we know and can know. Every cut produces only one conviction, that the past we thought we shared is a mosaic of conflicting histories, a History just this side of Chaos" (Ibid.).
This, however, stands in opposition to the narration of JFK and illuminates the fact that contradiction as a recurrent trope stands at the heart of JFK's agenda. On the one hand Stone’s narrative organization of JFK "wants every single one of [the audience] to walk out thinking like he does" (Tarantino quoted in Brooker 1997: 94). On the other hand Stone counters this with the epistemological instability of the montage, which forces the viewers themselves to reconstruct and make sense of the shattered and disparate imagery. This overall structure of the film mirrors and comments on the crisis of representation furthermore reinforced by Stone's use of the Zapruder Film, which stands at the core of JFK.
The Zapruder Film, the central document of American film history, in itself represents the perfect example of photographic ambiguity and uncertainty. Against the history of the document itself and the debates about the possibility of an unambiguous interpretation of the events represented, Stone proceeds as if the famous amateur footage was proof in the sense of epistemological certainty. In the courtroom scene the Zapruder footage is the object of an authoritative on-screen interpreter, whereas earlier in the film it was part of a larger montage sequence that reconstructed the assassination. Under the control of Garrison, the photographic evidence functions in the service of epistemological certainty. Garrison identifies each of the six shots on which his version of the event insists, using the Zapruder footage both as film and still frame. Stone's strategic usage of the infamous footage becomes apparent when he waits to reveal and display frame 313 of the film (the head shot) until the moment of Garrison's monologue in the courtroom. During the earlier reconstruction of the assassination, frame 313 is omitted and replaced by a CBS News Bulletin poster- a rendering that comments on the biased role of the media, which in complicity with the government blocked the transmission of frame 313 and other evidence during the 1960s. Saving the crucial frame until Garrison's address to the jury authorizes his interpretation with all the reliability guaranteed by the one image that transmits the shocking truth in all its graphic horror. Stone intensifies this effect by repetition and frame enlargement. Three times the audience in the courtroom and the cinema are forced to endure the graphical violence of the head shot in close-up. And three times Garrison describes the movement of Kennedy's head in voice-over as 'back and to the left'. By the third time, many in the courtroom, and presumably many in the cinema, have turned away from the painstriking image, confirming the intensity and truth of Garrison’s revelation.
However, this very usage of the Zapruder footage and the fact that the audience turns away in horror masks the limits of representation of the Zapruder film as a motion picture, which become obvious in the inherent contradiction of the Zapruder footage. Only through the repetition, the slowing down and freezing of the images, is it possible to see what 'really' happened. The very principle of a motion picture is inverted when motion is turned into stasis to make out crucial details. But these are themselves blurred and ambigious and due to their inability to document any certainties keep being subject of interpretation. It is this circumstance that makes the existence of varying 3-, 4-, 5- and 6-shot-theories possible. As well as the assertion of experts that-allthough shot from behind-the President's head snap describes a backward movement due to physical laws. Instead of acknowledging the limits of the Zapruder footage as proof, JFK drives at a tendency known from the original assassination case that upheld a faith in camera vision and photographic representation. Thus the film revived in 1991 a certain approach to representation and an argument about the assassination evidence that had been called into serious question during the previous decade. It signified that, despite the epistemological crisis that characterized the image after years of contradictory interpretation, the impulse toward affirmation and a faith in the image still informed the investigation (see Simon 1996: 213).
In its opening montage of 1960s archive footage JFK generates a similar faith in its imagery. The authoritative ‘Voice of God’ of the newsreel footage states the 'true' nature of the person Kennedy, his political history and political concerns. The narration establishes Kennedy's within three themes which will resurface as possible assassination motives:
1. Kennedy's politics concerning Cuba and the Bay of Pigs disaster;
2. his agreements with Krushchev and his attempts to de-escalate the missile situation and end the Cold War(which led members of the establishment and of the military to characterize Kennedy as being soft on communism);
3. Kennedy's plan to diminish the number of American troops in Vietnam and thus to de-escalate the crisis situation in Southeast Asia.
The accompanying image track shows JFK with John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's farewell address with his warning of the military-industrial complex, Castro at a political rally, and images of the private Kennedy rendering a romantic and mythical notion of the King of Camelot. The initial frame of reference is thus clearly set as a factual and true account of the historical events and the historical person of John F. Kennedy, generating the audience's faith in the cinematic renderings. Stone's strategy of provoking faith in the images is illuminated by comments from cinematographer Robert Richardson's diary:
"Utilize the opening documentary material to establish a concrete foundation of factual reality. Let the audience move through the material, never doubting its authenticity. Using this as a basis, move away whenever the desire to accomplish the concrete arises" (Richardson quoted in Fisher 1992: 45).
Although the subsequent 3 hours of Stone's scenario are on the whole fictitious, the film's crucial components have now been verified by that nonfiction disclaimer of historical and newsreel footage. It’s the very difficulty about the assassination case, however, that certain crucial facts are documented and others are not. The fact that President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd 1963, the crucial 6 seconds when it actually happened, are documented, but the details of the act, the persons and motives, are subject of speculation and rely on human testimonies rather than on camera witness. Accordingly Stone shifts the interest of JFK from a ‘whodunnit’ to a ‘whydunnit’ and is thus able to exploit his factual frame of reference. Nevertheless, Stone still has to speculate and rely on human testimony and reconstruction. However, in its use of historical identities and its densely layered flashbacks JFK echoes these problems of reconstruction and reenactment. For many critics this was the most dangerous aspect of the film: 'This is a film in which the real and the imagined, fact and fiction, keep shading into one another.' (Auchincloss 1991: 47) This provokes the already mentioned alertness in the viewer, since JFK with its visual patchwork "challenges the spectator to confront the simple and problematic distinction between documentary and fiction. Indeed, the film's political implications reside in part in how it succeeds at posing this challenge, in whether it prompts viewers to consider how central to the writing of history are questions about access to and organization of images" (Simon 1996: 215).
Furthermore, Stone gives various hints on a literal basis that things are not as they appear. He thus foregrounds the ontological flicker of the film, emphasizing JFK's factual content, and partly counters the faith provoking attitude of the film. Garrison at one point expresses this when he says: 'We're through the looking glass here: Black is white and white is black!' This applies to the whole of JFK and even becomes manifest in ironical facts such as the real Jim Garrison playing the role of judge Earl Warren.
On an explicit visual level this point is repeatedly made by shots of a pair of unidentified hands which manipulate the famous backyard photograph of Oswald, which appeared on the cover of Life magazine and was used to prove the alleged assassin guilty posthumously. These shots are intercut with a meeting of Garrison with his staff presenting their own collage of Oswald, which in turn is visualized by a montage of archival footage of U2 planes, still photographs of the real Oswald and reenactments of Oswald in the Soviet Union. JFK implies here that historical identity, too, is constituted by the existence and the arrangement of images. The fact that JFK chooses to deploy reenacted scenes of events surrounding Oswald rather than the documentary footage of the time (such as the famous first live murder on TV, where Ruby shoots Oswald; or the questioning of Oswald by the press in the Dallas Police Dep.) mirrors the circumstance that Oswald's identity, and his role concerning the assassination, is more difficult to document with certainty due to the emergence of doubles and stand-ins of Oswald shortly before November 1963.


III. JFK and History
The images of history evoked by JFK can be described in terms of two competing paradigms: On the one hand, due to its urge to explain and (re)construct the event, JFK appears to represent that a seamless and causal historical reality exists, which is accessible and could be recovered, were it not obscured by willfully deceiving actions of a cover-up conspiracy and by the withholding of crucial documents. Along these lines, the film sets out to impose a metanarrative to unify the disparate stories and loose contexts of the Kennedy assassination into a single frame or story.
On the other hand, however, JFK proceeds according to Hayden White's concept of derealization of the event in the twentieth century and represents the contemporary paradigmatic alternative of history as unstable discourse of fact and fiction, truth and illusion that discloses a fragmentation of contexts and identities. White has argued that postmodernist anti-narrative techniques, characterized by fragmentation, the exploding of conventions of the traditional tale, and the dissociation or splitting of narrative functions, may be the most appropriate techniques for representing the historical reality of the contemporary period, with its unprecedented catastrophes and its compound global contexts. (see White 1996)
According to this view, JFK attempts to produce a representation mirroring the incoherence, intertextuality and the contradictions that characterize the historical text; or, in Homi Bhabha's words, the "dissolution of history as fragmentary composition; the decomposition of narrative voice" (Bhabha quoted in Burgoyne 1996: 120).
JFK oscillates between these competing paradigms and represents them through a series of character-narratives. Burgoyne argues that the monologue of David Ferrie "conveys a strong sense of truth, underscored by the long-take camera work" (Ibid.). Rather than pinning down the details and providing a unified explanation of the event, Ferrie offers a mythic, polysemantic reading of the event: 'It's a mystery, inside a riddle, wrapped in an enigma', thus stressing its incomprehensibility.
In the authoritative analysis of X, however, logic and history serve as explanatory frameworks. Arranged accordingly they provide answers. X speaks about the control, suppression and manufacture of information and thus asserts that sufficient access to the facts would reveal the truth about the assassination case. Throughout his monologue, X is framed by the monuments of Washington D.C.: The Supreme Court, highest judicial institution of the United States; the Capitol, central point of Washington and symbol of democracy, the Washington Monument, by law the highest structure in the city, providing an unobstructed view over the whole capital; and the Lincoln Memorial, that during the 1960s evolved into a symbol of human freedom and dignity (Civil rights marches started here, crowned in 1963 by Martin Luther King's 'I have a Dream' speech, as well as anti-Vietnam war protests). Such way X's assertions are symbolically located at the heart of the American nation.
X's monologue, however, is accompanied by the techniques that have earned JFK the reputation of distorting and faking history: imaginary reenactments and recontextualized documentary footage that dramatize the alleged "conspiracy emanating from the highest reaches of power" (Burgoyne 1996: 121). Here can be found drastically dissimilar appeals to belief: in one case, a straightforward scenic rendering of the character's version of events; in the other, a highly edited aggregation of existing footage, staged reenactments, and rumor made photographically concrete. In juxtaposing these two stories, "both consisting of tenuous threads of information, the film exposes a cultural landscape in which different kinds of knowledge and different types of visual and verbal evidence abound" (Ibid.).
At the same time, however, the film here presents its two alternate ways to construct history. Important in this respect is that Stone synecdochally crosses the two strategies by countering narrative with cinematic form: with the Ferrie monologue he presents a blurry story, which asserts an assassination plot of vastness and obscurity. According to Burgoyne, Stone conveys a strong sense of truth of the narration, which is generated by the cinematic representational basis, which, unlike the rest of the film, misses the stylistic virtuosity and makes this scene a straightforward presentation. In X's case Stone counters the clear, rational and singular narrative with a fragmentary, polysemantic form, thus, once more, inscribing the pattern of contradiction into the film's main points. From this perspective JFK conveys White's argument that modernist and postmodernist forms rather than realist forms, may provide the most effective methods for rendering events of the recent past.

IV. Generation Gap, Credibility Gap: The Assassination Event as Cultural Watershed
In the 1960s the younger generation felt itself and its aims and values misrepresented in the media, i.e. represented unfairly or not at all. With the American Underground Press young people created their own mouthpieces, out of which a further differentiated form of advocacy journalism evolved: the fact and fiction blending New Journalism. However, in addition to the generation gap, the credibility gap was of paramount importance for the development of the New Journalism, since the central concern of this kind of journalism lies in the political examination of objectivity.
"The fact-fiction debate is not fully intelligible without reference to the New Journalism's political moment. In that volcanic age complaints about unfairness in representation rained down on all sides. United States government policy in Vietnam introduced the term credibility-gap [...] As society's self-appointed symbol-broker, journalism found itself at the epicenter of such debates ... Professional journalism's truth, which never stands unchallenged, has rarely been as fiercely contested as it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s" (Pauly 1990: 115).
Critics read the New Journalism as a reaction to the biased dealings with facts, objectivity and truth in mediated reports. The witch hunts of Senator McCarthy in the 1950s, the media reports on the Kennedy assassination, and many other events throughout the 1960s made it more and more obvious that facts had been either altered and suppressed, or that their subjective interpretation governed their very selection, and thus the representation of the event they were said to constitute in the first place. Deriving from this is the belief that an underlying truth can only be accessed or disclosed by an overtly subjective or creative representation. Stone comments on the shift in media representation and reception taking place at the time. JFK echoes this shift with its narrative as well as its form: "From the moment Garrison and his Assistant D.A. go to Napoleon's Bar to watch the televised reports on the assassination until the end of the film the media, in particular television, are ever-present. Everything appears to be revealed by the televised reports, but as the film unfolds it soon becomes clear that the media, directly or indirectly, are being used to conceal the truth about the assassination" (Medhurst 1993: 131-132).
Garrison, like the American public at the time, initially believes in the mediated reports: People in the early 1960s obviously sort of 'behaved' in the manner of good school children. When Walter Cronkite ended his television news broadcast every evening with a reassuring 'And that's the way it is', people did not think of questioning him. Throughout the 1950s TV had gained more and more authority. To question it, or even to switch it off or change the channel was a statement of deliberate dissatisfaction. Thus, television, for a time, perpetuated a linear, moralistic worldview-a view sponsored by those who stood to gain most from maintaining public faith in traditional values and loyalty. By the early 1960s, however, a few events conspired to change TV's role from an enforcer of linearity to a promoter of chaos. The Kennedy assassination with its central role among those events cannot be underestimated for its long-term effects on the media public. Although LBJ according to protocol assumed his rightful place in the Oval Office, the assassination marked a lapse in the political continuity of the American government. Since it abruptly and ‘artificially’ ended a term that had been lent a certain shine by Kennedy’s charismatic figure. But most importantly there was a discontinuous representation in the way the media deconstructed the moment-to-moment reality of the assassination and its aftermath, with a focus on spatially divided actions which took place simultaneously.
The Zapruder film and its public screening clearly marked a watershed event in American television, paralleled only by the Rodney King tape and, on a lower scale, by O.J. Simpson's Bronco ride. The footage itself and its airing took an already discontinuous event and broke it down further: "We watched, frame by frame, as our president's head flung back, and his wife sprang out of her seat onto the trunk of the limo. Rather than providing us with answers, our news media unintentionally flooded us with questions. Was Jackie escaping the car? Was she reaching for a piece of her husband's brain? Was there only one gunman? Two? A conspiracy? Making matters worse, when the suspected gunman was finally being escorted to his formal and customary arrangement, he was murdered, too! We would get no satisfactory ending. No matter how much tension was generated, relief was nowhere in sight" (Rushkoff 1996: 42). The fact that there was no natural ending of the story, no classical trajectory with a relieving moment, and the discontinuous style in which the information was presented (coupled with the overwhelming discontinuity of the event itself), so argues Rushkoff, altered people's relationship to mediated representations and their image of reality itself.
There were three cultural reactions to this rupture of linear reality: Some ignored it completely and convinced themselves that "[t]he assassin got killed a little early, Jackie panicked a bit, the camera footage was blurry, and FBI physicists figured out how a bullet can zigzag back and forth. In the long run this was, perhaps, the most painful path to take" (Rushkoff 1996.: 43). Painful, since this attitude must lead to a state of irreconcilable cognitive dissonance or even schizophrenia that might as well have become the normality of politics itself today: Nearly automatically one thinks of Johnson and the Pentagon Papers, Nixon and Watergate, Reagan and SDI, Bush and his read my lips tax raising policy and the election of a Kennedy-like media figure, who presumably was elected for the sake of his ability to play Rock'n'Roll with a saxophone rather than for political reasons. But even if Clinton did not inhale and did not advise military action against Bin Laden and Iraq to restore his believability and authority after being proved of having numerous extra-marital sexual relationships (and did not lie to the Gand Jury set up by a postmodern McCarthy, since he did pursue sexual practices but did not really have sex and did not have a sexual relationship but only an inappropriate one): The Kennedy assassination appears as the starting point of a somewhat disparate and pathological symbiosis of media and politics in the postmodern era. And the end of the Cold War did not exactly add order to that confusion.
The second reaction consists of attempts to create connections between discontinuous events (see preceding paragraph) when there were none. These were the conspiracy theorists who were compelled to create an antiauthoritarian but nonetheless linear explanation for what had happened to President Kennedy, the American society and its values. Conspiracy theory, however, involves the substitution of one version of a story for another. In the manner of the game 'join the dots' conspiracy theorists revise the way that lines of continuity were drawn between discontinuous events. They change the numbers on the dots, but the result is only a different version of the final picture. When this kind of conspiracy theory works, it yields Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate investigation. When it evolves out of a popular cultural background, it yields the story of JFK.
Nevertheless, unlike other conspiracy theories, JFK is more than a simple reaction to the first incursion of media discontinuity into mainstream social awareness. The film invcludes a paradox: On the one hand, in the manner of a teacher, Stone wants the audience to follow his linear story-line and argument, on the other hand, he simultaneously counters this by the ‘content of the form’, the nonlinear montage of the film. Thus, he affects the viewers cognitively and attempts to teach the audience to think independently and to critically question media representations.
From this perspective JFK also partly involves the third cultural reaction to the Kennedy crisis. The reaction of the post-war generation which grew up with the assassination as their first presidential memory: "To anyone under thirty-five, presidents are, by definition, people who get assassinated. To them, the Zapruder Film is a media classic" (Rushkoff 1996: 43-44). People of this generation do not expect answers from the media but rather pose questions at them. For them discontinuous media are the rule and not the exception; as zapping substitutes the nationwide Saturday night-show. As a result they have adopted a social philosophy different from their predecessors' and do not feel the urge for the recombination and reduction of the vast stream of media bits into coherent unified pictures which provide profound answers to the world's problems.
In this respect, JFK is also about the gaps, or more precisely the filling in of the gaps by the audience. The aesthetics of JFK has often been compared to the aesthetics of commercials and MTV where the rapidity of edits produces a new sort of changing image. Just as a regular film is made up of thousands of frames running by so quickly that it generates the illusion of a moving image, JFK, like MTV, juxtaposes its moving images so quickly and so disjointedly that it creates another level of imagery and with this a new cinematic language- a language of chaos. Whereas older generations felt the urge to order this chaos and deduct a morally valuable message from it, younger people embrace or at least acknowledge this chaos with all its contradictions and opposing forces, since, for them, it so much resembles the reality of the contemporary media landscape, and above that, the reality of a world where morality and ethics have become a question of trend (PC or absolutely not PC) or of money/power ('after the election is before the election') rather than of underlying spiritual and social values.
According to Stone, these by now almost classic characteristics of postmodern life and culture were triggered by a drastic and devastating loss of faith in the official version of the Kennedy murder and an increasing anxiety of the American people that its own government was involved in the assassination, or at least in the cover-up. The Kennedy assassination was definitely a catalyst and was of major importance for socio-political changes in the 1960s. But so were other events, such as the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy etc.. It is of course very unlikely that the singular event of the Kennedy assassination would have caused all the socio-political upheaval.

V. Possible Worlds and Ambiguous Index
Roland Sukenick writes: "The essential trope of fiction is hypothesis, provisional supposition, a technique that requires suspension of belief as well as of disbelief" (Sukenick 1985: 99). This describes a special logical status of the fictional text, an intermediate stage. A text is neither true nor false, but 'suspended between belief and disbelief'. Theories about possible worlds claim that during the reception of a text or film readers/viewers "abandon the actual world and adopt (temporarily) the ontological perspective of the [...] work" (McHale 1987: 33). The necessity, possibility and impossibility of the events represented is construed by the reader/viewer. Whereas propositions about the real world fall under the modality of necessity, propositions in fiction, by contrast, are governed by the modality of possibility; they require, in short, 'suspension of belief as well as of disbelief.' In JFK Stone intensifies this process by ambiguously or contradictory indexing his film. Maybe Stone was not so sure himself how to view his own film. On the one hand he claimed that his strategy was to present a countermyth to the Warren Commission's version. However, if JFK is to be seen as a mere myth, then why did Stone bother to carefully research the numerous facts, and why did he publicly defend his version on all accounts? What derives from this utterance of a truth claim of Oliver Stone on behalf of the film is an intensification of the oscillation between belief and disbelief which on a cinematic level increases suspense. On a political level he surely helped to trigger the controversial debates about the film, and thus increased the film's box office success. Although it is unlikely that Stone ambiguously indexed JFK purely for strategic marketing reasons.

VI. Conclusion
In this essay it has been discussed, how Stone constructs history through the production, arrangement and interpretation of images and how he counters his sometimes unifying arguments by a fragmentary form. It has also been discussed how Stone communicates his version of the event by the antagonistic play of voice- and image track, and how he in turn comments on his own assertions by the recurrent pattern of contradiction, which is inscribed into the film's construction.
In JFK Stone talks about that 'something happened' in America in the 1960s and moreover touches on film history, the belief in images as well as the limits of representation of the visual media. He furthermore comments on journalistic conventions, and with the form and narration of JFK echoes the shift from linear to nonlinear representation which started in the 1960s.
Despite all assertions of Stone, JFK is essentially a fictional form of entertainment. However: "Others praised these filmmakers for communicating higher truths in the course of designing stimulating portrayals that mix fact with fiction. The makers of these movies succeeded in getting the public to ponder important questions, they argued; the artistic flourishes make the audience think about history. Indeed, said the defenders, these individuals demonstrated some of the exciting ways that film can stir us to feel and conceptualize the past" (Toplin 1996: 17).
By ambiguously indexing JFK Stone underwrote the film's truth claim. Naturally, without the truth claim the film would have lost its punch and political implications. The controversial debate JFK triggered surely had an educating impact on the public and led to the opening of many until then sealed documents. Thus the film managed to transcend its impact from the sphere of mainstream entertainment to the political sphere-a fact rarely seen in Hollywood, where films normally reinforce and uphold traditional standards. JFK’s impact therefore has to be evaluated positively.
Nevertheless, as JFK itself, as well as this analysis and the outcome of the recently opened documents show, the final version of the event is wholly dependent on the arrangement and interpretation of those facts, and always has to compete with other possible versions of the event.
From this perspective it can even be predicted that the opening of additional documents in 2038 will reveal nothing which will be able to allocate with absolute certainty 'the murder at the heart of the American dream' to a definitive aggressor and motive.
As Stone puts it himself: 'The past is history.'


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