The JFK Files Have Been Released. Time to Revisit Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK’ Movie

It makes a kind of sense, to the extent that any of this makes sense, that Donald Trump would want to release files on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, even if in practice the files don’t contain much new or revelatory information. Trump is both a baby boomer and a creature of the 1980s, when chatter about the JFK assassination was part of the cultural firmament. This arguably culminated with the 1991 release of Oliver Stone’s JFK – not a biopic as the title might imply, but rather a sensational three-hour epic of conspiracy mongering, following the efforts of district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) to investigate Kennedy’s death. It made $200 million worldwide and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning two for its editing and cinematography.

The released files on Kennedy don’t contain much vindication for Stone’s film, though they do recall its geopolitical intrigue that reaches far beyond what happened in Dallas in November 1963. The files will also be forever connected the Stone film because of its closing note – back in 1991, mind – that official records would be sealed from the public until 2029. The Assassination Records Review Board credited the film for showcasing a conspiracy-minded approach to the assassination, implicating various government agencies – which they described as fictional while granting that it illustrated the mistrust felt by the American public over the issue, exacerbated by the sealed files. As such, the files were made public earlier than initially planned. (Many were released before this Trump 2.0 unveiling.)

Trump becoming POTUS, in fact, sounds just as much like some kind of fodder for a halfhearted spoof of Stone’s work (especially with the grim joke of JFK’s ghoulish nephew in the cabinet, patiently explaining how measles can be cured with unpasteurized bear milk or whatever). Is Stone, who had two Best Director Oscars before JFK got him his final nomination, the big-deal director of the 1990s who has fallen the most decisively out of favor in the new century? (Hell, even Mel Gibson had a movie in a few thousand theaters earlier this year, and Woody Allen was making acclaimed movies as recently as 2013.) He bookended the decade with two of his biggest hits, JFK and Any Given Sunday, and in between set about covering a range of subjects including the final and least-loved film in his Vietnam trilogy (Heaven and Earth), a divisive and explosive satire of tabloid media frenzy that is itself a bit of a frenzy and a stylistic pioneer (Natural Born Killers), a surprisingly rich and sensitive biography of a disgraced president (Nixon), and an attempt at pure pulp (U-Turn). Not all of these were hits – those last two, in fact, were huge financial flops – but Stone had a cultural currency that few serious filmmakers attain.

That lasted long enough in the 2000s for him to make a final presidentially-named picture, the underrated W., as well as a mellowed Wall Street sequel and the fairly straightforward 9/11 melodrama World Trade Center. But unlike some of his contemporaries in age (Michael Mann) or political controversy (Spike Lee), his influence and reputation have both diminished over the years. He hasn’t made a fiction film in a decade, and seems to attach himself to odd pet causes – Julian Assange; Putin – that don’t exactly capture the public imagination like the JFK assassination did.

But, boy was he on to something with JFK. Not necessarily the conspiracy stuff itself, but the emotions swirling around it. As Roger Ebert wrote for a “Great Movies” feature on the film about ten years after its release: “This is not a film about the facts of the assassination, but about the feelings. JFK accurately reflects our national state of mind since Nov. 22, 1963. We feel the whole truth has not been told, that more than one shooter was involved, that somehow maybe the CIA, the FBI, Castro, the anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia or the Russians, or all of the above, were involved. We don’t know how. That’s just how we feel.”

It’s true that “facts don’t care about your feelings” has since become a rallying cry for smug poindexters like Ben Shapiro, and looking at conspiracy-driven media of the ’90s can be a queasy trip now that so many of those feelings have been weaponized against stuff like vaccines. But cinema is a different story, and while Stone’s facts may not be straight, he accurately feeds his ideas through the prism of ’70s conspiracy thrillers and ’90s information overload. As much as many of his movies feel specifically dated to their time periods in style and subject matter, Stone also anticipates, in his way, the online rabbit hole, the message-board scrolling, the relentless suspicion that something else must be there beneath the official story that characterizes so much online “research.” Robert Richardson’s cinematography makes the prismatic effect near-literal at times, with its bright-white highlighting, and Stone cannily hires steadfast Kevin Costner (another figure who’s since become more a symbol of cultural conservatism) to play the guy spearheading the whole investigation, lending it further credibility in a sea of stars and character actors having a blast. (The film also reaches back to the ’70s by casting Donald Sutherland in a key role.)

Around the time of that year’s Oscars, a “Wayne’s World” sketch on Saturday Night Live made a silly joke about the film’s Best Picture loss: “JFK? Blown away?” deadpanned Mike Myers. “What else do I have to say?” Then he and Dana Carvey broke into the chorus of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. The thing is, though, JFK does kinda feel like a less celebratory version of that song – similarly boomer-centric but delivered at a pace closer to R.E.M.’s free-associative list-song of the same era: Kennedy’s death was the end of the world as they knew it (and with another few decades to build up their prosperity, the boomers felt fine). Stone now seems so removed from mainstream culture that a Hollywood Reporter piece that seemed to seek comment from him on the files turns out to just be reiterating the contents of his own press release; maybe he was always a blowhard. But maybe carrying around such generational angst took its toll, too.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.