TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122391/1223640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 132 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 84

When Artists Distort History


By Lance Morrow


    King Richard III was a monster. He poisoned his wife,
stole the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to
be smothered in the Tower of London. Richard was a sort of
Antichrist the King -- "that bottled spider, that pois'nous
bunch-back'd toad."

    Anyway, that was Shakespeare's version. Shakespeare did
what the playwright does: he turned history into a vivid,
articulate, organized dream -- repeatable nightly. He put the
crouchback onstage, and sold tickets.

    And who would say that the real Richard known to family
and friends was not identical to Shakespeare's memorably
loathsome creation? The actual Richard went dimming into the
past and vanished. When all the eyewitnesses are gone, the
artist's imagination begins to conjure.

    Variations on the King Richard Effect are at work in
Oliver Stone's JFK. Richard III was art, but it was propaganda
too. Shakespeare took the details of his plot from Tudor
historians who wanted to blacken Richard's name. Several
centuries passed before other historians began to write about
Richard's virtues and suggest that he may have been a victim of
Tudor malice and what is the cleverest conspiracy of all: art.

    JFK is a long and powerful harangue about the death of the
man Stone keeps calling "the slain young king." What are the
rules of Stone's game? Is Stone functioning as commercial
entertainer? Propagandist? Documentary filmmaker? Historian?
Journalist? Fantasist? Sensationalist? Paranoid
conspiracy-monger? Lone hero crusading for the truth against a
venal Establishment? Answer: some of the above.

    The first superficial effect of JFK is to raise angry
little scruples like welts in the conscience. Wouldn't it be
absurd if a generation of younger Americans, with no memory of
1963, were to form their ideas about John Kennedy's
assassination from Oliver Stone's report of it? But worse things
have happened -- including, perhaps, the Warren Commission
report.

    Stone's movie and the Warren report are interestingly
symmetrical: the Warren Commission was stolidly, one might say
pathologically, unsuspicious, while in every scene of the Stone
film conspiracy theories writhe underfoot like snakes. In a
strange way, the two reports balance one another out. It may be
ridiculous to accord Stone's movie a status coequal with the
Warren report. On the other hand, the Warren report has endured
through the years as a monolith of obscure suppression, a smooth
tomb of denial. Stone's movie, for all its wild gesticulations,
at least refreshes the memory and gets a long-cold curiosity and
contempt glowing again.

    The fecklessness of the Warren report somehow makes one
less indignant about Stone's methods and the 500 kitchen sinks
that he has heaved into his story. His technique is admirable
as storytelling and now and then preposterous as historical
inquiry. But why should the American people expect a moviemaker
to assume responsibility for producing the last word on the
Kennedy assassination when the government, historians and news
media have all pursued the subject so imperfectly?

    Stone uses a suspect, mongrel art form, and JFK raises the
familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so
what? Artists have always used public events as raw material,
have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it.
The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of Borodino
found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy's imagining of
it in War and Peace.

    Especially in a world of insatiable electronic
storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new
versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical
breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous
television miniseries -- although it is interesting that the
movie of Woodward and Bernstein's All The President's Men stayed
close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark
conjecture.

    Some public figures have a story magic, and some do not.
Richard Nixon possesses an indefinable, discomfited dark gleam
that somehow fascinates. And John Kennedy, despite everything,
still has the bright glamour that works best of all. Works, that
is, except when the subject is his assassination. That may be
a matter still too sacred, too raw and unassimilated. The long
American passivity about the death in Dallas may be a sort of
hypnosis -- or a grief that hardened into a will not to know. Do
not let daylight in upon magic.

    Why is Stone's movie different from any other imaginative
treatment of history? Is it because the assassination of John
Kennedy was so traumatic, the baby boomers' End of Childhood?
Or that Americans have enshrined it as official tragedy, a title
that confers immunity from profane revisionists who would
reopen the grave? Are artists and moviemakers by such logic
enjoined from stories about the Holocaust? The Holocaust, of
course, is known from the outset to be a satanic plot. For some
reason -- a native individualism, maybe -- many Americans resist
dark theories about J.F.K.'s death, and think those retailing
them are peddling foreign, anarchist goods. Real Americans hate
conspiracies as something unclean.

    Perhaps the memory of the assassination is simply too
fresh. An outraged movie like Stone's intrudes upon a
semipermanent mourning. Maybe the subject should be embargoed
for some period of time, withheld from artists and entertainers,
in the same way the Catholic Church once declined to consider
sainthood until the person in question had been dead for 50
years.

    No: better to opt for information and conjecture and the
exhumation of all theories. Let a hundred flowers bloom, even
if some of them are poisonous and paranoid. A culture is what
it remembers, and what it knows.