OMG, JFK, WTF!? (Is this title too much?)

Before I really get into the subject of this blog post, I just have to say that the film JFK (1991), directed by Oliver Stone, is mind opening experience that quickly escalates until your mind is actually blown. Having been to the 6th Floor Museum, a museum in the Dallas book depository where Lee Harvey Oswald is supposed to have shot President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, I was already aware that the official account of the assassination is questionable at best. Based on a number of of conflicting pieces of evidence, most clearly the angle of the bullet that hits Kennedy in the head on the Zapruder film, it is plainly visible to most that the official story is flawed. This film, while repeating these facts that I already knew, also added to them, and provided a detailed account of an investigation into the motives for covering it up, and the true story behind why JFK was killed. It was the details of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrisons investigation into this conspiracy that brought my mind all the way to the point of combustion.

In JFK, Oliver Stone tells this story by weaving the narrative in between footage of the present in the film, reenactments of conspiracy events, and real footage of the assassination and events surrounding it. Perhaps this visual style is explained by Garrison (Kevin Costner) during a working dinner discussing the assassination case with his legal team. "Y'all gotta start thinking on a different level, like the CIA does. Now we're through the looking glass here people. White is black and black is white." Although this film is long (the directors cut is 206 minutes, the original is only 188), this style of presentation necessitates a whirlwind different shots and camera movements. In the same dinner scene, the viewer is presented with fluid cuts between the different members of the team at dinner and reenactments of background events for the case. At the end of the sequence, however, the viewer is presented with a real photo of Oswald on the cover of Life magazine.

These sequences can be confusing to the viewer, and perhaps would be unintelligible were it not for the film's unique sound design. Referring only to the dialogue in scenes like the dinner meeting and many other, supervising sound editor Wylie Stateman explains that "The dialogue work in that film, from a sound point of view, was just incredible. There were so many layers and it was tucked in so tight, it was like working with a shoehorn. You had to transition out of one thought after the thought had been completed, just in time to allow the next thought to make its transition in. It was an exercise in microsurgery" (Sound on Film, 252-253).

In the same interview, Statemen also discusses the way sound helps to clarify the cuts on screen. "There's discontinuous imagery that makes your mind question its validity. Sound tends to smooth or soothe that phenomenon and can be a very effective tool in taking some of those breaks in action and making them far more transparent to the mind" (253). This is true of the dinner sequence, where, as Garrison says his lines about their level of thinking, we see the supposed doctoring of the photo that was so instrumental in convicting Oswald (at least in the public opinion). The continuous monologue in this sequence, culminating in the conclusion that Oswald may in fact have been a patsy, helps to clarify the action taking place in the imagined reenactment on screen.

The sound design in these blended scenes are only one piece of how the sound is an integral part of JFK. Statement also talks about how he grappled with the length of the film, and issues such as the volume of gunshots in his interview. "We wanted to really lull you into a sense of watch and listen, and we didn't want to box the audience in the ears just because we have a hundred decibels of potential sound pressure we can throw at them. So when there are gunshots, there's no point in making somebody's ears ring...we wanted the guns to sound different from different perspectives...There wasn't any real consensus on what happened that day, and there still isn't" (252).

Through its sound design and the sheer intrigue of the subject of its plot, JFK manages to force the viewer to see things from new perspectives and consider new and horrible possibilities about the assassination of President Kennedy. This film is truly massive in its length and the weight of the subjec it takes on. And hey, Kevin Costner isn't too bad either.