3 result(s) tagged “Oliver Stone”

When we say that a movie is more style than substance, we typically mean it derisively.

Oliver Stone’s JFK has a ton of stuff — with the director’s cut running nearly three and a half hours — that was mistaken for its substance. But the meat of the movie is its style, because it’s the fuel that made the film so combustible.

The movie was greeted with contentious debate upon its release in 1991, but Stone’s critics and supporters completely missed the boat by arguing about facts, theories, and cover-ups. JFK works not as an argument but as a style of argument — sly and forceful in equal measure — and an exemplar of contemporary propaganda.

Despite (and because of) its pedigree, Natural Born Killers is undoubtedly trashy, reveling in the killing spree of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) and joyfully joining in the public and media fascination with mass murderers. And it’s an invigorating, brilliantly assembled movie celebrating the way that cinema can make the ugliest human behavior thrilling.

I’m about 15 years late to this party, but I’ve always planned to write a lengthy piece on my love for Oliver Stone’s JFK. My point would simply be that whatever its failings as a credible history (or even a viable alternative history), JFK excels as propaganda, and should be studied for that reason. In a 1993 essay in The Atlantic, Edward Jay Epstein does a good job explaining Stone’s methods:

“The fictional O’Keefe’s story is supported by Ferrie’s fictional confession, which is then given weight by Ferrie’s fictional murder by the fictional bald-headed Cuban introduced in O’Keefe’s story. Since ... Oliver Stone’s audience is not apprised of the substitutions of fiction for fact, this cross-corroboration makes plausible ... the New Orleans plot.”

The irony is that the essay is intended as a tearing apart of Stone and his film. (Beware that the Internet version of Epstein’s article is rife with typos, making infrequent sentences incomprehensible.)