How well does the imitation or view of historical events stand next to fact? I was reading a lot about how film makers are the most influential visual historians of our time, and how their decisions on what we're shown have a searing impact on how we identify with moments of time. Take for example, Oliver Stone's JFK. I remember renting that movie for research when I did a biography on Kennedy for 4th grade. Still remember my mother cringing as the word 'fuck' was used in rapid semi automatic succession during a scene with a wigged man.
Anyway, that movie totally blew the Kennedy conspiracy up in the air for an entire generation, after it had taken forever to settle all of those decades. The fucker Stone makes out Jim Garrison as some hero trying to claw his way into the impenetrable facade of corrupt American government. In actuality, Garrison was a fucking kook who tried his damnedest to argue his point with the thinnest of connections. But that movie made me such a believer! Sure I was only ten or so, but fuck did I get that fear that something was wrong with our politics, and turned into a little pseudo liberal yoo-hoo loving dinosaur collector.
All of the hysteria and conspiratorial hissy fitting after JFK's assassination on Soviet involvement and other more outlandish bullshit just makes me think of how godawful the media was post-September 11th, everyone sniffing out as many loose ends as possible and filling in the cracks with their own concoctions of what went down.
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