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Example research essay topic: John F Kennedy Kennedys Assassination - 2,981 words

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Media, truth and culture as in JFK, Report and Eternal Frame America has enjoyed works of many talented movie directors. Oliver Stones JFK, Report by Bruce Conner and The Eternal Frame by T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm are all powerful movies because of their unique presentation of media, truth and culture in America as in connection with John Kennedys death. The main point of JFK seems to be that Americans live in the world that is imposed on them by media and the powerful of this world. This creates a visibility of having an American culture, however in reality, it is only a pseudo-culture.

The Eternal Frame emphasizes that American truth is only a myth. An event is only true if it is great and if media pays attention to it. Conners film Report states that Americans are shown what they want to see. Media does what is interesting for the people. It brings the truth in the light that would be understandable and acceptable to the public.

In other words, all three movies seem to agree that on one hand, truth does not exist in America. It is only a manipulation of somebody's powerful and clever mind, media, in the case of Jfk's assassination. On the other hand, Americans live in a culture, which only accepts what is clear and easy to accept, so media has to work in this direction as well. Oliver Stones JFK is a great movie, but not because it proves that John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy.

Stone himself has acknowledged that the movie is a myth a counter myth to the myth produced by the Warren Commission - but a myth that contains what Stone calls a spiritual truth. To understand that spiritual truth, we must look deeply into the psychological and social meaning of the assassination - its meaning for American society at the time that it occurred, and for understanding contemporary American politics and culture. JFK, dramatization of an investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, based on information from the books On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs. Released in 1991, this Academy Award-winning film was directed by Oliver Stone and stars Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, the district attorney who becomes obsessed with the case (Microsoft Encarta). The Warren Report laid the blame for the killing on Lee Harvey Oswald alone, but upon inspecting home movies made of the actual murder, Garrison sees what he thinks is a flaw in the reports hypothesis.

The movements of the presidents body as he is shot indicate he is being hit from many directions at once, which leads Garrison to conclude more than one person shot at Kennedy. The FBI closes the case, but Garrison digs for more evidence to support his claim and faces constant opposition from other government entities, both overt and clandestine (Microsoft Encarta). The spiritual problem that the movie speaks to is an underlying truth about life in American society - the truth that we all live in a social world characterized by feelings of alienation, isolation, and a chronic inability to connect with one another in a life-giving and powerful way. In our political and economic institutions, this alienation is lived out as a feeling of being underneath and at an infinite distance from an alien external world that seems to determine our lives from the outside. True democracy would require that we be actively engaged in ongoing processes of social interaction that strengthen our bonds of connectedness to one another, while at the same time allowing us to realize our need for a sense of social meaning and ethical purpose through the active remaking of the no-longer external world around (Tikkun). Yet, Americans do not yet live in such a world, and the isolation and distance from reality that envelops them is a cause of immense psychological and emotional pain, a social starvation that is in fact analogous to physical hunger and other forms of physical suffering.

One of the main psychosocial mechanisms by which this pain, this collective starvation, is denied is through the creation of an imaginary sense of community. Today this imaginary world is generated through a seemingly endless ritualized deference to the Flag, the Nation, the Family - pseudo communal icons of public discourse projecting mere images of social connection that actually deny real experience of isolation and distance, of living in sealed cubicles, passing each other blankly on the streets, while managing to relieve our alienation to some extent by making us feel a part of something (Tikkun). Political and cultural elites - presidents and ad agencies - typically generate these images of pseudo community, but Americans also play a part in creating them because, from the vantage point of our isolated positions - if Americans have not found some alternative community of meaning - they need them to provide what sense of social connection they can. The election of John F. Kennedy and his three years in office represented an opening-up of desire. The opening-up is a feeling that Kennedy was able to evoke - a feeling of humor, romance, idealism, and youthful energy, and a sense of hope that touched virtually every American alive during that time.

It was this feeling the rise of a new generation of Americans - that more than any ideology threatened the system of cultural and erotic control that dominated the fifties and that still dominated the governmental elites of the early sixties - the FBI, the CIA, even elements of Kennedys own cabinet and staff. Kennedys evocative power spoke to peoples longing for some transcendent community and in so doing, it allowed people to make themselves vulnerable enough to experience both hope and, indirectly, the legacy of pain and isolation that had been essentially sealed from public awareness since the end of the New Deal (Tikkun). The great advantage of the lone gunman theory is that it gives a nonsocial account of the assassination. It takes the experience of trauma and loss and momentary social disintegration, isolates the evil source of the experience in one antisocial individual, and leaves the image of society as a whole - the imaginary community, untarnished and still good. (Tikkun) From the point of view of those in power, in other words, the lone gunman theory re institutes the legitimacy of existing social and political authority as a whole because it silently conveys the idea that our elected officials and the organs of government, among them the CIA and the FBI, share American innocence and continue to express democratic will. The movie cannot be understood as to be suggesting that there was a conspiracy to set up Oswald in order to achieve this mass-psychological goal.

There may well have been a conspiracy to set up Oswald, but no complex theory is required to explain it. It would be absurd to think that the entire media consciously intended to manipulate the American people in the headlong rush to convict Oswald in the press. The point is rather that this headlong rush was something all Americans participated in because they unconsciously are deeply attached to the status quo, to their legitimating myths of community, and to denying their own alienation and pain. The interest that Americans share with the mainstream media and with government and corporate elites is to maintain, through an unconscious collusion, the alienated structures of power and social identity that protect them from having to risk emerging from their sealed cubicles and allowing their fragile longing for true community to become a public force.

The great achievement of Oliver Stones movie is that it uses this traumatic, formative event of the Kennedy assassination - an event full of politically important cultural memory and feeling - to assault the mythological version of American society and to make people experience the forces of repression that shape social reality. The movie may or may not be accurate in its account of what Lyndon Johnson might have known or of the phones in Washington shutting down just before the assassination or of the New Zealand newspaper that mysteriously published Oswald's photographs before he was arrested. Nevertheless, JFK does give a kinetic and powerful depiction of the real historical forces present at the time of the assassination, forces that were in part released by the challenge to the fanatical anticommunism of the fifties that Kennedy to some extent brought about. Through his crosscutting images of the anti-Castro fringe, the civil-rights movement, high and low New Orleans club life, and elites in corporate and government offices who thought they ran the country, Stone uses all his cinematic and political energy to cut through the civics-class version of history and to bring the viewer into sudden contact with the realities of power and alienation that were present at that time and are present in a different form now. This is the great achievement of the movie because no matter who killed Kennedy, it was the conflict between the opening-up of desire that he represented and the alienated need of the forces around him to shut this desire down that caused his death. This struggle was an important part of the meaning of the 1960 s, and it provides the link, which Stone draws openly, between John Kennedys death and the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr.

and Bobby Kennedy (Tikkun). There is no way for the forces of good to win the struggle between desire and alienation unless people can break through the gauzy images of everything being fine except the lone nuts, a legitimating ideology that is actually supported by our denial of the pain of our isolation and our collective deference to the system of Authority that we use to keep our legitimating myths in place. Oliver Stones JFK brings viewers face-to-face with social reality by penetrating the compensatory image-world of mass culture, politics, and journalism. For that reason it is an important effort by someone whose consciousness was shaped by the sixties to transform and shake free the consciousness of the nineties.

The overall response to JFK by both the general public and the media was both positive and negative. Positive responses mostly came from those viewers whom Stone enlightened, such as younger citizens out of touch with the assassination. The negative responses to the film came from those whom Stone attacks, mainly the press, the government, and historians. Interestingly, to promote further reading on the topic and to appease his harshest critics, Stone released a fully-documented screenplay to the film, replete with some ninety critical articles dealing with the film as well as the assassination itself and actual historical records. The Eternal Frame is an examination of the role that the media plays in the creation of (post) modern historical myths. For T.

R. Uthco and Ant Farm, the iconic event that signified the ultimate collusion of historical spectacle and media image was the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The work begins with an excerpt from the only filmed record of Kennedys assassination: Super- 8 footage shot by Abraham Zapruder, a bystander on the parade route. Using those infamous few frames of film as their starting point, T.

R. Uthco and Ant Farm construct a multi-leveled event that is simultaneously a live performance spectacle, a taped re-enactment of the assassination, a mock documentary, and, perhaps most insidiously, a simulation of the Zapruder film itself. Performed in Dealey Plaza in Dallas -- the actual site of the assassination - the re-enactment elicits bizarre responses from the spectators, who react to the simulation as though it were the original event. The grotesque juxtaposition of circus and tragedy calls American media experience and collective memory of the actual event into question.

The gulf between reality and image is foregrounded by the manifest devices of Doug Halls impersonation of Kennedy and Michels drag transformation into Jacqueline Kennedy. Hall, in his role as the Artist-President, addresses his audience with the ironic observation that I am, in reality, only another image on your screen. In the uncanny simulation of the Zapruder film, however, the impersonations are not as apparent, raising the question of the veracity of the image. Image and reality collide in a post-assassination interview; while both President Kennedy and the image Artist-President are dead and entered into myth, Hall discusses his role like an actor having completed a film.

Through a deconstruction of the film image, the artists underscore the medias importance to contemporary mythology - in which greatness is more a measure of drama than substance - and the extent to which it can be manipulated. In light of televisions transformation of the American political system, and the later election of a movie star to the presidency, The Eternal Flame continues to ring a truthful and haunting chord in the American consciousness. Eternal Frame is very different from JFK in a sense that it is uses a more philosophical approach for interpretation the truth and the reality of Kennedys assassination. Stones movie concentrates on the process of assassins identification, whereas The Eternal Frame does not. It does not deal with conspiracy theory as much and is more concerned with how the assassination is portrayed by the media. It feels, as if the producers attempted to make a very sharp joke about the event.

Not in the sense of laughing at Kennedys death, but rather at how Americans treated the event. Bruce Conner, another great director, completed a long cherished project making extensive use of found footage and collage method Report. The twelve-minute film, just as the other two movies, deals with the Kennedy assassination. Conner started the film right after the murdering on November 22 1963, but did not complete it until 1967. The film went through eight versions over the years, and its completion was made possible by a Ford grant that gave Conner access to archives footage (Kohn, 12). Report is entirely composed of black and white found footage, and old archives, which date and predate the assassination.

In contrast with JFK and the Eternal Frame, Report shows a deep representation of violence in its literal sense. Not only does Conner depict a violent reality through the editing process, but also the subject portrayed, the tragic ending of Kennedys life, comments on the depiction and representation of violence in the visual medium. The use of humor, and irony, makes Report, and its treatment of JFK s assassination, a highly polemical film. For this reason, the film remains an extraordinary testimony to a cultural paradigm shift. The film came to light when all the cultural and political forces came into interplay (now labeled Postmodern). This postmodern sensibility rejected the possibility of an autonomous artist in a capitalist society as both sterile and fictitious.

The artists are the product of the society they live in. The language, images, they use come from the culture they inhabit. The artists, on the whole, are constituted by the culture (Kohn, 17). The film is the product of this artistic shift, where life and art fused together to the point where aesthetics and ideologies also merged. The films images of violence are contrasted with an ironic approach to life. The film promotes the posture of uncertainty and endless doubt.

There is no attempt to produce a work that explains an armory and posterior causality. The footage begins in the most ambivalent fashion, in media res, and closes off with an open-ended resolution. From the outset, the filmmakers attitude questions (through the use of found footage) the epistemological foundation of human narrative, by creating a work of chaos in the most coherent fashion (Kohn, 25). Because it is paradigmatic of films other structure (imitating well-honed definitions of dramatic structure Report is nothing else than the discursive disintegration of the content.

Its global structure reflects both a deeply anchored and met aphorized reality. In general, JFK can be contrasted to Report and The Eternal Frame despite of their common theme. JFK seems to be more for the wide public, more for the viewers to understand, whereas the other two films are more artistically directed. They seem to carry out a deeper meaning than most people would understand and agree with.

There even seem to be a certain flavor of the rebellion in each movie, but this rebellion is artfully hidden. Produced by the different directors, at different times and for different purposes, JFK, Report and the Eternal Frame still share many common issues. The first one is obvious they are all about the assassination of John Kennedy. The other ones are much less obvious.

It is difficult to assert, but the viewer gets a feeling that the directors wanted to not only portray the images of the history, but to make an emphasis on the American culture and media as well. The issue of truth is very sharply depicted on in all three movies. In JFK Oliver Stone concentrates on conspiracy theories and their implications on American culture and people. The Eternal Frame carries a message of mythology of what is called truth in America. The producers virtually say that there is no truth truth is what media makes out of a certain event.

Report concentrates on how everything in America has to fit a certain standard that people are used to. If something important happens it has to be on TV, in the newspapers, etc. If it is not, then it is not that important. All three movies are real artistic works, which even appear unclear for the viewers at times, but yet full of deep meaning and directors talent. Bibliography: Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, Microsoft Corporation, 2002 Michael Kohn, An Interview with Bruce Conner, Bruce Conner: Inkblot Drawings/Engraving Collages, 1997, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles Tikkun magazine, Jewish Critic of Politics, Culture, & Society, The Truth of JFK, June/July 2001 issue


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