John F. Kennedy assassination in popular culture

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The assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been referenced or recreated in popular culture several times.[1]

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[edit] Fictional detectives investigating the assassination

The novel Gideon's March by J. J. Marric, published in 1962 by Hodder and Stoughton in London, gives an eerily prescient look at the Kennedy assassination. Inspector George Gideon learns of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy during a state visit to London. The assassination is to take place during a parade, by means of a bomb; the assassin is a Southern bigot who hates the President for his Roman Catholic faith and his civil-rights initiatives. Interestingly, the assassin is given the distinctly Irish name of "O'Hara") The novel's publication a year before the actual assassination is reminiscent of Morgan Robertson's 1898 novel Futility, which depicts the sinking of a massive ocean liner called "Titan" fourteen years before the sinking of the Titanic.

Sherlock Holmes in Dallas (Dodd, Mead 1980) by Edmund Aubrey, brings the renowned consulting detective (who, by 1963, would have been approximately 115 years old) out of his Sussex retirement to investigate the Kennedy assassination.

[edit] Television and film portrayals

The assassination and the subsequent conspiracy theories surrounding his death have been the topic for many films, including:

  • the 1966 Emile de Antonio documentary Rush to Judgment, based on Mark Lane's book;
  • David Miller's 1973 Executive Action;
  • The 1974 film The Parallax View, is inspired by the Kennedy assassination and is about a senator who gets assassinated, with his assassin himself dying a violent death quickly afterwards. The protagonist, an investigative reporter, played by Warren Beatty is on the verge of solving the mystery when another senator is murdered. This time, he gets blamed for that one, also posthumously.
  • The 1979 French film I comme Icare takes place in a fictional Western country, and tells the story of a presidential assassination from the viewpoint of one of the (dissenting) members of a (fictional) Warren Committee. He then starts his own investigation. The title is from the Greek myth about Icarus, who flies too close to the sun.
  • In the 1979 film Winter Kills, U.S. President Timothy Kegan is shot in Philadelphia at Hunt Plaza. The ensuing presidential commission condemns a lone gunman as the killer. The film starts years later, when Kegan's half-brother, Nick, witnesses the death-bed confession of a man claiming to have been part of the 'hit squad'.
  • Nigel Turner's 1988, 1991, 1995 and 2003's continuing documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy and
  • Oliver Stone's 1991 JFK.[2]
  • The 1997 Red Dwarf episode Tikka to Ride features the assassination of JFK as part of a time-travel paradox. In this episode, the crew interrupt the assassination attempt and JFK survives, only for the alternate future to go horribly wrong. The future JFK eventually returns to 1963 and assassinates himself from the Grassy Knoll, returning the timeline to normal.

In 1975, a San Francisco-based group of artists called Ant Farm reenacted the Kennedy assassination in Dealey Plaza, and documented it in a video piece called "The Eternal Frame". Two years later, the assassination was re-enacted again as part of the ABC television movie The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, looking at what might have happened had Jack Ruby not prevented Oswald from going to court. The 1983 NBC TV 1983 mini series Kennedy showed the assassination from Jackie Kennedy's perspective.

After thirty years, JFK assassination theories could be treated humorously. In the TV series Seinfeld, episode "The Boyfriend, Part 1" (1992), a ballpark spitting incident is revisited, and a "second spitter" theory, à la the second gunman theory, is discussed, in a parody of the final courtroom scene in JFK. The 2002 film Interview With the Assassin presents the assassination and resultant conspiracy theories in mock documentary fashion, with a terminally-ill former Marine named Walter Ohlinger, who claims that he was the second gunman behind the fence on the grassy knoll. In the same year, in Bubba Ho-tep, Ossie Davis played an assassination-obsessed character with a scale model of Dealey Plaza, and photos on the wall of the various players. The award-winning Irish short film My Dinner With Oswald, directed by Paul Duane and written by Donald Clarke, focuses on a recreation of the assassination at a Dublin dinner party. In the Comedy Central series Strangers with Candy, Stephen Colbert's character asserts that "Fidel Castro impersonated Marilyn Monroe and gave President Kennedy a case of syphilis so severe that eventually it blew the back of his head off."

Also, the aftermath and John F. Kennedy's funeral is portrayed as well. In the 1992 drama film Love Field, the Dallas housewife and her boyfriend attended the funeral, along with the widow and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. It is noted that the role of Jacqueline Kennedy is played by Rhoda Griffis, and is regarded as her breakout role[citation needed].

In the 1994 movie, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the main character Ace says to Einhorn, "I came to confess. I was the second gunman on the grassy knoll," after she asks him what the hell he is doing there.

In The Rock (1996), a mysterious rogue British secret agent, out of gratitude for helping him disappear, tells the protagonist of a microdatabase full of political secrets of the last 30 years. The last line of the movie is: Honey, uh, you wanna know who really killed J.F.K.? The agent, played by Sean Connery, was allegedly imprisoned in Alcatraz for stealing the microfilm information without charge or trial. However, Alcatraz was closed in 1962 by order of then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a year before the Kennedy assassination.

The J.F.K. assassination was mentioned twice in the 2007 movie Shooter, which revolves around a conspiracy to kill an Ethiopian arch bishop and frame protagonist Bob Lee Swagger. The first mentioning referred to how Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, apropos of tying up loose ends in a conspiracy. The second time was when Swagger and his partner Nicholas Memphis visited a weapons expert in Tennessee. This man said that the shooter responsible for the assassination was probably already dead, since "this is how a conspiracy works". As an example, he claimed that the men on the grassy knoll were dead within three hours. These men were supposedly buried in anonymous graves in the desert outside of Terlingua. When Memphis expressed his doubts about this claim, the man replied that he "still got the shovel".

In the film Zoolander, one of the characters states that male models were responsible for virtually all political assassinations, including that of President Kennedy. Another character replies that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a male model and is told "No. But those two lookers who capped Kennedy from the grassy knoll sure as shit were."

The assassination of JFK is also mentioned in the 2007 film National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

[edit] In books

  • In Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast which has alternate universes as on of its themes, the protagonist is asked to identify his timeline, which he does by method of naming Presidents during his life: "Woodrow Wilson - I was named for him - Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy-" Upon which another character replies: "Which brings us to 1984, right?" This implies that in his timeline the assassination didn't happen.
  • J. G. Ballard, of Empire of the Sun fame, wrote a 1967 short-short story titled: The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race
  • The 1984 thriller graphic novel series XIII (comic book) is based upon the Kennedy assassination. In the novel series, a president of Irish descent, William B. Sheridan, the 42nd president, is assassinated. Days later, a man suffering from amnesia due to a shot wound, is found washed upon a beach, only with the number XIII tattooed on his collar bone. Even though it is said to be inspired by the Bourne Identity, there are more clear references to the Kennedy assassination, than to that book, such as the existence of a 'Zapruder' like film, large scale conspiracy, as opposed to just a part of the intelligence community. [3]

[edit] "What if?" themes

Not surprisingly, the assassination of JFK has been the subject of several time travel stories in science fiction.

  • Profile in Silver, a 1985 episode of the second Twilight Zone series, was about a time traveler from 2172 who prevented Kennedy's death after being sent merely to film it. The result is an escalating series of events, all combinations of which end with the total destruction of humanity in a nuclear war. The time traveler resolves the paradox by sending Kennedy forward to his own era, and by taking Kennedy's place in the motorcade, dying in his stead.
  • The 1990 film Running against Time starred Robert Hays and Catherine Hicks as time travelers attempting, unsuccessfully, to prevent the Kennedy assassination (based on a theory that the Vietnam War would not have happened had JFK lived). In one sequence, Hays ends up accused of the assassination in place of Oswald.[4]
  • "Lee Harvey Oswald", the 1992 season opener for Quantum Leap, had Scott Bakula's time-hopping character leaping into the body of the book depository employee. The 1991 season's "Oh Boy" moment had Sam Beckett holding the rifle and newspaper for Oswald's famous photograph, painting the scriptwriters into a corner: Beckett couldn't murder Kennedy as intended, but neither could he deviate from any detail of one of the most scrutinized days in history. The solution had Beckett jumping back and forth in Oswald's life, then becoming Secret Service Agent Clint Hill to save Jackie Kennedy from dying.
  • Tikka to Ride, a 1997 episode of the science-fiction comedy series Red Dwarf, played the time travel paradox for laughs. Craig Charles, as Lister, goes back in time to order some curry and ends up in the Texas School Book Depository, and literally bumps into Lee Harvey Oswald (played by Toby Aspin), causing Oswald to fall out the Sixth Floor window before he can fire his shot. Ultimately, time travel is not invented and the resulting paradox is resolved only by a future JFK becoming the second gunman at his own assassination.
  • In the 2002 film Timequest, a time-traveler prevents JFK's assassination and history takes an alternate course, including the birth of a second son, James Kennedy who was conceived on the night of November 22, 1963 when JFK and Jackie return from Dallas.
  • In the novel "Alternate Kennedys", Kennedy's father exercised control over his boys, and first put Kennedy's older brother up for the presidency in 1952, then yanked him before he could seek a second term. The older brother ended up becoming John's assassin in 1963.
  • In Luke Powers' song "I Saw John Kennedy Today," from the Americana CD Picture Book (2007), Kennedy explains that he faked his own death in Dallas using a body double. Being free "because he was dead," Kennedy bought an old pickup truck and has been traveling the byways of America "where the girls are always friendly."
  • The Broadway musical Assassins(musical) climaxes as the ghosts of John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosh, Chalie Guiteau, and other "would be" assassins appear to Lee Harvey oswald, and convince him that the only way for him to truly connect with his country was to share his pain and bitterness with it; the only way this can happen is for him to shoot the president.

[edit] Miscellaneous

The X-Files episode "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" (1996) places a young cigarette smoking man as the assassin, shooting from a sewer drain located near the grassy knoll after setting up Oswald as his patsy.

In the Seinfeld episode The Secret Code, Elaine, trying to make a man remember an evening he spent with her, tells him that on that night she explained that her uncle worked in the book depository building with Lee Harvey Oswald. When he told Oswald that the president had been shot, Oswald winked to him and said he was going to see a movie.

The Kennedy assassination has been the subject of two music videos, Ministry's "Reload"; Marilyn Manson's "Coma White" (with Manson as JFK), and the album cover for The Misfits' album "Bullet" (depicting an image of the president with his head blown apart).

Comedian Bill Hicks used the Kennedy assassination as a frequent theme throughout his acts.

In the free MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing there is a location called "Degrassi Knoll"; the o"Knoll Gnolls" who inhabit it are led by a "Mayor Zapruder".

The Rolling Stone's song Sympathy for the Devil has the lyrics "I shouted out/Who killed the Kennedys?/When after all/It was you and me."

Lou Reed's 1982 album The Blue Mask includes a song entitled "The Day John Kennedy Died".

The Simon & Garfunkel song The Sound of Silence was written in the aftermath of the assassination of President JFK.

In the Family Guy episode, Sibling Rivalry, a brief clip is shown of Lee Harvey Oswald, where he tries to get the President's attention, before he notices a man on the Grassy Knoll with a gun, and gets out the rifle to kill the assassin. Unfortunately, Oswald is revealed to have very bad eyesight.

"Sleeping In" by The Postal Service has the lyrics "Where there was never any mystery of who shot John F. Kennedy/It was just a man with something to prove/Slightly bored and severely confused/He steadied his rifle with his target in the center/And became famous on that day in November."

"Tomorrow, Wendy" by Concrete Blonde has the lyrics "Underneath the chilly gray November sky/We can make believe that Kennedy is still alive and/We're shooting for the moon and smiling Jackie driving by..."

In the film In The Line Of Fire about a plot to assassinate the President of the U.S. Clint Eastwood stars as Frank Horrigan a secret service agent who was present at the Kennedy assassination.

In King of the Hill, Dale Gribble reads the Warren Report to his son. After going through it, he comes to realize that the assasination was entirely possible, and not a conspiracy.

In the DC comic 100 bullets a Theory is put forward that the shooter on the Grassy Knoll Used the Titular 100 bullets and the shooter was another famous celebrity of the era who had a reason to kill JFK

[edit] References

  1. ^ The JFK Assassination in Popular Culture
  2. ^ Nicholas Cullather has discussed "The Movie Version" of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Nicholas Cullather, "History, Conspiracy, and the Kennedy Assassination," Retrieving the American Past, ed. Marc Horger (New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2005), 301-330.
  3. ^ http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27393 a preview.
  4. ^ Running Against Time

[edit] See also

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John F. Kennedy assassination