The President's assassination and the events surrounding it have been a fount of inspiration for artists (and 'artists') of all stripes in the past five decades. Herewith some examples of their insinuation into the warp and woof of popular culture
SIXTEEN JACKIES
(1964) Andy Warhol. The artist began a series of acrylic and
silkscreen paintings of a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy shortly after her
husband’s assassination, continuing through 1965. Warhol claimed he was
“thrilled” to have JFK as president “but it didn’t bother me when he was dead.
What bothered me was the way the TV and radio were programming everybody to be
so sad.”
LIBRA
(1988) Don DeLillo. A paranoiac flight
of fact-fuelled fancy and probably
the greatest novel to come out of the assassination. Mostly a “biography” of Lee
Harvey Oswald, it’s a potent distillation of the dread, ambiguity and
instability that have informed the psychic landscape of the post-Kennedy era
where, as The New York Times’ Anthony DeCurtis puts it, “the past refuses to dissolve
safely into memory and instead exerts a pull one can never fully escape.”
THE DAY JOHN KENNEDY DIED
(1982) Lou Reed. Reed’s reputation as a brusque bruiser is belied by
this stately, moving ode in which he recalls where he was when he heard the news
of the Dallas shooting (“I was upstate in a bar”) and the event’s lingering
effects (“I dreamed the perfect union, and a perfect law, undenied/And most of all I dreamed I forgot the day
John Kennedy died”).
THE ZAPRUDER FILM
(1963) Abraham Zapruder. The world’s most famous (and
influential) 8-mm home movie. Hypnotic in its can’t-watch/must-watch horror. The
gasp-inducing high point of Oliver Stone’s JFK. The 26-second
precedent-setter for the “convulsive beauty” of Bonnie and Clyde,
The Wild Bunch, Taxi Driver and Scanners and … and …
BLOW OUT
(1981) Brian De Palma. Films have feasted heartily on the
assassination, using it as either direct inspiration or riff bait. Blow
Out’s one fun, heady concatenation, at once a variation on Antonioni’s Blow-Up and an interpolation
of the themes and events of JFK’s assassination with Ted Kennedy’s 1969 Golgotha
at Chappaquidick. John Travolta stars
as the Zapruder-like witness – except
here it’s a microphone and tape-recorder, not a Bell & Howell camera, that
make him one troubled man.
SEINFELD
(1992) The Magic Loogie
episode. The Kennedy assassination has attracted more conspiracy theories
than flies to a pest strip, a phenomenon that went global with the 1991 release
of JFK. This classic TV episode spoofs the Stone movie to hilarious
effect while simultaneously debunking “the magic bullet theory” posited by the
Warren Commission. Here, however, the trajectory in question is that of an
expectoration by New York Mets pitcher Keith
Hernandez.
ANNIE HALL
(1977) Woody Allen. As conspiracy theories gained traction, one of
their tangential effects was to make the world a murky, sinister place where
everything seems connected to everything else, even one’s sex life. In the movie
Annie Hall, Allen’s Alvie Singer character says he can’t have sex with
his wife because his obsession about the notion that the Warren Commission duped
the American public and that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone are
cramping his performance.
ASSASSINS
(1990) Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman.
A phantasmagorical musical, mounted first off-Broadway, then on, peopled with a
bevy of American assassins, failed and successful. In one scene, Lee Harvey
Oswald is visited by John Wilkes Booth in Dallas’s Texas Schoolbook Depository,
where Lincoln’s murderer cajoles him into achieving immortality by joining the
brotherhood of history’s greatest assassins. No, it doesn’t have a song titled
“Send in the Killers.”
BEAT AVENUE
(2003) Eric Andersen. A half-spoken, half-sung kaleidoscopic
re-creation from the creator of Thirsty Boots and Violets of
Dawn of his Nov. 22, 1963. For 26 minutes, to a smoky jazz-inflected
soundtrack, Andersen tells of being an aspiring 20-year-old singer in San
Francisco, gassed to be hanging that day with such Beat legends as Allen
Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Neal Cassady yet trying to process the tragedy of
Dallas. It’s a song of innocence and experience, of weed, wine, woe and wonder.
PRESIDENT ELECT
(1964) James Rosenquist. One of the progenitors of Pop Art,
Rosenquist began this large
painting shortly before Kennedy’s inauguration and finished it a year after his
death. There’s hope and affection here (as well as the suggestion of JFK as one
more capitalist comestible) but, post-assassination, it’s hard not to be
disconcerted by those spongy fragments of cake coming from his head and the
Chevrolet exiting the picture frame.