It’s been 30 years since Oliver Stone released his controversial “JFK” — an exhaustively brilliant account of the conspiracy behind President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. His latest treatment on the subject, which played earlier this month at the Cannes Film Festival, is the never-less-than-absorbing documentary “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.”
Over the last five decades, the murder of JFK has been swarmed with an endless array of “conspiracy theories”, but the case has quite simply too much evidence to ignore, to the point where, depending on who you ask, the lone gunman theory has evolved and, to many, been debunked. Lee Harvey Oswald was maybe not a lone wolf, his background working for intelligence overseas seems to contradict what authorities had originally told us about him.
In ‘Revisited,’ Stone riffs on the countless reasons why U.S. intelligence would want Kennedy dead; he wanted peace with communist adversaries such as Cuba and Russia, sought full retreat of troops in Vietnam, and threatened to dismantle the CIA. Stone also seems to indicate that JFK’s firing of CIA boss, Allen Dulles, kickstarted his inevitable demise. As Senator Chuck Schumer ironically warned Donald Trump in 2017, after Trump defied intelligence community assessments, "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Stone, who also narrates the doc, presents an abundance of clues, facts, contradictions, and declassified files to make his case here. Some naysayers may tell Stone to let it go already, this happened too long ago, they claim, but the director’s intensive examination to keep this case alive is integral to the history books. Never again should we let the intelligence community crush the will of the people, by murdering a democratically-elected President for their own personal gain.
Stone’s 120 minute document is incredibly upsetting to watch. It gets off to a somewhat slow start, as Stone tackles the mysteries surrounding the so-called “magic bullet,” and the corrupt post-mortem examination of JFK’s blown-off brain. Momentum starts to pick up when Lee Harvey Oswald’s movements come to a clearer focus, and his odd journey from undercover intelligence asset, posing as a fake communist in the U.S. and Russia, to ultimate CIA stooge in the JFK Assassination.
Even more intriguingly, the composition and secrecy of the infamous Warren Commission, lead by none other than fired Kennedy nemesis Allen Dulles, has parallels to the FBI/CIA coverup of the Mueller investigation, denying a full assessment of the crime and, instead, becoming a psyop on the American public.
What’s most horrifying about “JFK Revisited” is how it posits the Soviet Union, and Cubans to have actually been less of a threat to to the country than our own intelligence community. Maybe they were, or maybe weren’t, but what matters most is that these questions are being asked. This two-hour film races by, feeling like a potently told murder mystery in search of the truth. Whether we ever get the latter is up for debate, but Stone’s persistence is heroic.
And yet, despite this passionate effort to seek out the truth, Stone is still having issues finding a U.S. distributor for his film. With conglomerate-driven censorship on the rise and an American news media unwilling to search for truth in the face of party partisanship. Stone recently admitted to Anne Thompson that “If this movie is not shown in America, then something is wrong with our system.” Here’s hoping that it does.
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