Assassination Aura

In his 2005 preface to Libra, DeLillo doesn’t focus on the historical consequences of the Kennedy assassination as they are traditionally understood—what it meant for international and domestic politics, for our understanding of covert intelligence and its role in a democracy, how it shaped relations with Cuba, what it did to “the American psyche,” how it inaugurated the period of social unrest that carried into the 1970s, and so on. These have all been discussed at great length, and continue to be debated. DeLillo focuses more on what the assassination has meant to us in less traceable ways—the “aura” that continues to surround the event, and the images and characters it has introduced into American popular discourse. It has become a story that is fascinating in its own right, apart from any argument about its significance. In part because of the deep uncertainty pervading any coherent account of the events leading up to and following the shooting of the president (which opens to door to a seemingly unlimited string of conspiracy theories), and in part because so many of the key moments were captured on film (the serendipitous “Zapruder film,” the shooting of Oswald by Ruby, broadcast live on television), the Kennedy assassination has become a part of American popular culture.

JFK conspiracy theories have become a “world within a world,” to quote DeLillo’s refrain in Libra. Even a timid excursion into the thriving online archives and discussion groups reveals an alternate universe of trivia, speculation, and strong feelings. There’s a kind of “fanboy” dynamic to a lot of this stuff—it is a world unto itself, not unlike that of Star Trek fans or Minecraft enthusiasts. The fascination makes a lot of sense, on one level: it’s a massive mystery story, full of bizarre coincidences and eccentric characters, international intelligence and counterintelligence, organized crime, and forensic analysis. As DeLillo’s “CIA historian” Nicholas Branch discovers, it is a giant, neverending “novel” that keeps rewriting itself as we read: “the Joycean book of America . . . in which nothing is left out” (182).

The assassination—its names, images, and intersecting narratives—has become a part of the American popular imagination in a way that no other assassination has. And this has a lot to do with why it’s such a quintessentially postmodern event. The images and names circulate in a way that has nothing in particular to do with politics, or conspiracies, or assassination. The phrase “grassy knoll” can never again be used to simply identify a feature of the landscape; a “schoolbook depository” is part of the national working vocabulary in a way that has nothing to do with depositing schoolbooks. There have been punk bands called the Dead Kennedys, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Jack Rubies. DeLillo refers in his preface to the t-shirt image that circulated a few years back, where the iconic image of Oswald being shot in the gut by Jack Ruby was ingeniously refashioned to look like a punk band on stage:

“There at center stage is the mythic figure of Oswald, barking his sad and ragged love into a hand mike” (viii). Oswald totally looks the part of the punk frontman, and it’s easy to forget the fact that we’re looking at a man being fatally shot—a fatal shot that had enormous consequences for securing the mystery and ambiguity that continues to haunt this story. (And note the iconic Dead Kennedys DK logo spraypainted on the wall in the background—an additional and rather morbid meta-joke.) This is a great example of a meme that precedes the internet and Photoshop. In fact, the Oswald-Ruby-rocking-out image was itself made into a kind of “meta-meme” back in the early 2010s:

I can’t think of any other subject of widespread conspiracy theories that enjoys this kind of pop-cultural capital (with the possible exception of the Roswell UFO stuff—there’s a definite air of postmodernist camp surrounding that whole thing). We don’t see t-shirts with the iconic “falling man” photograph from 9/11 refigured as a stagediver or bungee-jumper (even typing such an idea feels deeply wrong); I’m not aware of John Wilkes Booth’s image being deployed for comedic or ironic effect fifty years after he killed Abraham Lincoln. For some reason, a combination of deep seriousness and ironic pop appropriation combine when we talk about the Kennedy assassination. The people who obsessively pore over the details of that day in November 1963 can seem like heroic, monkish seekers of truth, exposers of a deep-seated government coverup of one of the most important events in American history, or they can seem like deeply paranoid, obsessive freaks, denizens of the most rabbit-holey rabbit hole on the internet. There’s an undeniable compulsion to try to unravel this insane tangle of a story, and there’s also a little repulsion—a desire not to get involved.

The title of my previous post, “Conspiracy A-Go-Go,” alludes to one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, Richard Linklater’s plotless 1991 classic Slacker. The film follows a seemingly random assortment of characters around Austin, Texas, on a random summer day; we stick with each character for a few minutes and then move on. This scene takes place in a used bookstore, as a young woman makes the mistake of browsing through the JFK Assassination shelf.

The putative author of “Profiles in Cowardice” here is a classic parody of the conspiracy theorist—when asked about himself, he launches into a kind of private language full of references and allusions, and it never occurs to him that she’s maybe not part of the cult. And under it all is a kind of nervous self-promotion. Most viewers probably identify with the woman, who just wants to look at some books in peace. She doesn’t even remember this dude from that class they supposedly took together. But he’s so myopically fixated on his private narrative, he can’t pick up on any of these social cues: conspiracy theorist as social misfit. When people start talking about the Kennedy assassination, there’s a tendency to roll the eyes and say, “Not all this crap about the grassy knoll again!” But at the same time, when I read Libra, it’s easy to get sucked into the story beyond the novel, of which the novel is a part. You can see how this guy might’ve gotten hooked.

Google “Lee Harvey Oswald” at your own risk.