Spring 2002
Volume 28, Number 3

Think of the future! --The Joker, Batman

JFK was universally recognized as a bold, innovative political film, although the exact orientation of its politics was hotly disputed. Upon its release in 1991 JFK provoked attacks from center, left, and right--a proper posthistorical confusion of tongues. The Left divided against itself. Some left-wing writers applauded the film as a potent critique of governmental covert action and coverup, one crediting Oliver Stone with having produced a film that works to "delegitimate the national security state."1 Others derided the film as a conspiratorial myth that irresponsibly forecloses informed historical analysis. Michael Albert, the editor of Z, attempted to save JFK for leftist taste by reconstituting a distinction between a right-wing explanation of events, which imputes causation to conspiratorial activity, and a left-wing analysis, which is grounded in institutional imperatives. According to Albert, a conspiratorial theory entails a "claim that a particular group acted outside usual norms in a rogue and generally secretive fashion." It disregards "structural features of institutions" by insisting that an "outcome would not have happened had not the particular people with their particular inclinations come together and cheated." Institutional theories, he argues, "claim that the normal operations of some institutions generate the behaviors and motivations leading to the events in question." They "address personalities, personal interests, personal timetables, and meetings only as facts about the events needing explanation, not as explanations themselves . . . as causal agents."2

Albert acknowledged that JFK liberally scatters charges of conspiracy, and he deplored Stone's glorification of Kennedy. Yet he found those melodramatic excesses to be incidental to Stone's fundamental, praiseworthy political achievement: the mounting of a commercial movie that convincingly represents the assassination of an American president as a "coup d'etat." In Albert's judgment JFK counts as a leftist film because "Stone's ''bad guy' is a system oriented to war and profitability."3 Maybe so. But if so, it is hard to understand why Albert credits Stone with the achievement, when, according to the terms of his analysis, he really ought to praise Warner Films and its parent company, Time Warner. Why praise the person as cause when all we know about the operations of capitalism would lead us to believe that JFK came about through the normal operations of the corporate institution?

To claim that the business of a business "normally" involves institutional critique of American business and the American state seems counterintuitive, leftist in form only. And Albert certainly never got around to saying it. Too bad, for putting his tongue around the paradox might have prompted Albert to examine his obsolete distinction between persons and institutions. In the absence of a threat of state interference the constructions of corporate populism exercise power through an artful equivocation of that supposed difference. Especially in the case of the Time Warner merger, the negotiation between institutional commitments and personal prerogatives drove the deal.4

Albert was not prepared to see the connection between the rhetorical strategy of JFK and a corporate strategy of Time Warner because, although he eagerly followed Stone in his rejection of the suspiciously simplistic lone gunman theory of the assassination, he strangely adhered to the equally simplistic lone crusader theory--if not Kennedy, struck down in his prime, or Garrison, stonewalled by government bureaucracy, then Stone himself, pilloried by a mainstream press unwilling to tolerate challenges to its prerogatives. Albert did not feel the pinch of the contradiction because he was a victim of theory--and not political theory but film theory. Despite his able critique of persons as causes, he embraced the explanatory model of the auteur theory, which proposes the director as agent of the distinctive vision of the motion picture, a person whose detectable signature authorizes the commercial product as a meaningful artifact. Albert rightly believed that films are meaningful. And he had no way of explaining how institutions make films. No one does. But it's not important. Institutions don't make films; corporations do. Hollywood films are corporate speech.

1. Michael Parenti, "Morte D'Arthur," in "JFK": The Book of the Film, ed. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar (New York, 1992), p. 478.

2. Michael Albert, "Conspiracy Theory? . . . Not?" in "JFK," pp. 358, 359; my emphasis.

3. Albert, "JFK and Us," in "JFK," p. 364; my emphasis.

4. The two chief accounts are Richard M. Clurman, To the End of Time: The Seduction and Conquest of a Media Empire (New York, 1992), hereafter abbreviated ET; and Connie Bruck, Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner (New York, 1994), hereafter abbreviated MG. My version of the negotiations is completely indebted to Clurman and Bruck, unless otherwise indicated. In what follows I will cite those texts only when one author's version of the deal diverges from another's or where I quote from one individual text.