The following notes on Oliver Stone's JFK were written by Lance St. Laurent, Project Assistant for the Cinematheque and PhD candidate in the department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of the original theatrical release version of JFK will screen as the final film in our "Cinema in the Shadow of the JFK Assassination" series at the Chazen Museum of Art on Sunday, November 19 at 2 p.m. The Chazen is located at 750 University Ave, and admission is free!

By Lance St. Laurent

No Hollywood film should be held to the standard of an objective historical text, so it’s no knock on the quality of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy epic JFK to say that one should not approach it as a work that unearths great historical secrets or conclusively blows the lid off the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Historians and journalists were quick to criticize Stone’s film even before its release, and one can easily find a litany of rebuttals, denials, and officially sanctioned counter-narratives to most, if not all the bold claims that Stone’s film makes over its dizzying three hour run time. Stone, never one to shy away from self-aggrandizement, went as far as to claim, “Never before in the history of movies has a film been attacked in first draft screenplay form. All the established media seem to be terrified of my movie.” Stone may overstate his case somewhat, but he has a point. Hollywood has always played fast and loose with history, so why did this film warrant Newsweek to preemptively assuage its readers with the headline “Why Oliver Stone’s New Film Can’t Be Trusted?” Is it because of the film’s perceived lack of historical rigor, or because it touched on something deeper? Newsweek was right to say that JFK can’t be trusted, not because of its historical inaccuracies, but because it weaponizes the language of Hollywood into a truly destabilizing work of A-list agitprop that dared to ask the average American viewer to glimpse behind the veil of American power.

By the 1990s, Oliver Stone had already established himself as one of the most successful and politically charged filmmakers of his generation. Stone had managed to parlay his career as an Oscar-winning screenwriter (for 1979’s Midnight Express) into an even more successful one as a director, fictionalizing his own experiences as a Vietnam War veteran into the Best Picture winning Platoon (1986). Platoon was not Stone’s debut, but it—along with his other film released the same year, Salvador (1986)—established him as a filmmaker specializing in melodrama with an edge of left-wing agitation. His run of hits in the 1980s further cemented this reputation, with films like Wall Street (1987) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) garnering both mainstream success and critical plaudits while challenging prevailing cultural trends and social mores of 1980s America.

It was during Stone’s successful run in the late 1980s that Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of Assassins was first published, and Stone quickly secured the rights. Like many in his generation, Stone saw the Kennedy assassination and the subsequent investigation surrounding it as formative events in his own political development, a primal scene of Baby Boomer disillusionment. In adapting Garrison’s book, Stone also purchased the rights to another JFK assassination book, Jim Marrs’ Crossfire, hoping to do justice to not only the story of Jim Garrison’s quest for the truth but also to the larger, more insidious machinations that, in Stone’s telling, suppressed the truth about the assassination. Despite its controversial subject matter, Stone’s reputation helped secure him a $20 million budget from Warner Brothers and a massive cast of recognizable stars.

Stone had made political films before, and he had made films that were logistically complex, but JFK was something different. Stone’s initial draft of the screenplay suggested a 4½ hour film budgeted at $40 million, twice what WB had promised. While Stone was able to pare down the screenplay to a more acceptable runtime and secure outside financing for his expanding budget, JFK represented a huge step up for the filmmaker, not just in terms of scope, but also narrative and stylistic ambition. What begins as an almost Capra-esque slice of American domesticity quickly spirals into a swirling gyre of conspiracy—a barrage of names, locations, events, connections, varying film stocks, and alternate angles (both literal and metaphorical), all somehow wrangled into a legible form by the film’s two editors, Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia.

Guiding us through this descent into madness is New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner at his most wholesome. As characterized by Stone, Garrison is an idealized figure of American innocence, a man of unwavering moral fortitude and belief in the American system of justice and governance. That moral core never falters, but his belief in the American system—like the beliefs of so many of Stone’s protagonists—is shaken to the core by the magnitude of what he uncovers, and by the depths of its depravity.

There’s an animating tension at the heart of JFK; it feels as if it’s being pulled in multiple directions at once, seemingly by design. It’s a sprawling epic of national disillusionment that somehow also functions as a rousing, old-fashioned man against the system story. It’s both romanticized and deeply cynical, as if Stone himself can’t fully decide if the fundamental decency of the American people can overcome the sins of its corrupt systems. And try as he might, Stone himself can never fully reconcile these conflicting visions; they collide and conflict but never coalesce into a fully coherent point-of-view. There’s a sense that something has been achieved by the film’s end, but it’s never entirely clear what that is. Jim Garrison has his day in court, but all these years later, the Warren Commission’s single bullet theory remains the official story of the JFK assassination.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the firestorm of controversy surrounding JFK, the film proved to have strong box-office legs after a soft opening, ultimately grossing over $200 million worldwide. The film was also a major player at that year’s Oscars, earning 8 Oscar nominations and winning 2 for Cinematography and Editing. Unfortunately, it was also the beginning of the end for Stone’s career as an A-list director. The rest of the 90s would see him attempt to hit the same highs as JFK, either through similar style and subject matter of earlier work—as in the Vietnam drama Heaven & Earth or 1995’s underrated Nixon—or through outright provocations—such as 1994’s exhausting Natural Born Killers. His 2000s were plagued by a string of high-profile films that failed to capture the attention of critics or audiences. By 2021, the release of his documentary JFK Revisited felt less like the victory lap of an acclaimed auteur than a desperate bid to relive the glory days.

Still, Stone’s influence on contemporary filmmaking is readily apparent. One can see resonances with Jim Garrison’s quixotic quest for justice in a film like David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), which similarly follows a wholesome protagonist through a disillusioning years-long obsession with an unsolved crime. More recently, several critics cited the influence of JFK’s frenzied, elliptical structure on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, another star-filled epic of American innocence lost. Culturally, JFK’s influence is even more palpable. Conspiratorial thought has become the norm, with every harebrained theory imaginable little more than a click away for anyone who desires them. In an era where the very definition of truth is up for debate, the public pearl-clutching and outrage surrounding JFK seem almost quaint. Removed from controversy, all that remains is the film itself, and on that front, Stone ultimately prevails. Even today, JFK retains the power to grip audiences and pull them through the looking glass, dazzling with its narrative ambition and formal complexity long after the shock of infamy has worn off.

The following notes on Ghost World were written by Sarah Mae Fleming, PhD Student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of Ghost World will be screened at the Cinematheque on Saturday, November 11, presented in person by Director and Co-Screenwriter Terry Zwigoff. A discussion with Mr. Zwigoff will follow the screening. The screening is at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By Sarah Mae Fleming.

“It was held together by hair and spit,” remembers Daniel Clowes, on co-writing the screenplay for 2001’s Ghost World with director Terry Zwigoff. Clowes, a cartoonist and illustrator, wrote the anthology comic book series Eightball, which spawned the comics (and later graphic novel) Ghost World. When Clowes and Zwigoff were able to work together on a film adaptation, Clowes began by transcribing the comic into the screenwriting software Final Draft before realizing that adaptations don’t quite work that way. Zwigoff, too, was a Hollywood outsider. Born in rural Wisconsin before transplanting to Chicago at a young age, he fell into filmmaking to tell a story no one else wanted to tell. Both Clowes and Zwigoff, untethered by Hollywood conventions, have an interest in shining a light on society’s underbelly–characters that don’t fit in and don’t want to--until they do. Ghost World, a hybrid of a teen girl coming-of-age story and a quirky indie comic adaptation, fits neatly in neither category. Instead, Clowes and Zwigoff give genuine voice to adolescent malaise–snarky and suffocating under American monoculture.

Zwigoff became a film director somewhat unintentionally. His filmmaking origin spawned from blues musician Howard Armstrong, who Zwigoff profiled for a magazine. After spending two days with him and reaching out to uninterested filmmakers about producing a documentary, Zwigoff did it himself resulting in 1985’s Louie Bluie. Ten years later, Zwigoff’s next documentary, Crumb (1995), was released, and this time the subject famous underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and his dysfunctional family. Crumb was met with critical raves but was snubbed at the Academy Awards, resulting in a media frenzy that pressured the Academy to alter the documentary nomination process that had previously been controlled by distributors. Zwigoff was then approached by Jean Doumanian, Woody Allen’s former producing partner, to make his third film: a documentary about Allen’s jazz band on tour in Europe. Zwigoff passed on that opportunity, instead opting to direct his first fiction film–Ghost World.

Ghost World stars Thora Birch as Enid Coleslaw and Scarlett Johansson as Rebecca Doppelmeyer, with Steve Buscemi taking on the role of Seymour–a character created solely for the film whose misanthropic personality and collection of rare 78s suggest a stand-in for Zwigoff himself. Others have also pointed to Enid Coleslaw (whose name is an anagram for Daniel Clowes) as a stand-in for the author. However, rather than suggesting that these characters act as mere ambassadors for Zwigoff’s and Clowes’ thoughts about America, consumerism, and faux-retro diners, the characters of Ghost World are lived-in and true to the world they inhabit. Clowes and Zwigoff faced resistance from producers who argued that teenage girls would never speak the way Enid and Rebecca do. The experience of talking to a teenage girl (or being one) begs to differ.

“Look at all these creeps,” Enid loudly sneers in an adult video store. “Some people are okay, but mostly I just feel like poisoning everybody,” Rebecca states flatly at her barista gig. Enid doesn’t allow the conformity of her strip-mall saturated hometown to smother her quietly, while Rebecca’s monotone suggests that she allows her ennui to wash over her. This crucial difference in outlook is what drives the two best friends apart. Rebecca starts to want a small slice of the American Dream–namely an apartment to call her own. Enid can’t hold down a job or sell her belongings (e.g., a hat from her “little old lady phase”) to make enough money for one. And she’d rather spend her time with social outcast Seymour, anyway. While Rebecca finds joy in the wall-mounted ironing board in her new place, Enid dreams of disappearing.

Employing a slightly over-saturated palette, Ghost World’s cinematographer Affonso Beato studied Clowes’ comic books to create the visuals of a consumerist world. The heightened colors of Enid’s hair, or Rebecca’s clothes, invoke the constant hovering of strip-mall signage that floats around the characters. The film emphasizes emptiness and aimlessness, and often, background players wearing legible clothing wander zombie-like, seemingly serving little purpose in this world other than as walking billboards or as consumers of “delicious yellow chemical sludge” and other junk foods. In other sequences, the lack of extras is palpable, and instead of humanity, Ghost World’s backdrop is filled with storefronts. Alienated by the world and then by each other, Enid and Rebecca drift and search for something to hold on to. For Enid, Seymour becomes the object of her fascination. The dynamic between Seymour and Enid may provoke apprehension from some viewers, but as journalist Hayley Campbell puts it, “to call Seymour and Enid’s friendship ‘problematic’ is to be reductive and unimaginative about who or what teenage girls might find interesting.”

Zwigoff is drawn to characters–real and imagined–who intentionally exist on the margins. Clowes and Zwigoff found creative success by operating against the grain of convention. While this approach may have challenged the sensibilities of Hollywood studios and executives, it perfectly suits the angst and listlessness experienced not just by moody teenage girls, but by anyone who has felt the weight of modern isolation–a loneliness that grows heavier with every purchase with which we surround ourselves. Ghost World remains an achievement of resilient filmmaking, as well as a monument to the search for meaning–through friendships, records, traditional jazz or maybe ragtime, or through waiting for the bus. 

These notes on Taxi Driver were written by Nick Sansone, PhD Student, and Lance St. Laurent, the Cinematheque’s Project Assistant and PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A restored 4K DCP of Taxi Driver will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue, at 7 p.m. on Saturday, November 4. Admission is free!

By Nick Sansone & Lance St. Laurent

There is a moment early in Martin Scorsese’s newest film Killers of the Flower Moon where Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is reading a children’s picture book telling the history of the Osage Nation and comes across an image of predators on the prowl with a caption that reads “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” For the most of his creative life, Martin Scorsese has dedicated himself to spotlighting the wolves that move among us, men who perceive themselves as prosperous providers or righteous protectors, but in reality, prey on the weak and vulnerable in our midst. In a similar vein, writer (and director) Paul Schrader has made such a prolific career out of dramatizing the lives of alienated, emotionally damaged men that they have become an archetype unto themselves, “God’s lonely man”.

Surely the most iconic troubled man of either Scorsese or Schrader’s career is Travis Bickle, the antihero protagonist of their 1976 film Taxi Driver, indelibly performed by Robert De Niro in one of his most famous roles. In some ways, Bickle has become bigger than the film itself within contemporary American popular culture, inspiring countless imitators—2019’s Joker springs to mind—and becoming a cultural shorthand for an archetypical disaffected and violent white male. The specter of Travis Bickle haunts contemporary life, evoked explicitly or implicitly by urban vigilantes like Bernard Goetz, by the seemingly endless cycle of school shooters, and even by the misogynistic online “incel” community. Most infamously, Bickle and Taxi Driver were cited as the primary inspiration for attempted Ronald Reagan assassin John Hinkley Jr., who was harboring delusions that such a violent act could attract the attention of Jodie Foster, the actress who portrays the 12-year-old sex worker Iris, who Travis violently “rescues” at the end of the film.

Travis Bickle may feel like a prescient peek into a future of disaffected American masculinity, but his primary inspiration actually came from a contemporary source. In 1972, Arthur Bremer attempted to assassinate right-wing Alabama Governor George Wallace, later publishing the diaries he kept in the months leading up to the shooting. In an interview with Film Comment, screenwriter Paul Schrader described hearing about Bremer’s assassination attempt on Wallace while in the hospital recovering from an ulcer. Schrader then used this event as a springboard, fusing it with his own disaffection as a miserable insomniac wandering the streets of New York and bringing in a mélange of cultural reference points—Robert Bresson, Sartre, and Harry Chapin’s “Taxi”, among others—to create a vivid portrait of a man teetering on the edge.

According to Schrader, To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan was initially in talks to direct the film with Jeff Bridges as Travis Bickle. After Schrader’s script was optioned by producers Michael and Julia Phillips, several fortuitous developments helped get the project the backing of a studio, despite its pitch-black subject matter. First, the Phillips-produced film The Sting won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1974 awards, granting the producing pair enough cachet to back more challenging projects. The next year, up-and-coming actor Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor portraying the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II and Ellen Burstyn won Best Actress for her performance in the Martin Scorsese film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Schrader himself was also becoming a hot commodity, having recently sold his screenplay The Yakuza to Warner Brothers for $300,000. After director Brian De Palma introduced Martin Scorsese to Paul Schrader, Scorsese became interested in directing his script for Taxi Driver, bringing along his Mean Streets collaborator De Niro, whom Scorsese had first met in 1959, as Bickle. The stars had aligned to make the project feasible, and in Schrader’s telling, “No studio wanted to make the film, but we were simply offering them too good a deal.” Columbia Pictures came on board and soon they had a budget of $1.9 million (roughly $10 million in 2023 dollars) for filming.

After a long summer shoot on location in New York City during a sanitation strike—imagine the smell if you dare—Taxi Driver was released in theaters in February 1976, and three months later screened at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Palme D’Or. The next year, it would go on to earn four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and a posthumous nomination for Bernard Herrmann’s haunting, saxophone-heavy score. However, prior to these plaudits, the film was booed by audiences at Cannes and condemned during a press conference by the president of that year’s jury, legendary playwright Tennessee Williams. Williams, no stranger to the darker side of humanity in his own work, called watching the film’s violent climax “a brutalizing experience for the spectator” and stated that “films should not take a voluptuous pleasure in spilling blood and in lingering on terrible cruelties as though one were at a Roman circus.” Outside of Cannes, some contemporary critics also took issue with the film’s ending, with the Monthly Film Bulletin’s Richard Combs characterizing it as “the macho movie cliché of the heroine who returns to the hero once his capacity for purgative violence has been revealed.”          

Despite what the histrionic outrage from some critics may claim, Scorsese and Schrader themselves have repeatedly refuted the notion that the ending of the film makes Travis Bickle a hero, with Schrader going as far as to say that “Travis cannot be tolerated. The film tries to make a hard distinction for many people to perceive: the difference between understanding someone and tolerating him. He is to be understood, but not tolerated.” Decades later, Roger Ebert offered his own reasoning for why Travis Bickle remains a compelling, even empathetic figure despite his alienating nature and capacity for brutal violence. “We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it.” Almost 50 years after its release, Taxi Driver remains as relevant today as it was in 1976, if not more so. Thankfully, we still have both Scorsese and Schrader, who just this year continued their lifelong obsessions with men of violence, first with Schrader’s A Master Gardener, then with Scorsese’s aforementioned Killers of the Flower Moon. However, the impact and influence of Taxi Driver goes far beyond the careers of its two major creators, as the decades since have seen an explosion of media that asks us to understand, even sympathize, with those that commit violence against their fellow man. Long before there was Patrick Bateman or Walter White, there was Travis Bickle. And as long as society continues to breed isolation and loneliness, there will always be Travis Bickle, haunting the darkest corners of the American consciousness and giving voice to the worst impulses of God’s lonely men.

The following notes on The Parallax View were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. The Parallax View will screen at the Chazen Museum of Art on Sunday, October 22 at 2 p.m., the first in a selection of movies that were each created "In the Shadow of the JFK Assassination." The Chazen is located at 750 University Avenue. Admission is free!

By Josh Martin

As presidential candidate Charles Carroll proclaims that he is “too independent for [his] own good,” a gunshot rings out to interrupt his words, sending a bright burst of blood onto an interior window of the Seattle Space Needle. A film that begins with a vague air of suspicion erupts into shocking violence, killing the senator who remains a symbolic cipher to the spectator. A silent chase ensues across the Needle, concluding as the mysterious assassin plunges into the void below to his death. From here, we move to a room that exists in a functionally abstract space, where a committee of faceless, nameless bureaucrats directly inform the viewer of their findings regarding the Carroll assassination. As the camera pushes closer in, the committee chair says the shooter acted alone out of a “misguided sense of patriotism”; the man insists that there is “no evidence whatsoever” of a broader conspiracy. There will be no further questions at this time.

Welcome to 1974’s The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula’s second chapter in his thematically linked “Paranoia Trilogy”. Along with 1971’s Klute and the Watergate thriller All the President’s Men (1976), The Parallax View probes the inescapable and existential distrust of a decade marked by increasing disillusionment of the American people and a creeping cynicism about those in the upper echelons of power. Adapted by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr., and an uncredited Robert Towne from the book by Loren Singer, Pakula’s film is the quintessential “paranoid thriller,” as deemed by Time critic Richard Schickel (in an otherwise hilariously misguided review discussed later in this essay). Processing the devastation caused by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, The Parallax View shapes the conspiratorial thinking of the American political climate into a tense, provocative, and distinctly cinematic nightmare. The sense that something is not quite right – that nefarious systemic forces greater than any one individual are at work – pervades every moment of Pakula’s picture.

Three years after the opening assassination, the viewer reunites with our surrogate for this journey into the heart of darkness: Joseph Frady, played by New Hollywood legend Warren Beatty. An industry iconoclast and a famed playboy, Beatty’s performance as Frady channels both his undeniable screen charisma and his prickly public image. Frady, a journalist for a local rag in the Pacific Northwest, is positioned as a thorn in the side of everyone he encounters – sarcastic, disheveled, and profoundly anti-authoritarian. Frady’s milieu is seedy and low rent, far removed from the high stakes and thrills of American politics. Compared to the space of click-clacking typewriters and frantic chatter in All the President’s Men, the newsroom here is still and empty, an eerie space occupied only by Frady and his aging editor.

The narrative kicks into motion with the sudden reappearance of Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), a former friend/journalistic rival of Frady’s. Desperate for Joe’s help, she insists that a number of individuals who were present for Carroll’s assassination have since died under mysterious circumstances. Frady is dismissive, evocatively chalking it up to the paranoid mindset of the moment: “Every time you turned around, some nut was knocking off one of the best men in the country.” Despite Lee’s pleas, Beatty’s smarmy womanizer sees nothing of concern.

Smash cut to Lee’s body, dead in the morgue. If Frady didn’t sense something off before, he does now. Existing in a generic space somewhere between the noir procedural of Klute and the newsroom drama of All the President’s Men, The Parallax View follows Frady’s search for the truth – a search that is as ominous as it is futile. Shot by legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis, deemed the “Prince of Darkness” for his brilliant chiaroscuro compositions in films like The Godfather (1972), the film’s narrative tension plays out in predominantly visual (and sonic) terms. Static, empty spaces and extreme long shots work in coordination with unnerving silence, preempting the explosions of sudden violence that the film occasionally indulges. Faces are obscured by Willis’ harsh lighting: when Frady meets an agent of the Parallax Corporation, the mysterious entity that forms the film’s central enigma, he is almost completely invisible, shrouded in shadows. (Pakula would repeat this stylistic pattern in the first meet-up with “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men)

The centerpiece of the film is one of the most extraordinary sequences in the entire thriller genre. Frady visits the Parallax Corporation’s headquarters, and in a space not entirely dissimilar to a movie theater, he sits down to watch a six-minute montage of still images. The montage begins with simple associations: LOVE followed by images of the ideal heterosexual couple; MOTHER followed by photos of wizened, caring women. As the montage accelerates, the sequence becomes a jumble lacking clear definitions and categorizations, thrillingly modern in its execution of meaning’s collapse. Pakula and editor John W. Wheeler fuse images of violent cops, fascist violence, and major political figures like Kennedy and Nixon, all united by the reoccurrence of a comic book image of Thor. The suggestion of the sequence is that the montage can be used as a brainwashing device – a way of convincing vulnerable individuals that they are participants in the re-ordering of society through violent force. The concept that a film or photographic image is uniquely capable of transmitting this dangerous force forms the sequence’s most tantalizing implication.

Of the three films in Pakula’s trilogy, David Thomson notes that it is the only one “that missed commercial success, or an Academy Award nomination.” Thomson contends that this is a matter of the film’s lapses in coherence (and its overwhelming bleakness), but the lack of enthusiasm from reviews like Schickel’s may have also contributed. The Time critic called the film “ugly and dramatically unsatisfying,” scoffing at the far-fetched conspiracies that underpinned its narrative. While “ugly” is a word that few would associate with a Willis/Pakula collaboration, one could argue that the film is purposefully unsatisfying – as frustrating and unfulfilling as the Warren Report on the JFK assassination that Thomson evokes at length.

Indeed, The Parallax View’s finale is thoroughly despairing – no answers, no resolution, a continuation of a sinister cycle. After the dramatic events of the conclusion – which should remain unspoiled for the viewer – we merely return to the same abstract space that opened the film. Yet this time we begin in a close-up on the desk of authority, moving outward as the boilerplate speech is read by these anonymous figures, a statement the spectator knows is a lie. By the end of the shot, the figures are specks on the screen, barely legible to the viewer. We are even further from understanding the motives of the corporation or any hope of an exposure of the truth. But it does not matter: there will be no questions at this time.