Mr. Stone Goes to Washington: JFK 2.4

Abstract

In this examination of Oliver Stone’s JFK, I explore the rationale and means of how a power coterie of the sovereign interests mete out revenge for ‘transgressions against the state’ upon one of its own, the President of the United States (the body-politic). Incontrovertibly, the corporal body of this populist leader, John F. Kennedy, is publicly executed by internal competing sovereign factions, as Stone contends, as a means of retribution for Kennedy’s (the people’s will) invocation of political policies that challenged America’s ‘military industrial complex’ i.e. hegemonic corporate interests and the intelligence community’s structure and control of foreign policy objectives and practices. Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception is a central text to my argument in considering how JFK can be read as ‘non-war, war film’ in its ‘battle’ to re-visit/destroy propagated ‘government truths’ about the case. I also draw from Michel Foucault’s notions on state subjugation, punishment and control to explain state complicity in the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 and how the demise of the ‘world’s most powerful leader’ can be read as a return to the pre-Enlightenment ‘public execution scaffold’.