Monday, May 14, 2007
A short note on the impact of Hollywood on American public opinion
Do you wonder how much Hollywood's overwhelmingly left-wing film industry influences American popular opinion? If you are inclined to discount its impact because, well, Americans know the difference between fantasy and reality, perhaps this article in the New York Times will cause you to think differently.
The celebrated prosecutor and writer Vincent Bugliosi (the author of one of the best-selling true crime books of all time, Helter Skelter) has just published what promises to be the heretofore definitive account of the assassination of JFK, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
So why did Bugliosi take twenty years out of his life to write this book? The Times article says that Bugliosi was taken aback by the extent to which Oliver Stone's movie influenced the perception of the history:
Mr. Bugliosi likes to tell a story illustrating why he believes this book is necessary. In 1992, less than a year after the debut of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded film “J.F.K.,” Mr. Bugliosi was addressing a group of trial lawyers when a member of the audience asked him about the assassination.
Mr. Bugliosi asked for a show of hands of how many people did not accept the findings of the Warren Commission, which had investigated the assassination and concluded that Oswald was the killer. Close to 90 percent of the 600 lawyers raised their hands, he recalled. Then he asked how many had seen “J.F.K.” or read an account that argued in favor of a conspiracy; a similar number raised their hands. Finally, he asked how many had read the Warren Commission report. Only a smattering of hands went up.
Of course, the average American is more feet-on-the-ground than "a group of trial lawyers," and certainly some of us were less inclined to believe the conspiracy theories around the assassination of JFK because Oliver Stone promoted them. Nevertheless, Bugliosi's anecdote is instructive. Political movies, whether overtly fictional or allegedly factual, can have a huge impact on popular opinion.
14 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Mon May 14, 10:08:00 AM:
Given a certain topic and a lack of contradicting information, people will tend to believe whatever they are told. Conspiracy types get so much airtime regarding the Kennedy assassination, #1 it's assumed they have a certain credibility, ('couldn't broadcast it if it wasn't true,' right?) and #2 it drowns out contradictory opinions. I literally didn't meet anyone who gave the 'official' report on the assassination any credence until my 20s.
By 
, at
Mon May 14, 10:22:00 AM:
This reminds me a bit of the global warming folks. They love to point to the original IPCC report without having read the darn thing. After taking the trouble to wade through it, I was even less convinced of GW as a problem than I was before.
RPD
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Mon May 14, 10:52:00 AM:
"couldn't broadcast it if it wasn't true, right?"
Many of today's TV and newspaper people think like tabloid writers. The key to tabloid story writing is that something doesn't have to be true to print or broadcast it. Somebody just has to say it's true.
The legendary foreign correspondent Kate Webb died in Australia yesterday. She was 64 years old. Several years ago, during an interview for a publication of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Hong Kong, she noted another change in journalism. She said, "It's like we're all mosquitoes dancing on the surface of a pond, we have to move so fast... it's the damn speed. Reporting has suffered, it's nowhere near as meticulous."
By sammy small, at
Mon May 14, 11:44:00 AM:
Stone's movie is the highbrow equivalent of the tabloid rags. While trailer trash eat up the tabloid stories as true, Gen X'ers eat up the liberal Hollywood crapola as true. All the while, the Hollywood types rake in the big bucks. P.T. Barnum's words ring so true.
After years of additional analysis by a variety of "experts", I have yet to see anything of consequence which runs counter to the single shooter scenario. I grew up in Dallas in the 60's, had classmates who were at Dealy Plaza that day, and had as a classmate the son of J.D. Tippet, the officer Oswald shot and killed that day. The facts were on the table back then. None of this conspiracy theory b.s. started until years later.
The real tragedy is that the assassination ended the "Camelot" era of American politics and began a long cynical outlook from the American public towards its government. The conspiracy theorists kicked off that entire process which lives and thrives to this day. After the Vietnam war, I thought it couldn't get any worse, but I was wrong.
By , at
Mon May 14, 12:28:00 PM:
Hollywood has been getting history wrong since before the Talkies - Birth of a Nation, anyone? This should surprise no one. It is not Hollywood's job to get it right - though as an afficionado of "costume flicks" I can attest that in many period details it often does just that - it is Hollywood's job to make money by entertaining us.
This is not just the case with film. Ever since Michael Shaara's book The Killer Angels raised a fine regimental commander from obscurity to the Pantheon of the very great, the most visited site at Gettysburg has become not the High Water Mark but the far corner of the line where the 20th Maine fought to prevent the Union flank from being turned at Little Round Top. The movie Gettysburg seared Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain into modern memory in a way that honored what he did but also IMHO overemphasized his contribution, making his 300 men from Maine into 300 Spartans.
Myth-making is Hollywood's stock in trade. Hollywood has always been political, just not always politically to the Left (or do you think all those John Ford movies were about the decline of Native American culture under the onslaught of western imperialism?) That would be a fair description of what Dances with Wolves was all about, but then it Costner's film reflected what historians call the "presentism" of modern sensibilities. And Mel Gibson, who stands a good deal farther to the right than just about anyone else in Tinseltown, oh so conveniently had all those black farm hands in the Patriot laboring on as free men, as if slavery had never been a part of South Carolina or the real person on whom the character of benjamin Martin was based had never been a slaveholder. Rubbish.
Where I am inclined to agree with you, TH, is that too many of us are uncritical consumers of theory presented as fact. We either doubt everything, even when the evidence overwhelming supports it, or we take as gospel things that are mere speculation. We certainly do not read 1,000 page reports but rely on others to synthesize and debate the issues to help inform our own opinions and focus on the questions that require new data to answer. Uncritical consumers of data abound. That is what advertizing is all about., even among well educated and intelligent sorts.
By Andy, at
Mon May 14, 01:47:00 PM:
The idea that co-incidence implies causation is a logical fallicy. Nowhere does the author ever establish from his anecdote that those people didn't believe in the Warren Commission Report *because* of the Oliver Stone movie. The Warren Commission Report has had it's doubters since it first came out in the mid '60s. How do you ascribe all those people who didn't believe that Oswald acted alone before Stone's movie came out? As it is, the fact that this guy started working on his "definitive" book 20 years ago (before Stone's movie came out) says that there was a conflict of beliefs back then. Why didn't *he* just rely on the Warren Commission Report and leave it at that?
By , at
Mon May 14, 02:17:00 PM:
I would hardly credit Oliver Stone with this public "misconception". There are countless documentaries made and aired on ostensibly responsible Television channels about the conspiracy that predated the film and weighed in on my opinion a great deal more than Stone's work. The rather widespread suspicion that Oswald was likely not acting alone among respectable investigators and historians researching the assassination and that the wounds didn't match the alleged location of the shooter was what seemed compelling to me about the conspiracy theory and none of those things were revealed for the first time in the film. Stone was merely surfing the wave of preexisting suspicion and fascination with JFK.
By , at
Mon May 14, 03:30:00 PM:
I was not educated in the USA so I may be wrong, but everything I read indicates that the teaching of history has been dumbed down.
In the past, people may have had some background knowledge before seeing a film or watching television. Like me, many may have looked upon the content as a movie or TV program without considering it to be fact.
Nowadays, what knowledge would a person have which would make them question the facts of a film. Couple this with the increasing number of politicians and others in authority who lend a level of credibility to a film or tv program and I can see why someone would think they were factual.
By , at
Mon May 14, 04:50:00 PM:
Chloe --
Like Rosie's idiot conspiracy theories (it was BUSH!! not bin Laden responsible for 9/11) the idea behind the JFK conspiracy mongering was that it just could not be true that a loser like Oswald could change history.
Well, it was true. Oswald fits right in with the assassins of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. His rifle was accurate and fast (I've seen a 89 year old man simulate the same shots with the same type of rifle). The bullets match. The wounds match (Connolly was in front of JFK, on a lower jump seat, and turned back to look at JFK). Oswald had tried to kill some right-wing Texas politico before hand (with the same rifle).
Ruby showed up on the spur of the monent and shot Oswald because the police were incompetent and didn't have much of a protective barrier. What did you expect it was 1963?
People don't want to believe in the threatening reality of randomness, incompetence, etc. They'd rather have the comforting fallacy of the conspiracy theory.
Stone made it worse, but yeah the conspiracy kooks were there from the beginning like 9/11 Truthers or UFO nuts or Bigfoot hunters or Ghost Busters and Psychic Friends.
In other words, stupid people.
By Escort81, at
Mon May 14, 05:07:00 PM:
A good book on debunking the various conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination is Case Closed by Gerald Posner, which was originally published in 1993. Posner makes the interesting point that it is hard for many people to accept the notion that someone as dynamic as JFK could have been killed by someone as banal as Oswald. The NYT link TH provided mentions this book, with some criticism of it.
JFK seems to live on as a left-center to liberal martyr, even among those who were toddlers when the Stone movie came out. Perhaps the exception to this is the less than complimentary picture painted by Seymour Hersh in "The Dark Side of Camelot," which rehashed a lot of already known warts regarding the Kennedy presidency (and Hersh comes from a point of view that is somewhat to the left of left-center). I liked President Kennedy: Profile of Power by Richard Reeves, which provided a straight-up characterization of JFK as a pragmatic cold-warrior who believed in containment, and someone who was not on the vanguard of leadership in the Civil Rights movement, but acted once he was convinced that it was the right thing to do. As far as "Camelot" was concerned, Reeves quotes a source saying that Kennedy would have vomited if he had known that the Broadway musical would be used as a metaphor for his presidency following his death.
Stone's film resonates because it appeals to people who believe that if the dark forces hadn't taken out JFK, the events of the 1960s and beyond would have turned out much differently -- no Vietnam, no rogue CIA, no Nixon -- that the entirety of U.S. and World history since 1963 would have been changed for the better.
As GreenmanTim points out, of course Hollywood conveniently glosses over things as annoying as facts -- it is drama, after all. That's only a bad thing because the vast majority of Americans don't read multiple history books on the same subject and then come up with a point of view that is at least well informed. Why go to that bother if a two hour movie can give you the interpretation that seems accurate, and it's entertaining, and you can eat popcorn?
What concerns me is whether Hollywood will put out a "9/11 Truth" type movie sometime in the next five years. I find that kind of conspiracy mongering incredibly damaging to the body politic. Obviously, it's one thing to say that the federal government didn't act on information which might have prevented 9/11 ("a failure to connect the dots"), but quite another to say that the government actively conspired to direct the events of 9/11. It's evident that the Truthers exist on both the fringes of the left and right. What odds would readers of this blog give to such a movie (a signifcant studio movie or major independent, which would not include "Loose Change" or its ilk) being made?
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Mon May 14, 09:27:00 PM:
"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?…But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
CS Lewis That Hideous Strength 1943.
On a similar note, look what teens are believing in Sweden these days.
http://www.thelocal.se/7248/
By , at
Mon May 14, 11:26:00 PM:
To anonymous who addressed me,
Whatever the virtues or mistakes of JFK conspiracy theories (and they are surely more convincing than those surrounding 9/11), my only point is that it's a mistake to credit Oliver Stone with bringing them to the mainstream. As I mentioned, he was merely taking advantage of existing media interest in the subject. Seems best not to indulge in blaming left-leaning Hollywood for spreading anti-government propaganda when only the weakest case can be made to support the argument. It's a little like crying wolf and dooms considerably stronger examples as likewise overreactions.
By Unknown, at
Tue May 15, 01:50:00 AM:
Pretty obvious case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc here.
The fact that they saw JFK may have nothing to do with their doubting the Warren Commission. Doesn't follow and it's not even a remotely scientific method for determining a legitimate causation.
Could be that Americans in general are just gullible and prone to believing conspiracy theories. I suspect just as many may have answered the same way 5 years before JFK even came out.
I say this as someone who is neither a fan of Oliver Stone's nor a JFK conspiracy theorist. Single shooter. Case closed. But the reasoning above is just as faulty (and as silly) as the "magic bullet" reasoning of conspiracy theorists.
By , at
Tue May 15, 02:43:00 AM:
Whether you believe in a 9/11 conspiracy, you should agree that the congressional investigations were horribly incomplete and political. The McCarthy hearings were certainly known for political motivations over accuracy, even if there were some accurate revelations of closet Communists. So why exactly should we expect the Warren Commission to be so perfect? Did they take into account J. Edgar Hoover's darker side? (not invented by Oliver Stone). I'd personally expect the Warren Commission to be focused on sweeping it all up cleanly and moving the nation onwards.
I'd more trust someone like Bugliosi with digging out the "whole" truth than a Washington insider or another committee, even though the committee's work might be valuable. Just today I read some historical analysis of Lincoln's atrocious treatment of civilians during wartime in contrast to the norms of the time. Would we get this contrarian view from an official bio on Lincoln? (Have I ever heard of it before in anything on Lincoln?). Not that all versions of history have to be contrarian or ground-breaking, but history is seldom spotlessly clean.
