This October, fans of the horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can attend a special fiftieth anniversary screening on the lawn of Hooper’s, the Kingsland restaurant that’s situated inside the actual farmhouse that was used in the movie. Take it from me: It can be both thrilling and unnerving to step into the liminal space between fiction and reality, even without the cannibal aspect. To bear witness to the blurring of actual and imaginary history is an experience that even the most learned philosopher would struggle to describe, and I can only guess what it’s like to do it while noshing on a plate of pulled pork.
The Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff offered a similarly disorienting experience earlier this month when it welcomed director Oliver Stone for a screening of his 1991 opus JFK inside the very room where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended. JFK is uniquely suited to these kinds of head games because it lives within that uncanny overlap already. Stone’s film dramatizes the events surrounding the murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, by faithfully re-creating them on the very locations where they’d taken place. Historical facts are then blown up into an operatic frenzy, a postmodernist distortion that Stone has famously defended as a “countermyth” to the one proposed by the Warren Commission.
JFK offers a dizzying convergence of reality and fantasy that ranks it among the all-time great American movies—and in the opinions of its detractors, as possibly the most dangerous film ever made. To see it where history was made—first as tragedy, then as a movie where a ludicrously wigged Joe Pesci screams about riddles wrapped in enigmas—was a chance to step through the looking glass with the filmmaker who has arguably done more than any other to cause us to question everything we see.
“Are you ready for two hundred and six minutes of unrelenting paranoia?” the Dallas-based critic Matt Zoller Seitz asked by way of introduction, to which the packed house cheered in enthusiastic agreement. The audience that was gathered inside the Texas Theatre ranged dramatically in age, from graying seniors who could probably tell you exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot, to twentysomething movie buffs for whom JFK itself was ancient, inherited history. Still, as I wrote last year, even those folks who actually lived through the era have seen their recollections enhanced and even supplanted by what Alison Landsberg, a cultural history professor at George Mason University, has called our prosthetic memory of Kennedy’s assassination—a montage of sights, sounds, and feelings that have been largely shaped by pop culture.
Chief among that assassination arcana is Stone’s JFK, which—with its hallucinatory blend of fact and speculation, its invocations of Shakespearean tragedy dosed with the spirit of a seventies conspiracy thriller—didn’t just weave those six seconds in Dallas into a persuasive narrative. It also inspired a never-cresting wave of paranoid-themed entertainment, from The X-Files to Call of Duty: Black Ops, which in turn nurtured a generation of skeptics, helping to foster the ambient unease that now colors nearly every aspect of our daily lives.
Many of them had filled the Texas Theatre to give a hero’s welcome to the man and the film that had helped to bring conspiracy theories into the mainstream. And of course, it was also a strange sort of homecoming. We were watching JFK inside the very room where Oswald was arrested, just a half-mile from the intersection where he’d allegedly murdered Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit. When the Texas Theatre at last made its film cameo, there were whoops of proud recognition as multiple heads swiveled to gawk at the row of seats where Oswald had once sat—the same row where Gary Oldman was sitting on-screen, and now occupied by Oliver Stone and various other VIPs. My own head was among them. I couldn’t help it. This was the bizarro moment that many of us had come for, the singularity where reality and simulation, history and prosthetic memory collapsed in on themselves.
Unfortunately, anyone hoping for more insight into that—or any of Stone’s memories at all about filming in Oak Cliff—was left disappointed. Stone, who recently turned 78, seemed even shaggier than usual as he slumped onto the stage for the post-screening Q&A, his specific recollections dim and his answers growing increasingly discursive. (To be fair, he shot JFK more than thirty years ago. It was also nearing midnight by the time the whole thing wrapped.) He did offer some thoughts on Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, which he’d recently toured again, as well as the city’s tentative proposals to remake the site for a modern citizenry that, increasingly, remembers neither JFK nor JFK with much immediacy. “It should be a national monument and it should be preserved,” Stone said. “But there are people in this town who want to bury the past and cover it all up, so they put up a museum that pretends to pay homage to the truth—that we know is not accurate at all.” Here the crowd applauded again.
The idea that Dallas wants to hide its connection to the Kennedy assassination rings slightly false to me, especially at a site that sells commemorative shot glasses. But I can see Stone’s larger point about the museum’s attempt to control the narrative and avoid anything smacking of controversy. Oak Cliff, by contrast, has not made any attempt to pretty up its own past, although time—and gentrification—have largely allowed it to remain compartmentalized.
Before the screening, I walked a half-mile up Madison Avenue to visit 214 W. Neely Street, where you can still see the duplex that Oswald and his wife, Marina, lived in during the months leading up to the assassination. Around the back there is still the scrubby yard, framed by the same rickety white picket fence and wooden staircase, where Oswald posed for the now-infamous photos holding the guns that were later linked to Kennedy and Tippit’s murders. The scene still looks much like it did on the cover of Life magazine, its contours immediately familiar. Yet it also seems eerily unreal, floating inside a wormhole suspended among the many boutiques, mosaic-tiled condos, and taco-and-wine bars that now line the nearby Bishop Arts district.
There is no historical marker at Oswald’s former residence, although at the intersection of Madison and Davis around the corner, you will find a mural of Oswald’s mugshot plastered across the wall outside the Kings Club barber shop. The accused assassin’s face glowers next to a quote (attributed to John F. Kennedy) that reads, “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.” Another mile to the northwest lies the Lee Harvey Oswald Rooming House Museum, where you can rummage through the tiny bedroom that Oswald crashed in during the days preceding the assassination, still preserved in its 1963 vintage.
The Texas Theatre has similarly embraced its own dark history, perhaps owing to the fact that it wouldn’t exist today without it: The theater was slated for demolition in 1990, and it was only through a last-minute intervention by Stone (who was then prepping JFK) and the rock musician Don Henley (who’d filmed part of his “The End of the Innocence” video inside) that the venue was spared. The theater has since leaned into its infamy, hosting other assassination-themed events like the one held on last year’s sixtieth anniversary, where it screened the actual movies that were playing during Oswald’s arrest, followed by a staged reading of the Warren Commission’s interviews with theater employees, and wrapping up with a showing of, yep, JFK.
Perhaps because Oak Cliff was just a bit player in those events—because it was spared the accusations of corruption and simmering violence that so bedeviled Dallas in the national imagination in the years that followed—the neighborhood feels no need to cover up much of anything. It has welcomed, if warily, its circumstantial connection to the past, transforming it into street art, into dark tourism, and into a ghost story that, like Oswald’s old duplex, feels completely untethered to the life all around it. But even as the buildings themselves remain unchanged, whatever truth they have to offer about Lee Harvey Oswald is nevertheless colored by the legend that’s arisen around him—a legend that has largely been shaped by Stone.
JFK is rife with half-truths, exaggerations, and even outright lies. For his part, Stone has never recanted anything about the film; in 2021, he even doubled down on them with a documentary sequel, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which he urged the Texas Theatre audience to seek out. And as Seitz gently pressed him on those criticisms, Stone defended himself by pointing out that he’d seeded many of those doubts into the film itself.
He glancingly acknowledged the film’s most glaring misrepresentation. Its protagonist, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, was not the nobly quixotic, Frank Capra-esque hero that the film and Kevin Costner make him out to be, but rather an opportunistic bully who brought business magnate Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) to trial largely because of his prejudicial belief that Shaw had orchestrated the Kennedy assassination as a “homosexual thrill killing.” It’s an aspersion that Stone’s film plays into by depicting Shaw as an amyl nitrate–huffing deviant, but while talking to Seitz, Stone would only concede that “Garrison had a weak case.” Nevertheless, Stone maintained that the prosecutor’s instincts were sound. “I still feel very strongly that Garrison was correct,” he said. “He was on the right trail.”
Feelings are what JFK is really about—the pervasive sense that, as Stone put it, “the system is all lies and deceit” and that “they just don’t tell the truth to the American public.” In Stone’s estimation, this “they” is bipartisan and all-encompassing. As Seitz pointed out, JFK is part of a thematically connected oeuvre of Stone’s films, from Platoon to Snowden, that grapple with what the director termed on stage the Beast, a multipronged monster that includes the U.S. military, defense contractors like Bell Helicopter and General Dynamics, the Wall Street investors who profit from them, the politicians who keep feeding it new wars, and finally, the media, which Stone asserted remains not just biased, but actively controlled by the CIA.
The inability—or refusal—to kill the Beast is why Stone believes, he said, that “I don’t think we’ve had a good president” since Kennedy, going on to skewer even sacred Texas cows Lyndon B. Johnson (“a no good son of a bitch”) and George W. Bush (“put us in the shithole forever”) to cheers from the audience. “It’s not gonna happen with Kamala Harris, that’s for sure,” he added. The crowd cheered that as well.
In JFK, these feelings reach a fever pitch with the epic monologue delivered by the late Donald Sutherland as Mr. X, an anonymous insider who unspools a showy stem-winder about a secret shadow government orchestrating a coup d’etat on Kennedy in service of the military-industrial machine. Mr. X insists that the specifics of who killed Kennedy, and how they actually managed to pull it off don’t actually matter: “The how and the who is just scenery for the public,” he says. The only real question is why.
Sutherland’s speech earned rapturous applause from the audience—as well it should, seeing as it’s one of the most hypnotically compelling exposition dumps ever committed to film. But watching those sixteen minutes now, you can also feel the enmity and polarization of the last decade taking shape, as this proto-QAnon sows the cryptic seeds that would eventually bloom into increasingly byzantine suspicions about everything from voting to football games.
It was thrilling to watch this movie that had inspired so many of us to grow up questioning everything inside the oddly sacred space that had played a part in it. But it was also unnerving to hear Stone assert so confidently that the CIA still controls the modern media, and that what the government has labeled “misinformation” is actually “so necessary to cleanse all the pollution that has accumulated in this river.” Like watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre while chowing down on a big chunk of meat, it can frankly be a little nauseating to take in JFK right now, especially at a time when trust is at an all time low and none of us can seem to agree on basic facts. We are awash in the conspiracies that it inspired, propagated by folks who don’t care about who or how but only their convictions of why.
That nexus where fiction and reality collapse is now all around us; that “unrelenting paranoia” has gone on much, much longer than just 206 minutes. As I write this article, there are people on social media convinced that the devastating hurricanes in Florida were actually created by the Democrats to influence the presidential election. Even my CIA handlers can’t give me advice on how to begin to counteract that.
