The shot heard 40 years later

I have probably seen Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder’s home movie that recorded President John F. Kennedy’s assassination hundreds of times. Its 26 wrenching seconds captured the shockingly violent finish to a young president’s life 40 years ago. For a journalist trying to resolve the mysteries of Kennedy’s death, the Zapruder film is the best visual evidence to determine if there was more than one assassin shooting at JFK and from which direction the bullets were fired. In the last four decades, great strides in digital film enhancement, and the ability to replay the film frame by frame on a DVD, have converted tens of thousands of ordinary people into amateur sleuths.

Never once did I think of that short film as more than a piece of evidence in a murder investigation. Not until I read David M. Lubin’s thought-provoking study, “Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images.”

Lubin, a professor of art at Wake Forest University, challenges us to go beyond the film’s evidentiary value and see it “as a crucial cinematic text of the twentieth century ... that intersects in myriad ways with myriad other cinematic texts before and after.” The film, argues Lubin, unwittingly conforms to the three-act structure of commercial features -- a brief opening act that ends with a dramatic change of events, a longer middle one climaxing in a final act. It also relies on “star power.” If the victims had been unknown, the film would likely be a minor footnote to violence in America.

Initially, I was tempted to summarily dismiss Lubin’s comparison of the Zapruder film to commercial movies including “Rear Window” and “North by Northwest,” thinking that he had settled arbitrarily on the Zapruder film for a series of unrelated essays about film and the power of images. There was little substance, I thought, to the ambitious statement in his preface: “Our perceptions of JFK and his era, not to mention our own, rely entirely upon endlessly replicated and infinitely elastic chains of images from art, literature, and the media that constantly inform us, often in contradictory ways, of who we are, who we ought to be, and where we belong.”

But Lubin convincingly -- through a series of digressions that run the gamut from somewhat interesting to thoroughly inspired -- demonstrates that this core thesis is correct. He accomplishes something rare in modern books, taking our preconceived notions about a well-known event and challenging us to expand our thinking. To its credit, “Shooting Kennedy” is not an obtuse book of academic art history. Although it is filled with minutiae about films, paintings, photographs and the Kennedys, it is highly readable. Lubin writes confidently with his own broad range of historical reference. Even when he misses, as in a rather long comparison of JFK’s presidential limousine in Dallas with the rattletrap used on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” he is never boring. Anyone finishing this book will never again watch the Zapruder film -- or look at the myriad photographs of John and Jacqueline Kennedy -- the same way.

Most of “Shooting Kennedy” is not about the Zapruder film. There is only one chapter dedicated to it, and even there Lubin presents a pithy and wonderful overview of the history of U.S. cinema, the impact of New Wave Italian and French movies from the 1950s and ‘60s and the works of filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock to Michelangelo Antonioni to Andy Warhol.

Lubin also delves cogently into many tangentially related discussions, including how many of the most familiar photos of the Kennedys have become cultural icons because of the way the images prompt us to view the Kennedys as dynamic and gallant achievers. Our subconscious associations with classic images by Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer and even the James Bond film “Dr. No,” Lubin argues, have conditioned us to interpret the Kennedy photos in certain ways.

“The Kennedy images derive their power,” he writes, “from their ability to activate latent memories of other powerful images in the histories of art and popular culture.” Although clan patriarch and dynasty builder Joseph P. Kennedy may not have been a film or art historian, he understood the power of imagery and “selling” his son as a leader (vigorous, decisive and charismatic) whom men would want to emulate and women would desire (handsome, sexy, with a certain playfulness).

Studying a series of well-known photographs of Jack and Jackie from their 1953 engagement to their arrival in Dallas a decade later, Lubin shows that the imagery that created “Camelot” in the public mind was not by chance. “For ... $75,000, I put Jack on the cover of Time,” Lubin reports the elder Kennedy bragging over lunch to then-New York Cardinal Francis Spellman. Lubin’s detours are some of the most intriguing portions of the book. He explores, for instance, Joe Kennedy’s foray into Hollywood as a producer of 76 movies. It was here, Lubin says, that “Joe Kennedy [developed] an insider’s knowledge of movie stardom as a carefully designed industrial commodity.” It was also during his three-year stint in Hollywood, where he temporarily left his wife and children for a torrid affair with actress Gloria Swanson, that he set the example for philandering later copied so assiduously by his children, especially Jack. (Twelve-year-old Jack caught his father and Swanson in bed. “Joe thought the whole episode was hilarious,” Swanson is quoted saying.)

At times, “Shooting Kennedy” is like a roller coaster, changing course rapidly, often without much warning. Familiar images of Jackie were influenced, says Lubin, by ideas of motherhood established in 1950s television shows, the surge in feminism and the attraction of stars like Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. To Lubin, the photo of Jackie swinging 2-year-old Caroline by the arms in Hyannis Port -- “a picture of pure, unadulterated energy” -- evokes classic images from Raphael’s stunning “Galatea” frescoes. Even Jackie’s hair is compared to the “loose locks” of Romantic poets and pianists and the figures painted by Pre-Raphaelite artists. In the same chapter, Lubin contends that Paul Schutzer’s famous picture of JFK at his 1961 inaugural ball is reminiscent of both the statue of the Roman Emperor “Augustus of Prima Porta” and the memorable depiction from “Citizen Kane” in which Charles Foster Kane gestures to a giant portrait of himself. JFK seems great in part because the photo captures an image that we subconsciously associate with excellence and leadership.

In his chapter on Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, Lubin does a better job of capturing the personality of these two men as “classic losers” than many investigators who have spent years studying the assassination. To Lubin, Ruby’s killing of Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin -- “a lethal tussle in the basement of the city hall” -- was a “fight between two would-be paladins” driven by their inner demons. Lubin also takes events we know well, such as Oswald’s arrest in the Texas Theater and his killing of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, and analyzes them cleverly through films such as Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” and Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 black comedy “To Be or Not to Be.” The summer 1963 backyard photos of Oswald posing with the rifle that eventually would be used to kill the president are entertainingly compared to patriotic icons like the Minute Man statute in Concord, Mass., and film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. And few readers will again view the startling photos of Oswald’s murder by Ruby the same way after being told, “Oswald’s face amalgamates Edvard Munch’s screamer and the agonized horse of Picasso’s Guernica, making him yet a third modernist icon of unbearable torment.” And as Lubin so correctly writes in the terminology best appreciated by a celebrity-obsessed nation, “Lee Harvey Oswald went into the Texas Theater a nobody and came out a star.”

Keeping track of Lubin’s intriguing diversions and his stream-of-knowledge style of writing is absolutely worthwhile. This is a book that thoroughly succeeds in a bold attempt to show us how our perception of well-known events is affected by the arts. *