The Truth Is Out There: Rereading the Warren Commission Report and Re-Viewing Zapruder
Conspiracy theories are, in the end, stories. Aren’t they? Whether they’re fiction to you or the most wicked of nonfiction, they are yarns, always comprising the basic narrative nuts and bolts: a litany of connective incidents, at least two acts (the third might await us down the road), vivid and secretive larger-than-life characters, high stakes, some kind of lurking violence or menace, and, implicitly, a courageous protagonist — namely, the person or persons formulating and valiantly disseminating the said theory, with no great concern for their own well-being or safety. These outlandish-yet-imperative formulations might even possess a pulpy otherworldliness (the John Birch Society’s black helicopters) or satiric high invention (Mossad’s assassin dolphins).
Often, what culture critic John Leonard used to call “stampede reading,” conspiracy theories, well-written or not, can be hard to resist — resist consuming them, that is, not necessarily believing them. And indeed, I’d suggest that the potential veracity of a particular theory can be very much beside the point. In the reading, they can have a peculiar and enthralling subjective resonance, standing (if you squint at them right) as the extreme expression of civilian skepticism, the last crazed, beautiful voice of screaming defiance and doubt in the wilderness, outside the walls of our top-down institutions and our profit-fueled mediasphere.
At least, that’s the way it used to be, before the goblins took over. Today’s conspiracy theories are no fun to read; the paradigm has devolved from being a construction built out of paranoid suspicion plus erudition (of some kind) to becoming an uncorked expression of mass delusion, as if tens of millions of adult Americans were suddenly beset by the same schizoaffective disorder. The nonsensical and often bigoted fantasias of the MAGA cult — Pizzagate! adrenochrome! — hardly jolt the imagination, and at the same time they have come, as Marilynne Robinson recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, to be “readily seen as discrediting the entire phenomenon of unrest.” It’s as if they’re intent on ruining everything, even the teeth-gritting excitement of perceiving the secret gears behind the powerful, the moneyed, and the unexplained.
The question in this book is whether the JFK assassination happened at all.
I peg the turning point of conspiracy theory’s loss of legitimacy, if we can call it that, to the mid-’90s and the Clinton Body Count Theory, which was such a flimsy and bilious confabulation it would make any fact-crunching JFK-assassination theorist blanch with disgrace. It’s no coincidence that what passes for conspiracy theory in the years since doesn’t make its mark in books, which take effort, but on the cyber toilet paper of posting boards, IM platforms, and blogs. If it can’t support a book with an index, why bother? As it happens, this September will be the 60th anniversary of the publication of the Warren Commission Report — talk about a book that’s no fun to read, being essentially a stiff-collared anti-conspiracy prevarication that’s actually not meant to be read at all, even in the abridged “compendium” paperback version that I have (put out by the Popular Library that same year, 75¢!). It’s meant to merely exist, like a plaque at a Civil War battle site, intended primarily as an official sociopolitical inoculation against dread and suspicion, which, we well know, failed in every way to curb the infection and in fact made the disease worse.
For what it’s worth, this year also marks the 45th anniversary of the 1979 United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) report, which you can find and read at the National Archives and which stated, unequivocally, that the Warren Report was a dithering and “inadequate” cover-up and that JFK’s assassination was “probably” the result of a conspiracy. Not that this answers any real questions, of course.
A much more tantalizing option, by the most outlandish outer-edge conspiracy theory skylarker you’ve never heard of, is James Fetzer’s The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003). Here we have conspiracism in its native element, and in its finest obsessive voice. Part of its fascination lies in the fact that, by 2003, when the secretive publisher for some reason sent me a review copy, “investigative culture” had already moved beyond wondering who was responsible for the JFK assassination — true conspiracists have come to be largely agnostic about that. Not only may we never find out, but it might be unknowable. What the question comes to in this book is whether the assassination happened at all — or, at least, whether it happened the way we thought, and where and when we thought. Phenomenologically speaking, the ball is still in the air.
We don’t, in fact, need to worry about legitimizing conspiracy theories by now anyway — reality has done that for us.
Redundantly subtitled “Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK,” as if “deceit” and “deception” were not synonyms, Fetzer’s volume immediately takes off into a speculative/analytic ozone from which your brain might never return. In 483 densely packed, amply illustrated pages, in analytical essays written by Fetzer (who sports a Ph.D. and is a now retired professor from the University of Minnesota) and a band of like-minded scholar-brothers (all dudes), often citing each other, the case is made that the Zapruder film itself, which is of course the supposedly inviolable yardstick by which all JFK theories are measured (including the Warren Report and every disputation of it since), is not an authentic document. In literally dozens of different ways, Fetzer & Co. strive to demonstrate how the film has been edited and optically printed to such a radical extent that it can only be considered a work of complete fiction. You confront this premise with pure incredulity — how could something so simple as an 8 mm chunk of film, one so rough and amateurish, one that is so plainly a single, uninterrupted shot, how could this be manipulated? Fetzer has theories about “who,” but they remain largely unexplored; his emphasis is on “proving” the film’s illegitimacy.
Which he does, kind of. The sleuthing approach is fourth-gear techie-mania, like a never-ending episode of CSI devoted to a single piece of confounding evidence, ending up in a kind of quantum field where nothing is certain. Explored topics include missing or swapped frames, background image distortion or lack thereof, inconsistencies in focus and sight lines, the rate at which the film was shot (16 frames per second, it’s presumed) versus the rate at which it was printed (24 fps), the subtle aspect-ratio variations in various “versions” of the film as it has been selectively released to the public, signs of double exposure in the film’s intersprocket region, physical impossibilities (like head turns) occurring between frames, ad infinitum, as well as, most maddeningly, reams of speculation based on “off” perspectives and contradictions with photographs taken by others on the scene, suggesting that people, signs, and landscape elements were added or subtracted from Zapruder’s original, wherever or whatever that may be. At least we can all agree that there shouldn’t be two or more “versions” of the film, should there? Because there are.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Sounds crazy — who could’ve done all that to a rough piece of slender home movie in 1963? But Fetzer has an answer, exploring the optical printing technology of the time, which absolutely was capable of fabricating and altering and reprinting ostensibly “homemade images,” most of which are so blurry in the film’s printed form (the work of Life magazine and the intelligence agencies) that it may be impossible to say what belongs in the image and what doesn’t. The film grain itself is a scrim of evidentiary camouflage, a cover of fog. Of course, the fact that the camera negative of the film has never been, and might never be, available for scrutiny only strengthens Fetzer’s position.
Or at least, he thinks so. Typical of conspiracy discourse, the book is jam-packed with outrageous supposition and assertive conjecture — every hint at discrepancy or ambiguity is declared to be rockhard proof of skullduggery, practically from the first page. The generalized voice is that of the indignant, persecuted apostate, who takes every opportunity to proclaim his own brilliance — making the text play as a weft of accidental unreliable narrators, megalomaniac testimonials to self-regard and anti-authoritarian ire right out of Nabokov or Martin Amis. But is all of it mistaken? It’s a classic conspiracist conundrum: The more clinical information that is introduced, the more difficult concrete conclusions become, and you become less sure, not more, about whether or not the book has a real case to make — that is, whether it is investigating a real and not imagined phenomenon and in doing so revealing a view of official American power many times more bizarre and terrifying than the darkest doubts we may have harbored so far, Oliver Stone or no Oliver Stone. What’s more gripping than that? You’ll certainly have your life-seasoned sense of what is or isn’t “likely” seriously tested. You could choose to simply see the book as a walk through the brainpan of a titanically obsessive paranoid, despite the fact that it has the suction of an opiate as you begin to suspect that however off-kilter Fetzer may be, he might just be a little bit right. What if he is? How right is enough to make you stare at the ceiling at night?
What’s not to be suspicious about? What part of “conspiracy” did you not understand?
In an age of creative nonfiction, autofiction, memoirs that contradict older memoirs (see Jill Ciment), and hallucination-clogged AI insta-books it might be tempting to simply drop Fetzer’s irate beast of a book into the shrugging no-man’s-land between fiction and truth and leave it at that. One could even, rather indulgently, choose to see it — and much of conspiracy theory — as a sign of hope, of a dogged effort to make even crazy-sounding cause-and-effect sense out of a contemporary world that has seemed to be in unreasonable, insensible freefall ever since, let’s face it, November 22, 1963.
My choice of a liminal culture landing zone for this breed of hoax-hunting would be, rather, among texts, objects, songs, and signs that stand in petulant opposition to any version of The Official Story — Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police,” Hunter S. Thompson’s Freak Power fist logo, and many thousands of other acts of doubt and defiance, many less known or entirely unknown, comprising the secret modernity of naysayers and head-shakers that has long boiled beneath the dictations of power. There’s a brilliant shot in George Lucas’s first, and best, film, THX 1138 (1971): Amidst a computerized, dehumanized underground dystopia in which, it seems, every citizen’s wonk-job is to sustain the technological network that oppresses them, we get a single glimpse, inside the computer banks, of a desert lizard hanging out in the wiring. No matter how cleverly or expansively control is maintained, there will always be the rogue thread, the unwanted random invader, to stubbornly inject autonomy and therefore entropy into the system.
That’s our conspiracist, the lizard in the machine, even if she’s slightly mad or goes unheard. We don’t, in fact, need to worry about legitimizing conspiracy theories by now anyway — reality has done that for us. Much of the persistently dismissive discussion about conspiracy theories still proceeds as though, say, Lyndon Johnson didn’t lie about the Gulf of Tonkin to juice America’s commitment in Vietnam; as if Operation Ajax’s overthrow of Iran’s elected government in 1953 hadn’t happened or hadn’t been reported in The New York Times; as if Watergate were just a hotel; as if COINTELPRO hadn’t been exposed; as if Henry Kissinger didn’t conspire toward the illegal decimations of Indochina, Bangladesh, Chile, Indonesia, and Iraq; as if the Reagan Doctrine hadn’t semi-publicly turned Central America into a slaughterhouse; as if Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney hadn’t written up plans to wage war on Iraq in 1992; and so on. What’s not to be suspicious about? What part of “conspiracy” did you not understand?
It’s a frame of mind, ultimately, and one that seems particularly relevant today, when the mainstream media opposition to Trump’s mobster program takes the form of bemoaning the jeopardization of our old-school “democratic ideals,” which should make any literate reader bark with bitter laughter. But “should” is a high bar; Americans, making up what Gore Vidal called the United States of Amnesia, tend to forget virtually everything, even when entire national myths are revealed in our daily newspapers as con jobs. Who was that JFK guy, anyway? Maybe that’s the difference in the end: Conspiracists are the ones that don’t forget. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
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