ABSTRACT
The debate over Oliver Stone's JFK has been framed to date largely within the discourse of historiography, with greatest attention being paid to issues concerning the limits of fact and fiction and the erosion of the presumed boundary between documentary and imaginative reconstruction. 1 Defenders of the film have usually argued from a deeply theoretical position, pointing out the permeable nature of the border between factual discourse and imaginative reconstruction, as well as the protean quality of even the most substantial documentary record of the past. 2 In this essay, I wish to shift the angle of approach to the film in order to consider another set of questions, revolving chiefly around the tension between the film's formal innovations and its explicit aim to articulate a narrative of national cohesion. The film's fragmentary form, I argue, can be revealingly seen as an expression of a national narrative in disorder and disarray, its collage-like narrative structure reflecting the disruption of the evolutionary or historical narrative that gives continuity to national identity. From this perspective, the film's notorious mixing of idioms conveys meanings that depart from issues of fact and fiction: rather, it expresses the fracturing of historical identity, the breaking apart of a once unified national text. The film thus recuperates its radically discontinuous style, I argue, by linking it to the loss of what Benedict Anderson called social “unisonance,” to the absence of a unified national narrative that it nostalgically evokes as the foundation of community and the ground for all other narratives of human connection. 3
