Question, Disbelieve, Defy

[Dave Monroe]

... well, unable to follow my own best advice here
today, no time to spout off personally, but people
keep sending me interesting things.  From Oliver
Stone, "In Filming History: Question, Disbelieve,
Defy," The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14th,
2000 ...

"The style of my films is ambivalent and shifting. I
make people aware that they are watching a movie. I
make them aware that reality itself is in question.
That's why JFK is personally important; it represents
the beginning of a new era in terms of my filmmaking.
The movie is not only about a conspiracy to kill
President Kennedy but also about the way we look at
our recent history. That movie--and Nixon also--calls
attention to itself as a means of looking at history--
shifting styles, such as the use of black and white
and color, and viewing people from offbeat angles. You
might see Nixon saying something in a shot that
doesn't match. His lips are out of sync, and his
facial expression implies something completely
different from what is being heard. Or we might throw
out five staccato images that add up to a
contradictory portrait of the man. In such ways, we
make you aware that you are watching a movie. We don't
pretend that this is reality as in a conventional
historical drama. 
  
"As far as facts go, I used them as best I could, but
the truth is, you can't use them all. You are forced
to omit some. And any honest historian will tell you
that he does that, too.

[...]

"We are all victims of counterfeit history. In my
lifetime I have learned this lesson by head and heart.
Through the cauldron of Vietnam and the message of a
morphing, modern life, with the increasingly vast
control given to media, it has been burned onto the
template of my brain: Never underestimate the power of
corruption to rewrite history. We catch the tip of the
iceberg on a couple of things here and there, like
Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair, and some of us
feel reassured. But we continually underestimate the
power of individuals and systems to get things done
and get them done quietly.

[...]

"The awkwardness of conspiracy theories still prevails
in American politics, as we pride ourselves on being a
country where political change occurs without violence
through peaceful democratic process. People, rather
than the shadowy motives of the State, guide the
future. The deaths of our leaders are tragic acts of
faith, accidents, the work of unbalanced madmen who,
once destroyed, can no longer harm us.  In such a
view, tragedy becomes a random event, an act of God
that could not have been prevented. Only in empires
long since turned to dust do honorable men actually
conspire to kill for the cold motive of power. Those
who would suggest that it happens here, as it does in
European or Asian history, are frowned upon, painted
as eccentric by our society's leaders and its media.
Yet any thorough examination of history reveals a
consistent thread of convenient tragedy linked to the
turning points of the fates of nations. And, in the
smoke of the funeral pyre, not all the faces are
crying.

[...]

"Following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of
1961,   Pesident John Kennedy forewarned of his own
death after  he read Fletcher Knebel's novel Seven
Days in May, about military men taking over the office
from a 'liberal' president. When he was asked by a
friend of his, 'Could it happen here?' Kennedy
replied, 'It's possible.'  But the conditions would
have to be just right. [...] The president's
biographer acknowledged that Kennedy distrusted the
military and handed a copy of Knebel's book to his
secretary of the army, mandating that every army
officer read it. As a student, you have to go back to
the mentality of the 1950's and 1960's to understand
how familiar we were with war, crisis, and fear during
the Cuban missile crisis and just how treacherous
those times were.

"Nations, I think, plunge further into the abyss by
silencing the voices that cry for independent inquiry
at a time of change and crisis. Where is the immediate
dissent when politicians scream for tougher civil and
criminal laws at the first sign of some new terrorist
outrage or criminal horror?  Where is the dissent
against the vengeful drug sentencing of the last 10
years? Or against the many 'mini-wars' we've fought
since Vietnam -- in the name of what? Revenge, anger,
getting ratings, getting votes? It always seems that
the loudest voices win these days -- the bully's way.
Yet the lessons of history repeatedly point out the
virtue of independent thinking -- the need to
Question, Disbelieve, Defy.
  
"Allow then, in our million-dollar-a-minute TV
culture, a little space and time for the contrarian in
you, and allow that paranoia in moderation, like red
wine, is healthy precisely because conspiracy does not
sleep. Our failure of perception is the reason we
rarely see it. Why? 'Treason doth never prosper,' an
English poet once wrote.  'What's the reason? For if
it prosper, none dare call it treason.'"

http://chronicle.com

... Oliver Stone is hardly my favorite director,
that's for sure, but this was a pretty interesting
article ("In our country, if we search, we find that a
coup d'etat planned against President Roosevelt in
1933-1934 has amazingly disappeared from the history
books"), and I've posted maybe a third of it.  

Unfortunately, I don't have an URL for the essay
itself.  Seems to require a subscription of some sort
to search the site (I don't, and I couldn't) and
perhaps to access much of it, but I'll be glad to send
along the entire e-mailed copy I received to anyone
who requests one (preferrably offlist, of course, so
as to avoid further clutter).  Also have a nice
article on Planet of the Apes (novel, movies, new
movie).  

The film of Seven Days in May, by the way (with Kirk
Douglas and Burt Lancaster) is pretty gripping as
well, and there was even a decent made-for-HBO
contemporized version with Forrest Whittaker.  Bonus
points for creepy pre-Planet of the Apes Jerry
Goldsmith score.  And speaking of which, also have a
nice article on PotA (novel, movies, new movie), if
anyone's interested in that ...

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