[On April 26th,
1865, John
Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham
Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations
and their contexts!]
On a scene that
humanizes the JFK assassination, and the shortcomings of the film around it.
At the heart of
Wolfgang Petersen’s film In the Line of Fire (1993) is one of
those unforgettable,
quiet, potent Clint Eastwood monologues. Eastwood’s character Frank
Horrigan is an aging Secret Service agent who was part of John F. Kennedy’s
Dallas detail; the film’s villain, psychopath Mitch Leary (John Malkovich), is
threatening to kill the current president, and while so doing taunts Horrigan
with his failures during the Kennedy assassination and wonders if Horrigan has
or ever had the guts to take a bullet for the president (an overt, and of
course the most unique and difficult, part of the job of every Secret Service
agent). In that linked monologue, Horrigan opens up to his fellow agent and
love interest Lilly Raines (Rene Russo) about his failures on that November day
in Dallas and how they have shaped his perspective and identity ever since.
It’s an amazing
couple minutes of film, and a nice reminder that Clint Eastwood is more than
just an unhinged RNC
speaker or over-the-top “Get off my lawn”
caricature of a Grumpy Old White Man. But the In the Line of Fire monologue also does important, complex cultural
work when it comes to the JFK assassination and the kinds of questions I raised
(vis a vis Susan Cheever’s controversial article) in
this post. The assassination has long exemplified the “Where were you when
you heard the news?” narrative of history, a reflection on just how communally
traumatic its horrific events were. And if on the one hand the Secret Service’s
failures seem to have done their part to contribute to that trauma, on the
other it’s important to note that the trauma might be particularly devastating
when the answer to that “Where were you” question is, “I was a few feet away
from Kennedy’s car but did nothing to stop his killing.” At the very least,
Eastwood’s monologue does what great art so often does: forces us to think
about the humanity within history, complicating and enriching our perspective
on that shared, national history in the process.
Unfortunately,
the rest of Petersen’s film not only fails to live up to that moment of
complexity and humanity, but actively undermines the questions it raises. For
one thing, Malcovich’s character and the way he drives the film’s plot is just
another example of a psychotic, cat-and-mouse blockbuster bad guy, no different
from contemporary villains such as Dennis Hopper in Speed (1994) or Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away (1994) or the like. And
for another, more important thing, in order to complement that blockbuster
villain, the film turns Eastwood’s agent into precisely the kind of superhero
stereotype that the history of the Secret Service reveals to be nonsense;
[SPOILER ALERT] in the film’s climax, for example, Horrigan not only proves to
Leary, Raines, himself, and everyone else that he is willing and able to take a
bullet for the president, but after being gravely wounded continues to chase
and eventually overpowers and kills the would-be assassin. This action-movie
silliness doesn’t ruin the seriousness of Eastwood’s earlier monologue, necessarily;
but it reflects a film that as a whole fails utterly at maintaining that kind
of humanity.
Next assassination
studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?
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