[On July
18th, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a car accident
that left his female companion Mary
Jo Kopechne dead. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that Chappaquiddick
incident and four other Kennedy family
histories, leading up to this weekend post on film representations of the
family!]
On three
Kennedy-inspired movies that offer three distinct visions of history in film.
1)
Thirteen Days (2001):
Thirteen Days is by far the most
typical historical film of these three, a documentary-style drama (based on
Ernest May and Philip Zelikow’s 1997 book The
Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis)
set during the height of the 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet even within that nonfiction origin text, and with
at least some of the story’s figures still alive during filmmaking, no
historical drama is a documentary or a work of nonfiction. John and Robert
Kennedy are (like every figure in the film) played by Hollywood actors (Bruce Greenwood and Steven
Culp respectively), and the film is headlined by a major Hollywood star (Kevin Costner) playing a
relatively minor figure (consultant Kenneth O’Donnell) elevated to a central
role for obvious reasons. Those are the requirements of Hollywood historical
filmmaking—they don’t necessarily render the story any less accurate (nor any
more so of course), but they are factors we have to keep in mind for such films
regardless.
2)
Chappaquiddick (2018):
I haven’t seen Chappaquiddick, the
newest feature film about the Kennedys, and perhaps it’s just as much a
historical docudrama as Thirteen Days.
But in truth, American culture is in a radically different place in 2018 than
it was in 2001, and the very act of making a film about the Kennedy family’s
darkest and most divisive history and story (and I’m not trying to minimize
that tragedy nor Ted Kennedy’s culpability in it, as I wrote in Wednesday’s
post) is a necessarily political one in our current moment. Historical films
can certainly be political (with Oliver
Stone’s JFK a serious case in
point), and that element likewise does not necessarily render them less
accurate (nor again more so, although nobody tell Oliver Stone). But those that
overtly connect to contemporary political debates or perspectives are shaded
differently than those (like Thirteen
Days) that do not, and that too becomes a factor in considering these
films.
3)
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002):
And then there’s Bubba Ho-Tep. No
sentence or two of description can do justice to this comic horror film, in
which an aged Elvis Presley (or someone who delusionally believes he is) and an
aged John F. Kennedy-who-happens-to-have-been-turned-into-an-African-American-man
(or someone who delusionally believes he is) battle an invasion of the undead
in their nursing home. Well, maybe that sentence does do some justice to the
film’s unique craziness, one sold pitch-perfectly by stars Bruce Campbell and
Ossie Davis. That
craziness might not sound particularly historical, or at best like the sorts of
silly alternative history featured in films like Abraham Lincoln,
Vampire Hunter. But many of the details of Davis’s Kennedy—such as
Lyndon Johnson’s abandonment of him in a hospital in order to take the
presidency for himself—do at least comment provocatively on historical figures
and issues. As this trio of films demonstrates, there’s no one way to creatively
engage with the past, and the more genres and styles we add into the mix, the
broader and richer the engagement gets.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Kennedy texts or connections you’d highlight?
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