President's Day - Books - Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images - Book Review

Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the agriculture of Images, by David M Lubin. Berkeley and observes Angeles: University of California Pres 342 pages. $25

IN LATE 1960 a young artist named James Rosenquist juxtaposed a head discharge lifted from a campaign bill with shards from glossy magazine ads for a packaged cake mix and a 1949 Chevy. Equating voter with consumer Rosenquist called his painting President single out Thus, John F. Kennedy go intoed the White House already an thing perceived of marketable fantasy, America's novel First Trademark and icon-in-chief.

Art historian David M Lubin's Shooting Kennedy vastly elaborates the Rosenquist technique, allowing JFK--and consort Jacqueline--to hobnob with a promiscuous assortment of comrade images. Lubin locates photographs of the Kennedy and the Kennedy assassination among the movies and cultural artifacts of the 1950 and '60 further placing these images in the adjoining matter of a visual culture reaching back to classical antiquity. Given the centrality of the JFK myth to America's national narrative, the grandeur of this enterprise is evident--and in like manner are the delusions.

At one time stodgy and delirious, unexpectedly brilliant and brilliantly spurious, appropriately world historical and facetiously ahistoric, Shooting Kennedy is a volume that, Lubin suggests, advances its hold conspiracy theory by elaborating "an endles series of previously unnoticed" connections. ("Unnoticed" is an elastic term: The author does not timid from stating the obvious, which leads single to assume, for example, he is unaware that Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup [1966] was instantly and widely understood as a glos upon the Zapruder film.) The lock opener excavation is Lubin's discovery that individual eyewitness described the post-assassination chaos at Dealey Plaza as an "explosion in a shingle factory"--the real phrase employed by an American critic of the 1913 Armory display to characterize Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. If Kennedy is dead, all is permitted. give leave to the free associations begin.

The imaginary image of sniper to leeward Harvey Oswald framed in the sixth-floor window of the Texas institute Book Depository hypothetically "reminds" Lubin of an Edward Hopper isolato. sum of two units pages on, he imagines that, for the American family Oswald has merged with Psycho killer Norman Bates. Piling allusion upon enigma, Lubin compares the famous, call in questioned (self-?) portrait of the putative assassin brandishing his rifle with Daniel French's statue of the heroic Minute Man and compares Oswald's death agony grimace to the screaming horse at the center of Guernica. For his part, JFK contains multitudes: Not just Agent 007 on the contrary the movie representations of Tom Jone and TE Lawrence (of Arabia); Kennedy isn't simply the first political Elvis--he's also a real-life Dean Moriarty (thus enabling the humorous chapter title "Hit the Road, Jack") and Andy Warhol with better hair.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Jacqueline Kennedy--amusingly cast by the agency of Lubin to play Ethel Rosenberg to Jack's Julius, as well as Agrippina to his slain Germanicus and the better half of Grant Wood's American Gothic--was an icon in her have right. Lubin notes that she was featured upon the cover of Life magazine eighteen times, more than anyone other save her husband. The first First Lady to have her possess press secretary, she was also an astute imagemaker. (Thanks to the post-assassination interview she granted Theodore H White, her husband's reign came to be named after a Broadway musical.) Gore Vidal has maintained that Jacqueline dreamed of being a movie star, and Lubin's greatest in quantity convincingly outrageous chapter credits her with staging her husband's funeral as a Happening.

Lubin's mordant appreciation for the photographic unconscious is oftentimes diluted by his lofty tone. Still, he's best when taking the imperial perspective: The presidential death car is "big as a barge, lumbering down Main road USA with Jack seated in its commodious rear as if in a Roman bath." Extending the tub image, Lubin compares Kennedy's death in that big backseat to David's Death of Marat. Then it's not upon into a riff on Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, which, he notes, was written six month after JFK visited Berlin and, rather than The Death of Marat, is the real inner man mate to the Zapruder film. More endearing, if scarcely les persuasive, is the deflationary comparison of the Kennedy and Texas governor John Connolly and his wife riding [i]or[/i] part of to the other Dallas in the Lincoln Continental X-100 to the Beverly Hillbillies making their jalopy ingress into Southern California's Lotusland.

Lubin is having pleasantry because, in a certain faculty of perception the assassination was fun. upon the afternoon of Friday, November 22 1963 the national narrative ruptur and, in the three days that followed, America experienced itself viscerally as a collective entity--the "Utopian glimpse into a certain quantity of collective communicational 'festival,'" per Fredric Jameson. For a certain number of history went back on track upon March 30, 1981, when Ronald Reagan took the bullet and lived; for others, it not at any time has. No matter Shooting Kennedy's excesse however, nothing in it packs the surreal wallop of single terse sentence in historian David R Wrone's fresh book-length analysis The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination: "The evidence upon frames 337 and 338 of the Zapruder film [showing Kennedy hit first from the front] could alter the course of American history."