In Filming History: Question, Disbelieve, Defy

By OLIVER STONE

Let's face it -- any historian knows that jealousy plays a huge factor in human affairs. We're especially vulnerable here in Hollywood in a public fantasy business that is fodder for the media. The outside world thinks of us all as rich and irresponsible. But the truth is, many of us work long hours (60- to 80-hour weeks for some directors) and are harried by the pressure to make films pleasing to large audiences within an expensive financial structure. I think many historians, whether they know it or not, are equally subject to this jealousy, and, thinking that history is their territory only, they come at filmmakers with an attitude of hostility. To them we pervert the paradigm with emotion, sentimentality, and so on. But historians exhibit much pomposity when they think that they alone are in custody of the "facts," and they take it upon themselves to guard "the truth" as zealously as the chief priests of ancient Egypt; the prophecies must belong to them and them alone. I don't think anyone who knows of the jealousies extant in any cerebral profession, be it history or filmmaking, will question the petty infighting that results each year for prizes, awards, and tenure -- all at the expense of true investigation or creation. ...

American historians want respectability. They want prizes. Many simply don't want to rock the academic boat. And some fear that if they take a chance, they will be assassinated in The New York Review of Books by another trophy-hunting historian. It seems that the only people left who take chances are dramatists and a few progressive historians who are willing to undertake a deconstruction of history and question given realities.

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.

* * *

The concept of being a historian really, I think, began with oral storytellers -- dramatists -- who acknowledged the concept in the human mind that memories are a form of godhead or sacredness. The original Western historians were Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the many others who wandered the sea-lanes of the world, passing on the mythologies of their tribes around banquets and campfires at night, encoding them by day in ancient libraries such as at Alexandria in Egypt. Our known Western historians came into being during Greek and Roman times, and because of their intense politicking and subjectivity, it is conceivable to me that the subject of history was not considered as significant as philosophy, drama, poetry, mathematics, or even physical sport. In defining the various Greek schools of thought, we find their historians viewed highly subjectively, depending on what their outlook of life was, what school they'd been to, what philosophy they adhered to. There was nothing like the trend toward consensus and tenure today. The historian must sing for his supper, too, and as in almost every profession in the late 20th century, he has created around himself barricades of specialization and thickets of prizes, money, and fame.

* * *

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.

Having written a screenplay about Alexander the Great, I was intrigued to discover that his famous father, King Philip of Macedon, had been assassinated under mysterious circumstances. Alexander, not far from his father's side that day, was immediately suspect, as was his mother, Olympia. The assassin himself was quickly slain, and the murder to this day remains an enigma. What did Alexander really know of the supposed homosexual feud at the root of the revenge taken that day?

In Alexander's own untimely death ... we again have strong speculation of a conspiracy of Macedonian family clans. They may well have come together to terminate a young ruler who had no pure Macedonian heirs but was dangerous in his desire to radically globalize the known world by, among other things, intermixing Macedonian and Oriental bloodlines. Did a battle-weary Alexander die of fever or from poisoned wine? After my research, I intuit the latter.

I think of Julius Caesar, stabbed repeatedly by respectable senators in Rome itself, at the heart of the empire. I think of Archbishop Thomas a Becket of Canterbury and his historic feud with King Henry II delimiting the power of the state over religion, where we find perhaps the first use of "plausible deniability" in that disarming rhetorical question attributed to Henry: "Who would rid me of this man?"

I think of the serene Pope John Paul I dying of a supposed heart attack in his sleep after 33 days of papal rule in 1978. From day one, rumors of murder have persisted despite a powerful, suspected cover-up. Was this innocent pope sniffing out the massive fraud perpetrated in the name of God by the Vatican Bank, or was he aware of its ties to the shadowy neofascist undergrounds in Europe and Latin America?

Could the Russians handle a movie that implied that Stalin had poisoned Lenin before Lenin could change his mind about who was going to run the place? The French have long insisted that Napoleon was poisoned by arsenic and that DNA revelations from his hair point to this. Was this ugly deed done to him by the British, or was it a traitor in Napoleon's own circle? More recently, the handprints of Pol Pot's friends and enemies were seen everywhere in his death and rapid cremation. ...

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. You don't have to wonder why when you understand the power of the conspirators -- J.P. Morgan Jr., Bernard Baruch, Thomas Lamont, General Douglas MacArthur, and others -- or the incredible ability of the media, which were then as now basically controlled by the establishment of this country, to vaporize the incident into the black hole of ridicule. Henry Luce's magazines (Time, Life, and Fortune) trivialized the various testimonies at the time, including that of two-time Medal of Honor winner General Smedley Butler, and the incident was buried largely because Roosevelt himself was weathering a major storm and feared a revolution if these events were revealed. Thank God for the memory of the few men still around who do not so conveniently forget.

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, President 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. If the country had a young president, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, 'Is he too young and inexperienced?' The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending. ... Then if there were a third Bay of Pigs it could happen." Perhaps Kennedy, in allowing himself three miscues, underestimated the power of his opposition. 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.

Kennedy in 1963, like Alexander the Great long before him, was increasingly calling for radical change on several fronts -- the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, and our internal policies on civil rights, oil tax depletions, even the federal currency. Nothing was off-limits. Looming ahead was his certain victory in 1964, with the specter of a Kennedy dynasty lasting well into the 1970's. If nothing else, history has taught us that politics is power and people do kill each other if they want to acquire that power or, equally important, prevent that power from being exerted. In John F. Kennedy's nascent radicalism, a motive for murder is clear.

* * *

Ultimately, all this has more to do with the fear of change than anything. I truly believe that the thing that terrifies men in society the most is change. Often it is just Roosevelt's "fear of fear," but it becomes far more subversive and dangerous when that fear crystallizes into hatred and terror and destroys other people's lives in the name of an ideology of stasis, of conservatism, of seeking refuge in the past for fear of an unknown future -- in fact as we all do each night when we sleep and dream. Boldness, that reaching into the unknown future to make things better for oneself and perhaps for all, is not a motivation or a trait often shared by society, with the exception of enterprises such as war or space travel, and even then not often. I believe that in five years, between 1963 and 1968, three men ran on a platform of change and suffered enormously for it. They were John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy.

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."

Oliver Stone's most recent film is Any Given Sunday (1999). These excerpts are drawn from his contribution to Oliver Stone's USA: Film, History, and Controversy, edited by Robert Brent Toplin, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and just published by University Press of Kansas. Reprinted by permission.

Easy-to-print version

E-mail this article