Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images

A fascinating read. Very well written. A bid cynical toward the end, but a tremendously imaginative treatment of the topic of Kennedy and popular culture.

Of the books that have been published on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination on display in my local bookstore, which include memorial editions of LIFE and LOOK magazine that compile all the iconic photos of that time (and sponsored by the History Channel in one case), SHOOTING KENNEDY is a bracing antidote to the lachrymose nonsense posing as historical insight and edifying remembrance that litter the publishing landscape.In SHOOTING KENNEDY, Lubin employs a process that in post-modern cultural critique has become the prevailing strategy: the Dadaist practice of placing on the dissection table the sewing machine and the umbrella and reporting on their encounter. SHOOTING KENNEDY may, thus, for some readers, seem a bizarre and desacralizing example of the kind of "relativistic" post-modern cultural criticism that upends and sabotages the "milestone event" narrations of history by treating everything as a cultural text, everything as grist for the cultural critique mill. As an example of this technique, Lubin, late in the book, examines a LIFE magazine spread showing a liquor ad featuring a dandy tipping his hat in salute on the page facing the famous photo of John John's salute of his father's passing coffin. He then offers a disquisition on the suggested birth of the salute in the era of the knight errant, who it is believed, lifted up the visor on his helmet to show another knight his eyes to show he intended no harm. He then goes on to discuss the notion of Camelot as a metaphor for the Kennedy presidency, and then ties in JFK's boyhood reading during his sickly childhood of romantic tales of knighthood by Sir Walter Scott and others. To the average reader of political history, this will seem an inappropriate invasion of one discipline into the precincts of another -- in this case materials of history and politics examined with theories and tools of art criticism. The similarities Lubin finds between notable paintings from the Western canon and news photos of the Kennedy's and JFK's assassination will seem superfluous, beside the point. So will the parallels he finds between the structure of the Zapruder film and the standard Hollywood movie both now and then. Average readers will be more comfortable with coincidence as the principle behind the suggestive links he finds in history and art,(e.g., Oswald jumping onto the stage in the Dallas movie theater where he sought to hide from the police, John Wilkes Booth jumping onto the stage of the Ford Theater after shooting Lincoln, the Nazi villain in Lubitsch¹s "To Be or Not to Be" being chased onto the stage before being captured and killed), and less comfortable with the idea that life and art are inseparable and dialogic. This approach may seem destabilizing and even decadent. Lubin admits as much. Indeed, he often recognizes that his approach may serve to cast dirt on the icons whose images and histories he examines. He explains that this is not his inte