Even as I try to make sense of the hours and hours of TV programming that will air this month about the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, still more shows relentlessly arrive.
There are documentaries, reenactments, investigations, period dramas — more than you could ever watch and more than you’d possibly want to. My days just get Zaprudier and Zaprudier. Yet the more I watch, the less I am enlightened or entertained. (And only occasionally am I moved. The blue sky of the day is always somehow eternally heartbreaking.)
Before I review a few of the more notable offerings in this heap, it seems like the real review should be a review of us, as modern Americans. What’s wrong with this picture? (Why is the vertical hold still so tetchy?) Why do we subject ourselves to the ritual wallow in Kennedy grief? Why are we still pursuing mysteries that cannot possibly be solved? When we tune into it, what are we tuning out?
It’s worth noting that the median age in the United States is about 37, which means a great majority of us don’t remember where we were when we heard the news on Nov. 22, 1963, because we weren’t around at all. This in no way means we are ignorant or dismissive of what happened, nor does it disqualify us from our status as grown-ups.
But, had things gone differently in Dallas, President Kennedy would have journeyed on to Austin that afternoon, where (I have learned from National Geographic Channel’s rather good “JFK: The Final Hours,” airing Friday night) he was going to deliver a speech that included the following lines:
“This country is moving and it must not stop. For this is a time for courage and a time for challenge. Neither conformity nor complacency will do.”
Moving and it must not stop.
This month’s excess of JFK-related programming and infotainment — hardly any of it thematically or artistically challenging or anything like courageous; nearly all of it conforming; nearly all of it complacently unoriginal, overly dutiful and rote — clearly demonstrates how this particular event, preserved in permanent hindsight, keeps us inert.
As Nov. 22 approaches once more, this multimedia onslaught is a lesson in how not to move on. Allowing for history, reverence and popular interest, there is still much-too-much on TV in 2013 about the Kennedy assassination; “overkill” seems to be the right word, including the literal sense: bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard amplified rifle shots in the last week. JFK dies horribly, over and over and over.
Three styles of same story
Since everyone seems to be in the business of knowing what Kennedy thought, I wonder why none of the documentaries asks one of its public intellectuals the following question: What would Kennedy say about our fascination with his presidency, and especially the grisly details of his tragic death, five decades on?
He could no doubt accept the ego boost with the usual pretense of self-effacement, but wouldn’t Kennedy also find it somewhat sad that we still direct so much psychic energy toward Dealey Plaza?
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