As I sat watching the PBS Frontline episode on who Lee Harvey Oswald was one question kept popping into my mind: How the hell did they get so much of footage and information on the guy? Seriously it's like from every episode in his life historians have been able to find photographs and stories about him, even video footage of him during some points. And it's not even government surveillance that we see, mostly it's either photographs that he himself took, or it's photos and videos that were taken by the people around him. Really this is only surprising to me because of the historical era that it comes from. In our contemporary setting it goes almost without saying that if someone wanted to find a huge amount of voluntarily recorded material on just about anyone it would be available. Social Media plays no small role in this, but mostly it's simply an effect of how widespread cameras and recording devices have become in our society. In Oswald and Kennedy's time however, the amount of digital records of a persons life were way down.
Or at least up until that point in history it certainly was not the case that so much information could be drummed up on an individual. I've heard the Kennedy assassination described as the event that changed the way Television was viewed and I like that idea because it shows how shockingly connected and people had become compared to previously in history. Gopnik in his New Yorker piece describes how "The accepted division of American life into two orders--an official one of rectitude, a seedy lower order of crime--collapses under scrutiny, like the alibi in a classic film noir". The mention of the film noir seems like an especially interesting comparison, given the ties that the mystery genre has to Modernism and how differently the Kennedy case has gone compared to the generic detective story. Where there is a set method and end result for the detective to find in the story, in the Kennedy case there is almost an infinite amount of questioning and intrigue. And as stated above this isn't because of a shortage of facts, quite the opposite. If we knew less than we really do about the case I think it would be entirely more likely that people would accept a single explanation. In reality, the abundance of factual evidence available is what allows conspiracy theorists to raise the questions they do.
I think also this sense of "seeing is not necessarily believing" is another aspect of the Kennedy assassination that seems so linked to the postmodern mindset. Again I would say that in our contemporary setting it wouldn't be at all unreasonable to have suspicions about the extent to which the Media and the U.S. Government are keeping details hidden, or even fabricate them. In addition to this we've also become accustomed to the sense that there can be multiple sides to any given story and all seem true. In this way I find it a fairly compelling argument to think of the assassination of JFK as the major catalyst for the beginning of the postmodern era.
Partly this is a reflection of the fact that, after the assassination, pretty much every photograph or film clip of Oswald was suddenly of great historical significance, so they were singled out and preserved. But new stuff keeps surfacing--like the picture of young Lee at the CAP camp with Ferrie, which Frontline unearthed for the first time.
ReplyDeleteBut the weirdly "documented" nature of Oswald's life will be exploited by DeLillo, as he has Everett construct "a man out of paper." Conspiracy theorists have long found the record on Oswald a little too neat, and DeLillo opens the possibility that all this documentation might not be authentic.