A few days ago I was watching a travel/food show called Parts Unknown with the chef Anthony Bourdain, in which he essentially travels around the world and talks to people, and then shows himself eating some of the local food and saying "mm, that's delicious." The particular episode I was watching took place in Libya, which of course had a revolution not too long ago. As a result, one of the things he visits while he's there is a memorial dedicated to all the people killed in the revolution in the city of Misrata. It's a fairly touching scene, where the local guide walks around a room covered in photos of war victims and points to the ones he knew personally. At the end, however, we see that there's a TV set in the center of the room, which is looping footage of the beating and execution of Muammar Gaddafi from 2011. This is a pretty jarring thing to have in a building that's otherwise full of serenic cloud wallpaper and dropped flowers, but to the guide it makes perfect sense. Since Gaddafi was responsible for the deaths of the people on the walls, those people's loved ones want to see nothing more than the camera-phone footage of their revenge. We then see a clip of a Libyan couple who are indeed staring intently at the TV set after having visited the photo of a loved one.
Naturally, this brought my mind to the scene from Underworld where a group of people holds a viewing of the Zapruder film on repeat. To be honest, I've always found the idea of watching the Zapruder film over and over again a little bit off-putting. Even if it is historically significant, it's still a video of a man being killed, and I've always kind of had the sense that that's part of the appeal -- that a big part of the reason people watch it isn't to determine the exact trajectories of the bullets, but rather because there's something fascinating about watching such a famous person die. I don't know exactly why the idea of watching a person's death for entertainment bothers me and I don't exactly have an explicit moral reason not to do it, but somehow the idea of claiming to watch something for its historical merit while really going for the perverse thrill of seeing such a shocking moment unfold rubs me the wrong way. At the same time, I have to admit to being genuinely interested in watching it in class, especially after it was so well explicated in Libra. Having had the experience of going into Oswald's head (or at least on possible version of Oswald's head) makes watching his brief "appearance" in the historical record a much richer experience. Is this what the people who watch the video over and over again are really feeling? Could I just be making up the idea that they're somehow thrilling in watching a man's head explode, when really they have a personal connection to the case that's as close as mine is now, even if it comes from more of a "what happened" angle than a "what was Oswald thinking" one? Or is imagining Lee up there in the book depository and waiting for him to do just sort of masking the part of me that actually enjoyed the actual tension and sudden release you feel watching the video, whether or not I want to admit it? It's hard for me to find a definitive answer, but my guess would be somewhere in the middle. I think that there is a part of everyone that does "enjoy," or is at least fascinated by, the death of a figure we imagine we know pretty well, and that part coexists with the part of us that intellectualizes that enjoyment by finding interesting facts about the film.
I'm still left with the question of why exactly people are so fascinated with famous deaths -- and more specifically, what differentiates the ones that inspire this fascination from the ones that are simply considered tragic. I feel like one part of it has to do with our personal investment in the situation; when we remember the impact of an event very vividly, like our generation does with something like 9/11, it becomes too uncomfortable to watch (and too socially unacceptable to appear to be enjoying). At the same time, I just said that it takes a certain amount of intellectual investment in order to get something out of the Zapruder film, or at least it did for me. After all, few people want to just watch a man get shot in the head, or if they do they would have difficulty admitting it to themselves. I think the difference is that with the JFK assassination, we're not really focused on the death itself. It's there and it's intense and it's jarring every time, but it's not really the point. We're not watching the video to watch JFK die, we're going into it with all kinds of ideas that we want to see realized and little side details we want to notice; essentially, we're distracted from the reality of the moment by our own preconceived notions. By comparison, watching footage of something that's harder to analyze outside of the deaths involved, like a terrorist attack or natural disaster, just brings up all the emotional difficulties we felt when the actual event occurred. In a way, that means that understanding Lee is a distraction from the reality of the Kennedy assassination -- while we gain a very interesting sense of what it would have been like to be Oswald in an incredibly unique position of assassinating the president, we lose the equally valid reality of what it would have been like to be Jackie, or a spectator in the crowd, or someone seeing a few frozen frames of the film in Life magazine, or Kennedy himself. That's one of the central complaints I have about Libra, about the Zapruder film, and about the narrative of the Kennedy assassination more generally: while everything it details is a very interesting history, it stills leaves out everything else but the central narrative. Even when DeLillo tries to escape this, with his changing perspectives in "22 November," the sudden switch from a character we know so much about and understand so well to random people off the street just underscores how closely tied we've become to Lee's personal story. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- Lee's story is incredibly fascinating, probably more so than that of anyone in the crowd, but that same fascination leads us to forget much of the context around it. And of course, that just leads us back to where we started, trading gawking at one trainwreck for another.
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