NIXON

Oliver Stone's Nixon is not much different from the Nixon portrayed in Secret Honor. Both portraits seem intended to be sympathetic, but sort of render Nixon as a helpless, solipsistic infant, obsessed with fame and his own self-mythology, and completely detached from the reality of America's politic landscape and the way that his own power works.

At the beginning of the second half of the movie, when Nixon's presidency is beginning to unravel, Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins in a way that made me think I was watching a movie about Anthony Hopkins or Hannibal Lecter, makes a trip in the middle of the night to the Lincoln Memorial, to look at the imposing statue of one of his heroes.














In what I think is intended to be a poignant moment, Nixon sees that a group of hippie Vietnam protesters are camping out at the Lincoln Memorial for some reason and he approaches them as they watch him skeptically. After trying to banter with them about his college football days, a cute nineteen-year-old girl says "We're not here to talk about football." Nixon has a brief "duh" look and then turns on the sincerity. She challenges his power to stop the war and realizes that he can do nothing to stop the war, that it's the system, which he has lost, or never really had, control over. Then the secret service guys pull him away and he tells his main assistant guy that the girl knew something it had taken him five years in office to realize, that he has no real power.



















This idea echoes the conspiracy theory presented in Secret Honor, but Stone takes it to another level. While the conspiracy theory of Secret Honor is not supposed to be necessarily fact, but a sort of distortion of Nixon's, Stone's theories stemming from 1991's JFK about J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA are presented again as history (granted there is a disclaimer at the beginning of the film saying it is a work of fiction, within the work of fiction the conspiracy theory is presented a reality). This scene is sort of a microcosm of Nixon's character as interpreted by Stone. He wants people to love him and he wants power, but in the end he has neither. He's desperate to win, whether it be the presidency or anything else, because he equates that with being loved, but he's willing to do anything to get there, which, in the end, is what brings his downfall.















Stone's Nixon worships Lincoln as a hero president, and wants to resemble him, but he's can't have that heroism because his success isn't based on a particular passion other than to gain power and to be elected. In Nixon's era--Nixon has been called the most documented president, can't remember who said that at the moment--the idea of power is supplanted by both his constituents, who no longer revere the icon of the presidency, and the behind the scenes guys, who manipulate Nixon for their own interests. Nixon's desire to be accepted by both systems prevents him from ever understanding or being accepted by either.















While the movie certainly made me think more about Nixon, it didn't introduce any more than those certain points that I talked about in my last Nixon post, those events that it seems most chronicles of Nixon's life (Checkers, his mother, the crying with Kissinger, his crappy football career, etc.) have gone back to and exploited again and again. It is extremely detailed and perhaps historically quite accurate, but Anthony Hopkins' Nixon isn't convincing to me. It's certainly not my favorite Nixon, though this might have more to do with Stone's direction. He is too obsessed with JFK and J. Edgar Hoover and the conspiracy theories of the time to pay appropriate attention to Nixon. What he wants, it seems, is for Nixon to fit into a particular world view, while giving some attention to Nixon's particular dilemma, the paradox of his outsider/insider status.

To be honest, I still prefer Frank Langella, in Frost/Nixon, perhaps because that particular movie is based more on a limited presentation of a particular historical moment, rather than gross speculation. Langella's Nixon is contained within a moment that was historically documented, with almost no editorializing and little speculation of Nixon's life beyond that television interview, which allows the subltety of Langella's performance to tell us more about the man than Stone's exhaustive exposition can.

The most thought provoking aspect of Stone's movie is probably the incredible amount of speculation presented, especially considering the vast amount of source material he had to work with (the Nixon tapes, duh). The most outrageous example is his portrait of J. Edgar Hoover as a fat cat queer running the scenes with no particular motivation besides racism and greed. Perhaps the general idea of that is true. It probably is actually. And maybe everything in the movie is true, but this is just absurd:















I guess he's just trying to entertain people and be edgy, but it just feels like silliness, and it's not edgy.

Oh, also, I've been reading some Freud essays about paranoia recently, which he attributes to latent homosexual urges (surprise!). I think it has more to with power/lack of power, which I'll talk about more in my next post, on The Assassination of Richard Nixon, which I watched in the bus back from Boston the other night, and I'll probably write about this week or next week or something. Anyway, Stone seems to agree with Freud, and maybe they're right. At least, Nixon is portrayed as having no sexual interest in women and just being generally uncomfortable around women, which is part of why he resent JFK and perhaps why he is super paranoid and obsessed with the idea that people don't take him seriously, he's being manipulated by higher forces, etc etc.

Oh, that part is interesting to, his rivalry with JFK. Basically, people loved JFK because he was cute and did it with women and knew how to talk to people and all that, and they hated Nixon because he looks kinda weird and has a pretty terrible personality. This allows Nixon to see himself as the underdog, and his whole "My father was the poorest lemon farmer in California," thing. He saw Kennedy as part of the establishment, nouveau riche and all that, though that doesn't make sense if Nixon was sort of aware that he was going to be assassinated, which the movie implies.















Oh, I'm obviously getting bored/rushing this post, but two more things:

1. Young Nixon looks like Dick Whitman:
















Not really, but whatever.

2. David Hyde Pierce as a staffer:
















And this biblical quote:

Executive Action

Executive Action is sort of like the older, more boring brother of Oliver Stone's JFK. It's an incredibly sober account of a possible conspiracy theory behind the assassination, shot in documentary style. It's painstakingly slow, but actually pays very little attention to detail, the characters are vaguely constructed, no actual government agencies are named other than the Dallas Police, the dialogue is even more vague than the characters speaking it. The conspiracy described is similar to that in Oliver Stone's film, with a few nuanced differences. The only real credence that I can give to the film is that it was made almost twenty years before JFK, making it the first film of its kind (that kind being a real movie with a movie star (Burt Lancaster) about the JFK assassination conspiracy theories).
















"Executive action" refers to a real 1950s CIA term for assassination operations (ie Che Guevera and Fidel Castro), which was outlawed by the Ford administration in 1976. The film does little more than illustrate this term, combining stock footage and docudrama. The plot is, basically: A bunch of old guys get together (who exactly they are is vague; one assumes a collection of oil barons, bankers, senators, CIA black ops dudes) and plot to kill JFK, because he wants to get America out of Vietnam, but really they seem to just resent everything about him. This is followed by a slow recreation of all the steps of the conspiracy, most of which you've already seen in JFK, including doctoring the photo of Oswald with the rifle, setting up the triangulated fire, blah blah.















Some code that says "executive action" that needs to be deciphered for some reason

There were a couple things about this movie that were new/interesting/exciting:

Aerial film of the grassy knoll, etc:
















According to this particular theory, Oswald was the patsy, but did not actually fire any weapon, and an Oswald double was used to establish his presence as a communist in New Orleans and Dallas. These scenes are hilarious, because, basically, the Oswald double goes to random places like the rifle store, causes a commotion by being an asshole and a pinko (at a car dealership he criticizes the salesman's American made cars), and then, when asked for his name, he pronounces very clearly, "LEE HARVERY OSWALD, O-S-W-A-L-D."

There's another cool tidbit at the end of the film, which is that of eighteen witnesses of the assassination, sixteen died within five years of 1963, the probability of which happening, according to some British newspaper, was 100 trillion to one. One witness died of a karate chop.



















One more nuance is that the conspiracy described is of a much smaller scale than that of JFK and other sources. The Dallas police wasn't involved, they were just inept. In fact, very few people were involved, and they relied on the basic ineptness of everyone surrounding the president.

Oswald in this film is not developed much. He's simply a patsy, one who fits the needs of the conspirators. But there is plenty of stock footage, actually more than I've seen before, and there's something captivating about Oswald's demeanor before the press and police, something that allows one to question what really happened and what he really knew.

Ockham's Razor

"Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate."

I found this the other night, which attempts to define the concept behind "Occam's Razor." It's a fairly good description of the concept, if glorified. ("And yet it is, of course, probably the most important principle ever introduced into human logic.") But it made me realize that I have never explained Occam's Razor or it's relationship to this blog. I did some research which is actually pretty interesting.

Occam's Razor (you could probably just read the blog entry or this to understand it but whatever) is basically the premise that given a theory or set of theories, human logic will lead one to trust the theory which requires the fewest assumptions. An easy, but inaccurate, way to say this is that the simplest theory is always true. The simplest theory may usually true because it makes the fewest assumptions, but if one of those assumptions is outrageous, one would have to trust a more complex theory. The weird thing about Occam's Razor is that it's pure philosophy; it will never prove anything concretely.

For example (one that's a bit more specific to my blog than the examples in the link), I'll use the JFK conspiracy. There are basically two theories, though the conspiracy theory popularized by Oliver Stone's movie etc. can have a lot of different nuances. One is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating JFK. The other is that Oswald was a patsy (as he referred to himself in a press conference) for a massive conspiracy that went all the way up to Lyndon Johnson. So if you apply Occam's razor, you have to look at the assumptions that each theory takes to determine which is more probable. One assumption you have to accept for the lone gunman theory is that Oswald was a capable enough marksman to hit Kennedy from the sixth floor of the book depository with 6.5 millimeter Italian carbine rifle and four-power scope. This is hard to believe, but impossible to finitely falsify. For the conspiracy theory, you have to assume that Jack Ruby was hired by the conspirators to kill Oswald in order to keep him quiet. As a possiblity, this is sort of easy to believe, especially considering that the motive Ruby gave was that he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to testify. But it's difficult to prove. It's also difficult to falsify. But both are just one of many assumptions that both theories require, though the conspiracy theory would probably have many more assumptions.

Okay, long-winded example.

After the jump I want to do a quick summary of the history of the principle, and then I'll explain wtf it has to do with this blog.



The principle is attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th century logician. Some people claim that a bunch of other people invented it, including Thomas Aquinus (my bff) and even Plato (or was it Aristotle). He was a controversial figure with the Catholic church because he basically denied the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. Both require a lot of assumptions. He was an important contributor to the philosophy of Nominalism, to which he contributed his theory of universals, which was that they don't exist. Basically the original skeptic. In some cases he was a little to skeptical, like he denied the comlexity of human biology. But in other cases he was pretty awesome, ie he was one of the first people to advocate the seperation of Church and State.

What's also funny is that there's writing on the "Myth of Ockham's Razor" which denies that he came up with the concept of that it has attributed to him by later scholars. And that it's not really important. That paper is actually really dense, so I don't reccomend reading it, I didn't get very far.

Applying Occam's Razor to conspiracy theories in the literal sense is not really what I'm interested in doing with this blog, so the title is a bit inaccurate. What I'm interested is the narrative form that conspiracy thoeries use. But the principle is important, because it gets to the heart of what is fascinating about conspiracies, which is that they can't be proved, but present a set of assumptions which can be more believable that the theory accepted as status quo. Granted, conspiracies are exploitative, they take advantage of people's natural fears and insecurities to convince us that there are powers in the world greater than what we see in our everday lives. If Ockham were alive today he would undoubtedly scoff at most conpiracies, some of which take on an almost religious role in our lives, requiring belief and even faith in certain ideals, mainly "the truth", in order believe things we would otherwise write off immediately.

I am obsessed with fiction, and I see conspiracies as a sort of counterpoint to fiction. I'm not going to be able to express this very well at this point in my life (maybe one day I'll write a dissertation (which would have to come after my Roth dissertation)), but I think the idea is apparent. Conspiracies are basically fictions that are applied to the real world. It's not a lot different from history and the news, which often contain elements of fiction, but it's much easier to see the fiction and narrative making behind it.

A funny example of a conspiracy that fictionalizes reality is the World War Crew, from Richmond Virginia. I don't know them personally, but my sister dated on of them, and I've been close to people who do know them, so I sort of know what their deal is. Basically, they're a bunch of teenagers who live in Richmond and graffiti things and do random pranks. But the police decided that they were a gang, and actually went the kid's houses and confiscated their computers and suspected them of being much more criminal than they actually were. I heard they had a whole task force dedicated to the World War Crew, which is pretty hilarious considering that Richmond has one of the highest crime rates in American for a city of its size, and the police were focusing their energies on a bunch of kids in a hard core band.