Some thoughts on EXECUTIVE ACTION (1973) and other conspiracy theory films

Tuesday, August 8, 2023, at 12:45 AM: Turner Classic Movies will air Executive Action (1973), starring Burt Lancaster and dealing with conspiracy theories around the assassination of JFK.

I cover the movie in my Four Scores and Seven Reels Ago book, dealing with presidential movies, during the chapter dedicated to films about Kennedy. It's a rather slow-going affair; namely featuring men sitting around in one room or another talking about things they did or plan to do. 

I go more in-depth on this and films like JFK and The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (and the suggestions made in The Greek Tycoon), but here's a quote from the book itself. If you want to read more, check out my book, whish is available in most stores! Check it out!

... No great revelations, no villains to expose, no resolution to our grief - just a madman killing the nation's leader.

That doesn't quite sit well with us. A lone gunman managed to alter the country's future - the world's future - with just a rifle one day in Dallas in 1963? We believed it when it happened to Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley because it was "old times" or security wasn't that great or who thought someone would kill the president? But this was our time and our Camelot. To have something so brutally simple occur in our technologically advanced world where we are in control of so many things made no sense. Hollywood has told us that bad guys will be found out and stopped and that the good guys will win. Nothing like that happened here. Oswald won and in death got to keep whatever secrets he had to himself. That isn't how it is supposed to work.

We turn to the media for help to understand, hoping another angle or source or perhaps through fantasyland thinking, we will find answers that tell us something satisfactory. Stone's JFK helped by trying to tell us that, yes, it had to be the bad guys in Washington, along with the mob and other insidious individuals, and that worked for many viewers. We can sleep at night if it was a big government conspiracy, after all. That appeals to the status quo of us hopelessly against the machinery of government, where things can be changed in the blink of an eye because they have all the power. To have it come down to a single person who changes everything is frightening and means anyone at any time could alter the world on us. Best to stick with the movies and hope for relief in the darkness than go down that path.

If you're interested in conspiracy theories, don't forget to check out Executive Action on TCM. And Check out Four Scores and Seven Reels Ago!