Saturday, November 22, 2014

Grant Morrison's Pax Americana, the JFK Assassination, and Comic Book Storytelling


 By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis


Multiversity: Pax Americana. Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
Kennedy's death has been a fascination of the pop culture kind. The actual aesthetics of it make the event all the more iconic. It brings us back to the infamous "back and to the left" scene in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) movie where District Attorney Jim Garrison replays the video of Kennedy's head bursting after the kill shot, over and over again, to an audience gripped by horror. The video came courtesy of Abraham Zapruder, an American manufacturer of women's clothing, and a Democrat, who got to Dealey Plaza early in order to get a good spot to take pictures of Kennedy's motorcade. Kennedy was going to ride through the plaza on his way to the Dallas Trade Mart where he was going to give a speech. Zapruder's video footage is often used to argue the existence of a second or even third gunman at the plaza that day (November 22nd, 1963), possibly located in the Grassy Knoll area (situated at the northwest side of it). It had a very clear view of the motorcade as it turned close to the Book Depository, where the official version has Oswald readying his rifle. But the film also gave us the final images of the assassination. In doing so Abraham Zapruder gave American culture an universal template for political assassinations.

     Zapruder's home movie is basically an incomplete anatomy of the assassination. It gave investigators visual entry into the crime scene, if only in part. It also gave comic book writers, cinematographers, and artists a visual point of reference from which to work from. Artists, writers, and comic book creators usually explore the actual trajectory of the bullets, the ones that end in kill shots in particular, in order to better sell an action or an assassination sequence. This opens up new storytelling possibilities and makes for a sense of authenticity when representing or recreating a political assassination.  President Kennedy's assassination can still be argued as the visual standard for this.

Stracynsky's Sidekick is an example of the
JFK assassination as visual template.

     For example, the angle of the shot that produced Kennedy's fatal head wound, as Zapruder's video shows, suggests not all shots could have come from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building, where it was said Lee Harvey Oswald positioned himself to shoot at the President. Officially, Oswald fired three shots that produced 7 wounds between Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally in addition to the head shot. And one of the bullets missed. That bullet, according to the Warren Report, hit concrete a little farther up the motorcade. This caused the concrete to splinter and hit James Tague, a Dallas car dealer who was standing a few feet east of the eastern edge of the triple underpass railroad bridge. The final shot would come shortly after. And with that, history gave popular culture a spectacular yet problematic set of images to play with.

     Perhaps one of the most recent reimaginings of the Kennedy assassination comes in Grant Morrison's Multiversity: Pax Americana. Illustrated by Frank Quitely, the comic book's opening pages see an American president getting murdered, while on a motorcade, in reverse sequencing. The President is seen to be grabbing a flag with the peace sign over his head, serving more as a bullseye than a symbol of more ideological connotations, while smiling to an unseen crowd. We are immediately reminded of Kennedy here, setting himself up as a reference point for Pax Americana's opening scene. The fact the president is holding a peace flag reminds the reader of Kennedy's 'ultimate diplomat' myth. Kennedy's death, it was quickly concluded, meant peace was off the table (at least in terms of public debate). It was as if Kennedy was peace's last resort, the answer to John Lennon's "Give Peace A Chance" plea. In a twist of historical fate, but mostly because of the Kennedy Administration's own foreign policy decisions, Vietnam started for real shortly after the assassination. There was an air of reinvigorated militarism in Lyndon B. Johnson's White House (the Vice-President who took over Kennedy's administration) and America was slowly being taken farther away from the mythic and utopic ideals of Kennedy's own version of peace (which historians are still unsure as to how it would have looked like).

The shooter is falling from the sky.
     Pax Americana's assassination scene, then, captures this highly problematic set of historic circumstances. The fact the assassination is played backwards here leaves the reader with a sense of historical revision that further adds to the mystery behind the actual shooting. We are shown the dynamics of the president's movements, his reaction to the kill shot first. As the opening panels pull back, we see the President has been shot from above, the bullet entering through the base of his head going straight down, shattering his jaw. It is an inversion of Kennedy's kill shot, where the final bullet (whose trajectory is inferred from Zapruder's home movie) comes from the President's right (some argue from the Grassy Knoll) and blows out the back of his head, leaving a gaping wound. Kennedy's death is bloody, shocking, and definite. So it goes with Pax Americana's American President in the opening scenes.

     The Kennedy assassination parallels do not stop with the head wound or the trajectory of the kill shot. In fact, it is in relation to the kill shot's trajectory that we see what can be best argued as an attempt at historical satire, done in a very subtle way. The shooter, which looks like a rogue superhero, is revealed as falling from the sky while aiming down the scope of a rather large silenced sniper rifle (or high-powered rifle). The shot actually comes from sky. At a simple glance, this can be taken as a ridiculing of the official version of Kennedy's assassination, which explains that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman responsible for 7 bullet wounds between the President and Governor Connally and the final head shot that culminated the killing. It is as if Morrison equates Oswald's sharp shooting skills with that of a superhero falling from the sky while hitting a perfect head shot. Reality's doubt makes for great comic book storytelling.


     The killer is eventually captured and his motives questioned. But we are left in the dark as to the true intentions behind the assassination. Instead, the comic turns inwards and explores the narrative mechanics of a post-Kennedy world trying to recapture lost American counterculture ideals as reimagined by a very problematic group of superheroes. And it is all set up by an opening sequence that invites us to revisit President Kennedy's death down to the last gory detail, even if it is meant as a very subtle critique on the controversies surrounding the death America's 35th president.
    
     It might be easier, more psychologically manageable  to believe that a lone gunman can kill the President of the United States, especially if he is falling from the sky equipped with nothing but a high-powered rifle and a parachute. But there is something oddly spectacular about imagining and reimagining the assassination of an American president. It captures an historic sense of controversy and mystery while reflecting on the death of an utopian dream.  That we automatically resort to Kennedy when thinking of such things speaks to the power of historical memory as a referent for creating fiction, especially when we want to get the violence right.

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