4/21, The President is Dead: "Somebody will have to piece me together"

Don DeLillo's Libra presents a life of Lee Harvey Oswald, filling the historical ellipses with fiction. Oswald, like nearly every character in the book, spends the duration trying desperately to make sense of a world that seems to be conspiring against him; DeLillo seems likewise to be desperately trying to make sense of the world that could produce Oswald.

Bruce Conner with Report is similarly desperate for meaning. Rather than constructing meaning in the holes of the Warren Commission Report, Conner reconstructs the emotion living in those holes of knowledge. Starting with the news footage of the Dallas motorcade Conner establishes the visual space of Dealey plaza, 1963. As the motorcade stops and the soundtrack narrator slips into a tone of confusion, the image on the screen vanishes into visual white noise. The flicker increases with the panic of the narrator's voice. While watching this lengthy section of blankness my mind wanted to resolve the voided image with the disturbing audio; therefore, the flicker became something of a motion picture Rorschach card. I started to project images of Jack and Jackie, Oswald and Ruby on the screen. I became so desperate to see the image of this icon that when the second portion of the film began with the footage of the bullfight I recoiled. The images felt irreverent, out of place, and blasphemous.

When the film had finished, after introducing the breaking of lightbulbs and a commercial for a refrigerator, I realized that the montage, with very few images of Kennedy, was both an appropriate rendering of eye-witness emotions, but it was also the only way to resolve the anxiety of the blank screen. After allowing the effect of the film to mull around in my head after lecture, I began thinking of my own emotions and "blank screen anxiety" on 9/11/01 after hearing about two planes crashing into the World Trade Center but not being allowed to watch any news cast footage.

As a teenager I spent a substantial amount of time studying the Kennedy assassination, but my interest always had a certain romantic aura. I had no idea of the power such an event could hold over a generation of individuals. I was interested in conspiracy theory, in political watershed, and in cynicism. Report made concrete the chaos, the emotion, the blankness that could only have come from witnessing the assassination. Though I can never truly experience those things in relationship to the event, the film gave a deeper insight to the event. Where Libra helped to understand the event as a result of personal and cultural flaws Report made the assassination personal to someone whose was born over 20 yrs. later.