Mayday Paranoia

John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (1964) is a strange document. It opens viscerally, with documentary-like footage outside the White House of protestors clashing. Unfortunately, Frankenheimer never maintains this stunning momentum, as the backroom drama lags in his direction of dialogue (a common problem in Frankenheimer’s cinema, and perhaps why he’s never obtained master status in the canon of film history). It’s at its best in the opening minutes, with cameras violently flailing around in the melee. I’d say it is almost proto-Peter Watkins, who’s most famous for his hybrid forms, blending the aesthetics of BBC TV documentaries with historic recreations (the Battle of Culloden, the Paris Commune, the life of Edvard Munch, etc.) or fictionalized futures (The Gladiators [1969], Punishment Park [1971]). But where Watkins shines most is in his political cogency backed by a rigor for research and texture. Frankenheimer’s Rod Serling-penned film, however, feels like a hallucination brought on by a psychotic set of assumptions about how the American government works.

Based on a 1962 novel about the discovery of a planned coup by a right-wing populist general in the state department against a presidency that’s promoting peace talks and de-escalation with the Soviet Union, the film seems like it would take on an eerie new truth coming out after Kennedy was assassinated. According to Frankenheimer, Kennedy was supportive of the film being made, likely in part because the novel was influenced by his ousting of the anti-communist General Edwin Walker. To the conspiratorially minded, the events in between the book and the film’s release confirm both theses, that there’s an authoritarian impulse rising up from the shadow-y back hallways of the Pentagon, quietly pulling the strings to manipulate their fortune. What’s compelling about this conspiracy is that it’s so close to the truth, except for one massive oversight: they already exert their political power in the open, why operate in secret as well?

Oliver Stone’s 1991 epic JFK is a film jam-packed with flashbacks to smoke-filled rooms, of nameless generals, bureaucrats, and businessmen talking about Kennedy’s danger to the military industrial complex—a man in between themselves, profit, and power. It’s not poised as the what-if? scenario of Seven Days in May, but a what-did-happen expose. The procedural investigation ends in a dramatic court sequence where Kevin Costner’s character (Jim Garrison) speaks about the vast collusion and conspiracy to kill the president as plainly as he can, yet it apparently falls on a deft-eared jury. It’s not, however, the ultimate details of the conspiracy that’s most revealing of Stone’s politics, but an earlier scene where Costner speaks to the mysterious “X” (Donald Sutherland), who details the interweavings of American military apparatus and Kennedy’s attempts to scale their power. Costner replies in awe, “I never realized Kennedy was so dangerous to the establishment.”

What would be considered the “establishment” in Seven Days in May and JFK are effectively inverses—in Frankenheimer’s film, it’s the establishment under threat from a rogue general, and in Stone’s, it’s the military establishment under threat from a rogue president. Perhaps this speaks to a generational difference in politics, with Frankenheimer’s Silent Generation belief in the American system in spite of adversity internal and external, rubbing up the childhood trauma of the Baby Boomer’s hearing that the President had been killed and their generation’s innocence has been lost forever. The positions of the establishment and the rogue are reversed—the president in one, the military apparatus in the other—as are which idea is perceived as heroic, the man defending the establishment or the one bringing it down. They both deal with the same time period (early-1960s) and the same overarching nemesis (militarism), and they’re both victims to the most pernicious aspect of conspiracy.

“Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs,” Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Precession of Simulacra. According to Baudrillard, the attempts of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to expose the Nixon administration’s corruption served to create a morality play about the nature of the United States government—Nixon is corrupting, ergo there’s something to corrupt, i.e. the goodness of the government. This is a dangerous assumption, and is one that Seven Days in May and JFK both presume: the military’s trying to break a good system, a good man is trying to break the bad system. Both create an argument about what a good American government is, but neither are able to see outside of that dichotomy of good/bad governance based around the American system. Both can imagine its corruption, but neither can envision a better world without that system.