Last night I watched the feature film, Jackie (2016), on Netflix. I go to the cinema rarely so as usual I am about two years behind what is currently on release.
Having read nothing about the film beforehand I was expecting to half-enjoy an up-market, soapy bio-pic.
About that I was completely wrong.
Jackie is a film about the elemental experience of unexpected death. One moment life is one thing. The next moment it is something entirely different. It is an experience as unanticipated as birth, & perhaps as terrifying.
This is Natalie Portman's most disturbing film since she played the twelve-year-old Mathilda in the controversial Leon (1994).
The two films are connected. Both portray sudden bereavement as the result of extreme violence. Portman excels in the depiction of grief that is kept, or not kept, under iron control.
For those of us of a certain age the death of JFK marked indelibly a particular moment in our lives.
As a child of seven-and-a-half I remember the dark November evening in 1963. I cannot recall how the news arrived. It was maybe eight o'clock, winter bed-time for me. Staring blankly at the patterns in my bedroom rug I could not understand why any men (we assumed at first there must have been several) would want to destroy this cheerful father figure to us all. A light had gone out for no apparent reason other than someone's sheer meanness.
Jackie recreates that moment of loss & disorientation that everyone who was alive & sentient on that day felt.
More particularly, it creates terribly & brilliantly the chaos that ensues following the sudden death of someone close to us. The earth seems to roll without an axis.
The white light that forms a backdrop to many of the scenes in the film, & the brightly illuminated public rooms that recur over & over, create the feeling that one is close to drifting out of reality into another world.
In the hours after her husband's death Jackie floats through the crowds of officials & security men that are pressed into Air Force One, cut off from communication with all those around her.
Her isolation & confusion is broken at last by the wife of Lyndon Johnson, "Lady Bird", played by Beth Grant, who takes her in hand & calms her. Lady Bird seems to be the only person who remains in command of herself during this crucial period, unembarrassed by the shame of the half-acknowledged emotions that inhibit everyone else.
Lady Bird subsequently intervenes a second time a little later at the news of Oswald's death to pacify her husband, now the President, who bristles at receiving instructions from Bobby Kennedy.
This memorable brief performance is a reflection of how expertly & persuasively all the characters in the film are sketched.
Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby is also perfect. Genuinely shattered by his brother's death & by the plight of his sister-in-law, he yet struggles to conceal from himself his own satisfaction at it, not least through a long recital of the failures of their shared administration.
In his last film appearance before his own death, John Hurt gives a characteristically hypnotic performance as an Irish priest seeking to console Jackie.
But then we notice something odd.
The long wispy white beard that Hurt wears was surely not seen on any Catholic priest in 1963, least of all one who was acting as spiritual guide to the Kennedys.
And at this point the key to the abiding power of this whole drama becomes clear.
In the guise of a priest the character Hurt is really playing is Teiresias, the old blind prophet of the Oedipus legend.
Here we have the source of the fascination of the tragedy of JFK. It is yet another iteration of the Oedipus fantasy at the heart of human action & experience.
Understood in this perspective the figure of Jackie emerges in its true light as Jocasta, the mother who is both desired & forbidden.
The secret appeal of this terrible moment in modern history is our excitement, no less than our horror, at our own impulses. We are transfixed by the image of Jackie-Jocasta because her terrifying widowed state threatens to reveal so much about ourselves. We so much want to see this & we so much don't want to see this.
All this is encapsulated in the historically accurate moment when on leaving Dallas she refuses to change out of her blood-stained clothing. "Let them see what they have done," she says.
Over the years there have been many conspiracy theories about what happened at Dallas. Perhaps the Russians had some involvement. Perhaps the mafia had some involvement. Presumably we shall never know.
But the real engine of these events was the human unconscious & our need to re-enact in each generation the sacrifice of fathers.
And the sacrifice of sons too, for this is also central to the legend of Oedipus.
JFK was both a sacrificed father & a sacrificed son. This is what is so poignant about his tragedy & why he still haunts us. For a brief time he was the good father to us all: cheerful, vigorous, self-deprecating, giving us trust in ourselves.
But he was also the victim of his own father's ambitions, & driven by the need to atone for his father's sins, which ranged from the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s to the arranging of a lobotomy for his eldest daughter Rosemary in 1941 (long after the psychoanalytic revolution had reached America), who did not recover.
As we did not know at the time but as we know now, JFK paid for all this with chronic illness for much of his life.
In Jackie it is the unrelenting focus of the filmmakers on this underlying emotional reality, ignoring the superficial political detail, that makes the film so true & so powerful.
