Initiative Post – Week 5
Natalie Portman as “Jackie Kennedy” in JACKIE. Photo by Stephanie Branchu. Photo: Fox Searchlight, LIFE
Jackie, Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s biopic starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy astonished audiences and challenged stereotypes after its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2016.
In December, following its release in cinemas, the film generated plenty of Oscar buzz, going on to receive three Academy Awards nominations: Best Actress (Portman), Best Original Score and Best Costume Design.
Primarily following the days after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the film also comprises Portman’s portrayal of Jackie Kennedy during her life as First Lady in the White House, alongside Theodore H. White’s Life magazine interview with the newly widowed woman maintaining great importance throughout the film.
The interview, given a week after her husband’s assassination, gives origin to the phrase “The Camelot Administration”, as dubbed by Jackie Kennedy herself. President Kennedy, she said, was strongly attracted to the Camelot legend because he was an idealist who saw history as something made by heroes like King Arthur. Therefore, the film features the chain-smoking former First Lady spinning falsehoods into the new truths of American history. Her unnamed interviewer (Billy Crudup) is the listening ear, writing furiously, and asking a handful of probing questions. At the end, Jackie takes the pen into her own hands, scratching out and adding in the words she wants the American people to read. The result is the magazine’s 1963 cover story, “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” with a final line that declares that “for one brief shining moment there was Camelot.”
The movie makes clear the image of “Camelot” and its glistening vision of the Kennedy years came from Jackie. But it also came from the interviewer. On screen, White appears tough and unbothered, his furrowed brow acting as a lie detector for Jackie’s dreamy fantasies. When the interview is finished, he murmurs a few words assuring Jackie that the story will work out, that her husband will be cast as an American martyr and that the musical metaphor will stick. Crudup says this somewhat begrudgingly, but in real life, White was an equal partner in the Kennedy myth-making.
In real life, Jackie needed a journalist who was on her side, and White turned out to be one. He complied with the Camelot metaphor, hence many people remember JFK’s era just as Jackie conceived them to.
This gives light to the kind of power an interview can wield, both through the actions of the interviewee and the one conducting it. White’s Life article told an important story, one that lasted decades with a tragic ending. However, how much of it was fabricated makes one question just how many interviews are similar in this regard.