Oliver Stone: The Similarities Between JFK And Walker

There is a surprising amount of similarities between the Oliver Stone directed JFK (1991) and Walker (1987) directed by Alex Cox. The movies both involve a coup d’état (although one is an alleged coup d’état), feature a male lead guiding a team with an ambitious and controversial goal, and whose themes take political aim at the United States government. JFK is a mindboggling trip through the years of work the District Attorney of New Orleans, Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) performed to uncover the truth behind the assassination of president John F. Kennedy. The film involves Garrison investigating several scenarios in which the assassination plot could have occurred at a cut-rate pace, ending ultimately at his loss at the trial of Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee

Walker is a surrealist biography of William Walker (Ed Harris) who in the 1850s nefariously takes over the Nicaraguan presidency leading to the ruin of the major city Granada that he resided in. Walker and JFK are political drama films that portray historical stories in a style that is what Brecht would call “epic theatre”, and they demonstrate how this Brechtian nature leads to a reconstruction of history that uses anachronisms to favor the director’s political argument. Walker and JFK are strikingly Brechtian films that stretch the bounds of docudrama; both films are processes that work to (as Brecht says) make the audience face something. In his work, Epic Theatre Bertolt Brecht argues that the modern form of story-telling has transformed from dramatic to epic. The epic changes the audience member from spectator to observer so that they may more critically study the story rather than passively sharing the experience of the characters. In this way the story