Jackie

Saturday 11th February 2017

As you know, I was chronic for Jackie. I’d envisioned acres of frockage with an assassination. Well, it’s a marvellous film but not frock-minded. It will be misunderstood. Indeed has been. When General de Gaulle referred to ‘la gracieuse Madame Kennedy’ in welcoming the First Lady and her husband to Paris, he meant her style. As First Lady she was largely decorative and in her TV tour of the White House, watched by just about every American, almost simpering in her devotion to her husband. But she knew what she was talking about. She knew the history, she knew the facts. When President Kennedy was shot, she was preoccupied with the funeral – she studied the ceremonial accorded to Lincoln. For those few days she was in charge as well as angry. She was nothing like as frothy as appeared.  Nobody knew more about spectacle than she did. She’d married for power, not love, as she told the priest. Kennedy’s death made her more powerful. But also nothing. She is seen dumping her clothes, the clothes that had made her what she was, still on their hangers, into cardboard moving boxes. ‘Every First Lady must be ready to pack her bags,’ she says. What was the Kennedy Presidency? What would it have been had he not been shot? What would it have been without Jackie? The long scenes with the journalist at Hyannis Port, a few weeks after the funeral, are vital, although some say they’re dull.  The culmination is Jackie inventing Camelot and the legend that has persisted ever since, despite everything we know now about the reality. By getting assassinated, President Kennedy became whom he afterwards became. And nothing can ever change that.

So Jackie is incredibly intriguing. And like our own lives, as we re-decorate and wear outifts, all for nothing and everything. Oh yes, philosophical.

Posted Saturday, February 11, 2017 under Adrian Edge day by day.

Leave a Reply