31 Days Of Feminist Horror Films: JACKIE
“His blood and brains were in my lap.”
It begins with the ominous swell of violins from composer Mica Levi’s Oscar-nominated score, and the dread never dissipates from then on — in Pablo Larrain’s JACKIE (a 2010 Black List script by Noah Oppenheim), what could be a conventional biopic of America’s most famous first lady becomes an exercise in intense psychological horror, thanks to a micro-focus on feminine grief. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (the divine Natalie Portman, born for this role) watches her world erode further with one impossibly well placed shot to the head of her husband, John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), and in the immediate aftermath of his death, watches her personal grief become magnified on a national scale — a private nightmare, autopsied in public life. By amplifying and ornamenting her grief for mass consumption, Jackie reclaims control of her own personal tragedy — by presenting her own pain to the world with “more horses, more soldiers, more crying, more cameras,” maybe she can begin to make sense of the cruel, random nature of death that seems to pervade every part of her life as a wife, widow, and mother. Because there’s no inherent tension in the narrative of JACKIE — we already know the ending — Larrain’s film instead creates an atmosphere of unease surrounding the intimate, tactile details of Jackie’s life as one of the most iconic women in American history, a life that’s often marked by isolation, unhappiness, sacrifice, and anxiety. By turning JACKIE into a psychological horror film, it becomes a fascinating study not of JFK’s assassination, a story we all know, but of what being the symbolic “dutiful wife” to an entire nation looks like on the national stage at one of the darkest moments in American history.
JACKIE’s structure lends itself well to the disorientating, fragmentary nature of grief — we see Jackie doing her best performance as First Lady in a 1962 CBS special, on the day of and immediately following the assassination of JFK, in private conversation with a journalist (Billy Crudup) crafting the myth of The Kennedys as THE mythic American family, and at her most vulnerable with her priest (the late, great John Hurt.) Sirkian shots of Jackie’s new home, photographed the in sickly greens and stark whites of the hospital wards Jackie’s visited so often, offer no comfort to the audience as she sits down with the journalist for the first time to manipulate the truth of her marriage, family life, and husband’s death for the American public — Portman holds her collarbone, shoulders, and hands together so tightly that it seems as if she might break apart by letting go. This is firmly her story, not JFK’s — he’s got no real scenes in the film and floats around the edges of the frame, his face often obscured and fuzzy, just as he now appears in the memory of his late wife. Even as we see famous moments — Jackie donning her pink Chanel suit on a Dallas runway or a black sedan slick with the president’s blood and brains zooming down an emptied highway — Larrain gives us only fragments of these “moments in history”, often shot in cloyingly tight close-ups. It’s incredibly unsettling, and speaks to the mounting anxiety Jackie carries throughout the film. The claustrophobia of Jackie’s life is pervasive as we watch her fight her way through a rowdy Dallas crowd of well-wishers or stalk down a hospital corridor to peek in on JFK’s autopsy, a decision she instantly regrets — she’s unable to hide from both the most public and most private horrors imaginable. When filming the CBS special, Jackie is placed under a microscope: and her constant companion Nancy (Greta Gerwig) urges her to smile, while Jackie instead seems more like a butterfly squirming under a needle than the poised, polished woman we knew her as publicly. We watch Jackie ritually cleanse herself after the assassination — first, removing blood from her face so that she can watch power change hands to LBJ, then weeping anew while removing her bloody nylons in the White House bedroom — but no amount of salty tears or harsh scrubbing can remove pain of what Jackie’s been forced to endure with the world watching. In these moments, Jackie Kennedy looks much more like a final girl than a First Lady — she hasn’t survived a masked killer, but instead, a public killing, its terror on full display for the public to see.
“Objects and artifacts are more important than people,” Jackie tells us on her CBS tour of the White House, and this statement serves as a thesis for not only the film, but the Kennedy legacy. JACKIE is obsessed with the significance of objects: the ruined pink suit, paintings in the spooky Lincoln bedroom, the rows of pills she despondently lines up on a glass coffee table, the cowboy outfit worn by John John Kennedy on his birthday just days after his father’s death. For Jackie, history and legacy are all about the items we leave behind (she’s obsessed with bringing objects from former White Houses into the current space) so it only stands to reason that when it comes to a presidential funeral, nothing short of an opulent spectacle will do. To deal with the enormity of her own grief, Jackie turns JFK’s funeral into a grandiose affair, and frankly, why shouldn’t she? The media and the public have been observers for the deaths of her two infants and her husband, and Jackie knows they’ll want to share in her sorrow fully now — it’s an enormous sadness, and Jackie deals with it by opening herself up to America to mourn along with her. And, Jackie does it as a final rebuttal to Jack’s dismissal of her interests in design — “there you go spending money on all those silly knick-knacks,” she mocks. Feminine interests are so often dismissed, and even the First Lady is no exception — Jackie’s passion to keep the past alive isn’t taken seriously by her husband, but this is just one of the many rifts between them. JACKIE only hints at JFK’s infidelity and womanizing, but the film conveys the bone-deep loneliness and isolation felt by Jackie because of this through subtext — she’s a kept woman in the White House who’s self-surrounded with the ghosts of the past. She even jokes about with other political wives, including her successor, Lady Bird Johnson (Beth “sometimes I doubt your commitment to SparkleMotion” Grant), but once Jackie is left alone, the ghosts become all too-present. In the film’s most stunning sequence, Jackie drops the needle on the Broadway performance of “Camelot” and floats around the White House drinking wine, downing pills, and searching for those old ghosts. With Richard Burton’s voice booming in the background, for a moment, Jackie can pretend that Jack isn’t far away, that he’s right there with her in the White House. She wraps herself in the finery of a life she’s soon to say goodbye to — a pink robe that echoes the Chanel suit, a crimson gown which swirls like fresh blood, pearls that soon constrict around her neck — as she ambles around the White House, taking pictures off tables, smoking, and saying goodbye to the life of luxury and spectacle she’s fully embraced. Jackie knows that she’s soon to become one of those ghosts she fought to revive, but instead of fighting it, she instead decides to make JFK’s funeral an elegy for their entire time together in the White House. She refuses to be forgotten like those other First Ladies.
But of course, JFK’s death isn’t Jackie’s first experience with all-consuming with tragedy — she’s already survived the worst possible grief after the death of her babies, Arabella (“in the womb,”) and Patrick (“39 hours on earth, just long enough to fall in love with him,”) and of course, the many miscarriages not mentioned in the film. It’s clear that Jackie views these losses as a personal failure — her womb must be flawed through some secret mistake on her part, and their deaths of course reflect some kind of maternal negligence. Women often bear the shame and guilt of miscarriages and stillbirths silently — after all, what could be worse than discussing the death of a baby — and Jackie is no different, bearing the brunt of that pain alone, especially now that her Jack is dead. That blame bleeds into the guilt she feels for not acting sooner during the assassination, but she wouldn’t be a good Catholic if she didn’t. In exploring Catholicism, JACKIE delves into some of its richest and darkest themes. In a confession to her priest in the film’s final third, Jackie admits that she wishes she was assassinated next to her husband, that “every night [she] dreams of dying,” and that she remembers every detail of the assassination — after so much loss, it’s no wonder that death pervades every one of Jackie’s waking thoughts. But of course, she’d never commit the moral sin of suicide, that’s only for “crass, self-indulgent people” — death may be constantly on her mind, but Jackie wants her own martyrdom to happen while she’s still living. Of course Jackie’s obsessed with death after the assassination, but most Catholics are anyway — when you grow up attending masses surrounded by grotesque statues of the crucifixion, partaking in the symbolic consumption of the blood and body of Christ, and feeling the heady high of incense, you develop a healthy appreciation for pain, suffering, and death from an early age. Even selecting the right funeral veil becomes an impossible, obsessive task — Catholicism is all about ritual and object-worship, so of course that extends to Jackie’s persona as First Lady, and the state of mourning she’s projecting as the most fashionable widow in the world. A trip to Arlington to pick out a burial plot for Jack is shot like a Hammer horror film, with Jackie serving as the ghastly woman traversing foggy, gothic moors, her heels sticking in the mud the whole way — the funeral becomes a ritual of the highest order for Catholics, and only the grandest will do for Jack. She changes her mind about the funeral procession after she begins packing up the White House — it’s the exchange of one significant object for another — and decides to reinter Arabella and Patrick near their father. Burying one’s children once is traumatic enough, so doing it a second time is an exercise in masochism, but nothing but the best and biggest will do for Jackie’s grief.
JACKIE is a film about the personal horror of grief being expanded to a global scale, and the burden that Jackie must bear in order to share her grief with the world, but she remains entirely in control of her own narrative, the Kennedy narrative — she creates the myth of Camelot, controls the public perception of the kind of man Jack was, and decides which personal details she’ll allowed to be made public. When Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) pushes back against her decisions, Jackie doesn’t cave, but instead becomes even more empowered to put on a funeral to end all funerals. This is how Jackie processes the immense, unimaginable horror of having your husband’s brains and blood blown all over you with the world watching, but as she tells us in the film’s final moments, the spectacle of Jack’s funeral “was for me.” Jackie Kennedy turned the Kennedys into one of the most known dynasties in American history by crafting a careful narrative that turned them into heroes of impossible stature. History, of course, kept Jackie’s carefully controlled narrative from becoming the only story about America’s first family, but in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Jackie was able to seize the reins of violent chaos to make a nation grieve along with her. “People believe in fairytales,” Jackie tells the journalist, knowing that she’s just sealed her own, complete with a gruesome, heartbreaking ending. “You were a mother to all of us, and that’s a very good story,” the reporter tells Jackie, further emphasizing her persona as the ultimate American housewife, put through the ultimate American horror. And JACKIE too ends like a fairytale: after seeing her two children exhumed and reburied alongside her husband on a miserable rainy day, the story ends on a note of fantasy, with Jackie daydreaming of waltzing with Jack during a grand White House party, the absolute belle of the ball. JACKIE is a dark fairytale about the destruction of the American dream, and through the tight focus on Jackie Kennedy — wife, mother, widow, icon of American femininity, public matron of grief, and ultimately, author of her own story — we come to understand just how much our mothers, wives, and sisters take on when controlling the immediate aftermath of death.
