“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.


- Lewis Carroll
, “Through the Looking Glass”

“Apocalypse Now,” Francis Ford Coppola (1979)

The record keeps spinning. World events fly past my mind like the cattle flying past Dorothy’s bedroom window in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Over the years growing up I began to see all the fallout from the Kennedy assassination. Conspiracy theories blossomed while the Cold War intensified and the Vietnam War raged on. The Watergate scandal legitimized an ever widening mistrust of government. The haze that seems to conceal the ugly truth of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is part of this fallout, along with our default paranoia.

Today we wearily recognize that the corporate mass media is diverting us from what is meaningful with bullshit about the sex lives of famous golfers. Paid pundits create noise and confusion like a smokescreen. But a smokescreen against which truths?

Conspiracy theories abound in crazy times, during economic slumps or after tragic events. The mind must find patterns to explain the things that upset the familiar order. Moving the bits around into a coherent narrative is a way of returning to the way things were before the tragic events occurred. Without explanations, we feel like leaderless soldiers fighting invisible enemies.

“Who’s the commanding officer here?” asks Captain Willard as they reach the last U.S. Army outpost along the river.

“Ain’t you?!”

Was Oswald a secret agent? In his book, “Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery,” Norman Mailer says yes but with an important qualification:

“…Oswald was a secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the privacy of his mind. At the least, we can be certain he was spying on the world in order to report to himself. For, by his own measure, he is one of the principalities of the universe”

But let’s turn to popular music. So often it manages to capture the hysteria released by big, tragic, shared events.

The Beatles, “Revolution 9” played backwards (from “The White Album,” 1968)

The practice of putting messages into records with reverse speech is called backmasking or backward masking. It became popular in 1966 with the Beatles’ psychedelic album “Revolver.” The Beatles used a process they called automatic double tracking to reverse instruments and vocals. John Lennon claimed to have discovered it working with producer George Martin while stoned on marijuana.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s describes castle walls being breached in the story of Sleeping Beauty as a metaphor for the walls of society in times of war, famine and tragedy. They open like a husk of wheat and release a force of energy.

When the “White Album” was released in 1968, it was like a conduit for the primal forces that had been building up like gases below an arctic permafrost. Sudden climate change brought sudden release. The album was mined for hidden meanings and injunctions. Unfortunately, among those interpreting the music was Charles Manson. For him, the album was justification for mass murder: “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”

The Beatles, “Helter Skelter” (1968)

Manson, like Oswald, was one of the warped products of the particular psychoses of that pocket of history. Today we have our own dangerous crazies, and an abundance of conspiracy theorists, including modern day backmaskers:

Backmasking freaks have figured out that if you play something backwards enough you are likely to find some sort of recognizable pattern.

The idea of subliminal messages has been hugely popular among conspiracy theorists since the 60s. Events are always the result of manipulations by one or more secretive powers, and those same powers can’t help but betray themselves—by accident or by deliberately planting clues. Legislation like the Official Secrets Act has ensured that difficult truths about the world remain secret, and for many of us, it is a given that it is used to cover up deception, corruption and embarrassing incompetence of every kind, and, as in the Arms for Iraq affair, to subvert the course of justice.

But are there people with such great powers? Are we right to have so little faith and trust in our governments? You can hear no answers in the rumble of the collapsing twin towers. There is no closure and nothing is ever conclusive.

My record keeps spinning but now in the opposite direction; I seem to be coming back. I now see a man tumbling through the air, jumping off the tower of his own accord. The photo was taken by Richard Drew at 9:41:15 a.m., September 11, 2001.

What happened on either side of this moment in time? This picture offers only a glimpse of the truth, the edge of an entire story. The man was identified, but many of his family members chose not to accept that it was him. “He would never have done that.” Are they right?

I’m now back to watching “Popeye,” but it’s not the Popeye I was watching that day when history and a smoking TV interrupted. Out of the confused viral ooze of the world wide web slides a secret message. It’s the familiar Popeye theme song, but something has changed.

In “Moments of Being,” Virginia Woolf writes about all the time we spend in a semiconscious state, doing shopping errands or sitting at traffic lights. Then, she says, there are sudden flashes of insight and awareness when we see that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. “Hamlet” or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.”

We are also the images we replay time and again. We are the theories we imagine. Of the Iraq invasion, Tony Blair said: “I was wrong but I’m not to blame because I fooled myself I was right.”

What? What? Oh… Number nine. …Dead is Paul. Kachoo Koo Koo… Walrus the am I. 11/9. Attack under we are? East middle. War long. Conflict intensity low.

Change climate…. Obama deploys another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and the insurgency only grows in strength.

There is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, nothing kept secret that will not be brought to light.

Now it’s 2010 but I am still I am looking through the cross hairs of Oswald’s gun before he pulled the trigger on Kennedy. Now I am back at that moment when I was watching “Popeye” just before my TV caught on fire. I am standing on the grassy knoll and through the haze and chaos of reality I am standing alone and looking straight into the eyes of the unknown assassin.

- Peter Lynch

“There is nothing covered up that will not be exposed and nothing secret that will not be made known.” - Luke 12:2

Walter Cronkite, CBS News (November 22, 1963)

I’m going back in time spinning my records in reverse to try and decode a childhood recollection …Number nine, number nine…

I was watching “Popeye” on our black and white RCA TV and smoke started to rise from the set. The smoke completely enveloped the living room and my mother I had to evacuate our Thorncliffe Park apartment.

In the haze of smoke in the hallway, I could hear the superintendent of the building speaking to my dad. “It was a terrible thing that happened,” he said. I could still hear the television. Before I was pulled away from the doorway I caught a glimpse of the screen through the smoke. What I saw was Walter Cronkite’s face, breaking the news about the President.

What had happened? Dan Rather is probably the first person who watched the 486 frames of Zapruder’s silent eight-millimeter color home movie of the presidential motorcade. When he narrated the film in his CBS nationwide television coverage, he said the President’s head “went forward with considerable violence,” confirming the official story--that the bullet came from behind, from “the Oswald position.”

Later when the film was publically released, we saw that Kennedy’s head was in fact snapped backwards, introducing the possibility that the shooting was carried out by more than one gunman. This discrepancy has spawned the most conspiracy-ladened debate since the Jews were accused of killing Christ.

The movements of Kennedy’s head, seen frame by frame—analyzed, blown up, reversed—do seem to prove that a shot was fired from in front of the motorcade. Here are frames 311, 313 and 321:

The funny thing about watching reality on film is how easily your perception can be influenced by whatever narrative you have invested in or would rather believe. We still don’t really understand the events of November 22nd, 1963, the forces that produced them and what they really mean.

The Abraham Zapruder film

In the fabled 1966 World Cup game between England and West Germany, England was awarded a goal after the ball was seen by the linesmen to have hit the underside of the crossbar then bounce over the goal line and spin out of the net.

When, as a biased England fan, I look at the film footage I clearly believe that it goes over the line. If you are a German supporter you likely prefer to believe the opposite. The rest is the stuff of myth.

1966 FIFA World Cup Final: England 4 -- West Germany 2 (30 July)

The imperfections and inadequacies of images like these—captured as they are in time from a particular angle—become part of the narrative of a mythologized event.

In his 1988 novel “Libra,” Don Delillo aptly refers to the source and substance of all the conjecture surrounding Kennedy’s shooting as “six point nine seconds of heat and light.” The heat and light of Zapruder’s film contain the assassination rather than show it with any certainty; it becomes a phantasmagoria.

The underpinning of this hysteria and the bigger overriding narrative is the difficulty accepting that the most powerful man in world can be shot by a wing nut in broad daylight while the world watches. The President’s head snaps back instead of snapping forward. That is what our eyes tell us. What conclusion to draw?

The tape of the Rodney King beating was played around the clock on CNN. 90% of Los Angeles residents believed the police used excessive force. Then the almost all-white jury acquitted the officers for lack of sufficient evidence. Perception of even clear cut video evidence can be warped by fear or agenda.

George Holliday’s video of the Rodney King beating (March, 1991)

Humans tend to want to believe there is an order to things. It’s hard to accept that our world is held together by such fragile threads, that our reality can seem so arbitrary. Thankfully most of us are not consumed by revenge fantasies like the zealots who brought down Kennedy or the World Trade towers—those earth-shattering events, both captured on film, and both paradoxically the most cloaked in conspiracy. The more those images are repeated the more incomprehensible they become.

Dan Rather commenting the collapse of WTC7, CBS News (9/11, 2001)

Chaos theory states that one can never predict with certainty the state of particles, for example, their location or velocity. The Zapruder footage seems to bear this theory out. Don Delillo talks about a chaos version of history and applies it to Kennedy’s death: there is no conclusive version of the assassination but rather numerous multiform forces and sequences of events playing themselves out all at once.

I like Delillo’s chaos theory, but I personally think Oswald did it. Or rather, I agree with J. G. Ballard in “Love and Napalm: Export USA”: “Oswald may have pulled the trigger, but wasn’t it all that hate and violence in America that loaded the gun?” Or maybe it is best summed up by the title of that unfinished Orson Welles film: “It’s All True.”

- Peter Lynch

“Better king for a day than an schmuck for a lifetime.” -- Rupert Pupkin

For the 15 Minutes Gallery, Pittsburgh Technology Council

Martin Scorsese’s seminal film, “The King of Comedy,” is the story of an aspiring comedian Rupert Pupkin (played by Robert DeNiro) who wants more than anything to be famous. His biggest dream in life is to end up as a guest on a popular talk show. Things don’t work out the way he imagines and he ends up stalking the host Jerry Langford (played by the brilliantly cast Jerry Lewis).

“The King Of Comedy” was a box office flop when it came out in 1982 yet for me it remains Scorsese’s darkest, most prophetic and resonant work. Its vision of how fame and the cult of celebrity skewer our world is even more relevant today than when it first arrived on the screen.

Andy Warhol’s visionary observation that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” resonates through the film.  Pupkin’s desire for fame is exemplified by him standing in front of a cardboard cut out TV talk show set in his mother’s basement “interviewing” a non-existent guest while a laugh track plays in the background. The “studio audience” is photos of people stuck to the wallpaper.

Martin Scorsese, “The King of Comedy” (1982)

There probably isn’t a filmmaker (or performer for that matter) alive who hasn’t felt a bit like Rupert Pupkin at one point in their career (“Jerry, I’ve got Rupert Pupkin on line two…” ), who hasn’t fantasized about recognition and the fame it promises to bring.

“The King of Comedy” was a harbinger film in terms of reading the reality TV zeitgeist of the last decade and Pupkin is the archetype for the likes of fame seekers like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

Even more so, it chillingly foretells the current glut of reality shows like “Survivor” or “American Idol” and echoes peoples’ obsession with train wreck TV. This is an audience who likes the possibility of a downfall as much as it secretly shares a personal unconsoled impossible dream. Like many of the attention seekers on YouTube, it becomes clear in “The King Of Comedy” that Pupkin functions better in the realm of fantasy than in reality.

Pupkin’s main obstacle a dark void with in himself and his dilemma is the fact that his aspiration and skewed ambition clearly exceed his talent. His constant rejection turns him in to a sociopath. At one point he and his ‘groupie’ cohort even kidnap their TV idol, Jerry Langford.

Pupkin’s quest for fame is a search for meaning, a quest to complete himself, and he believes it will happen when he appears on the Langford show. This film unrelentingly implicates you, the viewer, and never lets you off the hook, which is what makes it such a profound and unsettling work. It seems there is a little bit of Rupert Pupkin in all of us.

Charles Manson

Permit me to be terrified!

- Peter Lynch

“It’s About Time,” CBS TV (1966/7)

Once upon a time (Christmas Eve, 1968; I was eleven years old), I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It was a galvanizing cinematic experience, which shattered my idea of time and space. That night, I became obsessed with wondering about what life would be like in the year 2001. That date presented me with a point of reference that linked a world between the primitive and the future seamlessly and poignantly particularly as represented by Kubrick’s opening shot, of an ape throwing a bone into the air, which then turns into a space ship.

Stanley Kubrick, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)

When 2001 did arrive, I had just finished my documentary Cyberman on self-professed cyborg Steve Mann, an appropriately futuristic subject. Interestingly, Steve was fascinated with a form of retro looking technology, which reflected the speculative science fiction style the media of my childhood frequently tried to invent. He was also obsessed with a form of cybernetic digital photography which he believed allowed him to get outside of his body and step into space and time.

From “Love You Till Tuesday” (1969) -- David Bowie: Space Oddity (1967)

As a child in the 60s, I was fascinated by that weird split wherein people were obsessed with prehistoric time and the cave man aesthetic as well as the future, generally represented as the space age. Somehow dinosaurs and spaceships were all around us, in houses, couches, tables and chairs, lamps, stereos, in rock bands, in TV shows, in movies.

“One Million Years BC” (1967)

“Barbarella” (1968)

What I loved about this era of pop culture was that it was a contemporary portrait of the times as much as it was about the future or the past. Both the “Flintstones” and the “Jetsons” somehow depicted recognizable portraits of contemporary life of that era.

“The Flinstones” (1960-66), ABC TV

“The Jetsons” (1962-63), ABC TV

My first dramatic film, “Arrowhead,” was based on an archaic point, a primitive artifact I found in the modern apartment complex I grew up in Thorncliffe Park in Toronto. “Arrowhead’s” mythology was deeply informed, not only by prehistory, but by a blurring of history and pop culture.

“Trog” (1970)

“Arrowhead” set time and space in motion between the poles of prehistory and the retro future. I think it speaks to our longing to connect with our past while trying to imagine a more idealistic world, our attempts to confront the conflicts and realities which grow out of the human condition.

“Planet of the Apes” (1968)

These two seemingly disparate historical poles were always about people living on the outside of society — how we would cope with these two extremes of the universe which make up both who we are and where we might be going.

President John F. Kennedy, 
Special Joint Session of Congress, 
25 May, 1961; Moon landing, 20 July, 1969.

The 60s depicted this kind of warping of the time and space of history, and the success of Apollo 11 at the end of the decade seemed to announce the imminent arrival of our imagined future.

- Peter Lynch

“It’s About Time” — Theme Song

It’s about time, it’s about space,
About two men in the strangest place.
It’s about time, it’s about flight --
Traveling faster than the speed of light.
This is the tale of the brave crew
As through the barrier of time they flew.
Past a fighting minuteman, past an armored knight,
Past a Roman warrior, to this ancient site.
It’s about caves, cavemen too,
About a time when the earth was new.
Wait’ll they see what is in sight!
Is it good luck or is it good night?
It’s about two astronauts, it’s about their fate,
It’s about a woman and her prehistoric mate.
It’s about time, it’s about space,
About two men in the strangest place.
They will be here right on this spot
No matter if they like it or not.
How will they live in this primitive state?
Will help ever come before it is too late?
Will they ever get away? Watch each week and see!
Will they be returning to the 20th Century?
It’s about time for our goodbyes
To all these prehistoric gals and guys.
IT’S ABOUT TIME!