How many of you remember the movie Jackie from 2016? It was well-received at the time, but like everything in our age of ephemera, it didn’t make any lasting impression. As the national motto says, “don’t ask questions, just consoom product, then get excited for next product.”

Despite my best efforts (i.e. writing long-winded, rambling reviews) it didn’t even manage to garner Natalie Portman the second Oscar she deserved. It’s too bad, because if it had, it would have made the 2017 Best Picture announcement even more screwed up, since presumably Faye Dunaway would have announced Jackie as the winner when it wasn’t nominated.

On the other hand, more people probably remember Jackie than have read Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image. Which is also too bad, because, as I said in my review, it basically predicted our current society.

If you don’t want to read (or reread) my review, the executive summary of Boorstin’s book is that ours is increasingly a world of what he termed “pseudo-events”. Pseudo-events being artificial creations of publicists and propagandists to generate news items, or what we today call “content.”

Careful readers will notice I’ve referenced one pseudo-event already: the Oscars, which is a ceremony based around people giving themselves awards for pretending to do things and creating elaborate illusions. It is a pseudo-event based on pseudo-events. Naturally, it is one of the biggest news events of the year, every year. Somewhere, Boorstin’s ghost mutters, “Q.E.D.”

And Jackie is a film about the construction of pseudo-events, images, and narratives. As the widow says towards the end of the film, “I believe the characters we read on the page become more real than the men who stand beside us.” Indeed.

Of course, the central precipitating event of the film is anything but pseudo, as it involves the real death of a real man. But from there, after a whirlwind of emotional agony, Mrs. Kennedy sets to work crafting the funeral for her husband, planning it with the same care she put into her renovations of the White House; with an eye to how the public will perceive it.

The film is framed as a conversation with a strangely disrespectful journalist, who strikes a decidedly abrasive tone with Mrs. Kennedy that seems impossible to imagine happening in real life. My interpretation is that this is meant to represent her impressions of the Press as a whole, rather than any single real event. Again: images!

Over the course of the film, the journalist develops a grudging respect for how skillfully she crafted political theater to convey her message, never more so than when she says the whole thing can be summarized by the last lines of the musical Camelot.

To be frank with you, it was the use of Camelot in the soundtrack of Jackie that inspired me to do this post. Let us peel back the layers of this pseudo-event onion: here we have a film about how people used a play based on a legend to craft a fictional narrative that then shapes reality. When you listen to the voice of Richard Burton portraying King Arthur singing about Camelot (which would have been the actual performance Kennedy would have heard) set to footage of Natalie Portman playing Jackie Kennedy spinning the whole thing for a magazine interview—well, it really does start to blur the line between reality and fiction.

Speaking of the footage of Portman-as-Kennedy: the film includes scenes where archival film of the real Jackie Kennedy is intercut with scenes of Portman mimicking her. Many a film reviewer noted how it was impossible to tell which was which. (I can tell which is which—but then, I had a poster of Ms. Portman in my room when I was 12.) Still, there’s no denying that the imitation is expertly done, and that an actress in a movie reenacting the words and mannerisms of a woman who was already putting on a performance for the television cameras just adds another layer to this kaleidoscope of unreality.

Boorstin, writing in 1962, already had plenty of material for his thesis from the Kennedy administration, not least of which was the famous observation that Kennedy’s appearance in a televised debate helped sway voters to him.  Jackie is practically The Image: The Movie, since it’s not only the same theme but even the same time period. (By the way, how excellent of a title is The Image: The Movie? They should have made that the subtitle.)

A lot of the advance press, including interviews from Portman herself, emphasized the “Female Power” aspect of the film. (This was late 2016, remember.) Frankly, this is something I’ve never really gotten from this movie. Jackie isn’t empowered, she’s a slave to public opinion, just like everyone else in Washington. She’s good at dealing with it, perhaps, but ultimately, the nature of the image-based world requires her to sacrifice what should be an intimate, private act of mourning her murdered husband to appease the all-seeing eye of mass media.

At least, I’m certain Boorstin would see it that way. The state of the “Graphic Revolution” as it existed in the early 1960s, and that Boorstin exhaustively documented in his book, is captured vividly in the film, to the point where you can see why Boorstin felt like he needed to sound some alarms.

However, there is one part of the film where the widow relinquishes control of her carefully-managed appearance and bares her soul. These are the scenes where she speaks to a priest, and they are some of the most interesting in the entire picture, so they are worth exploring in detail.

The Priest, played by legendary actor John Hurt in one of his final performances, is even more unlike a priest than The Journalist is unlike a journalist. Mostly in the sense that his attitude towards God seems distinctly atypical, as when he says, by way of consoling the widow:

There comes a time in man’s search for meaning when one realises that there are no answers. And when you come to that horrible, unavoidable realization, you accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching… I have lived a blessed life. And yet every night, when I climb into bed, turn off the lights, and stare in to the dark, I wonder… Is this all there is?

I don’t think they’ll be printing that on sympathy cards anytime soon.

In these scenes, Mrs. Kennedy seems to be confessing to a terrible spiritual emptiness, which she has tried to fill by creating the image of an idyllic “Camelot.” But she has not succeeded, and dreams of surrendering, finally, to the void. The film ends with a strong implication that Jackie’s—and by extension, Jack’s—lasting legacy to the world is in the images they created. But for the people themselves, there is no true peace, no true meaning.

This is probably why the movie feels so disturbing and not completely satisfying. The bitter notes are all on a human level, while the notes of triumph and overcoming are all in the range of images and projections. The sacrificial fire casts beautiful shadows on the wall of the cave.

As a drama, it succeeds only intermittently. As a warning about pseudo-reality overtaking actual reality, it succeeds nearly as well as Boorstin’s magnum opus. Which is to say, (a) incredibly well and (b) not well enough. Because every trend Boorstin identified and every facet of political theater that Jackie exposes have grown exponentially since the 1960s. The only parts of Boorstin’s book that haven’t aged well are the ones where he says things like, “this cascade of pseudo-events reached a climax when…”

Buddy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This all leaves us with the question of whether it’s even possible to make a film, or any work of fiction, that warns about everything being fake. Since fiction is by definition fake, isn’t that just contributing to the problem?

I hope you aren’t expecting me to answer that, because the truth is, I don’t know. Or perhaps I suspect I do know, but I don’t like the answer I am coming up with. If it’s correct, it implies you should immediately log off and touch grass. In fact, you should never have come here to begin with when you got thinking about pseudo-events. If documenting the problem itself contributes to the problem… well, we have landed ourselves squarely back in one of those hyperstitional situations, as discussed last week.

The only vague shape of something resembling a solution that suggests itself to me are in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness:

“To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road…”