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It is to be said that every American could remember where he or she was when they heard the news that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Today, it’s official that no one under 50 can, or ever will, remember that moment. But I bet a great many people who are too young to have experienced the cataclysm of JFK’s murder can remember where they were the first time they saw the Zapruder film. Because for anyone too young to remember the assassination, that 26-second, 486-frame little home movie — the film that has been viewed more than any other film since the medium of film was invented — isn’t just the looking glass we pass through each time we think about the JFK assassination; it’s not just how the assassination lives inside our minds. The Zapruder film expresses the meaning that the killing of JFK has acquired. As shocking a tragedy as it was, tearing a black hole in the nation’s psyche, the assassination would have been, without the Zapruder film, an event that belonged to the past. Over time, however, the killing of JFK became more than the savage murder of a leader: It became, through conspiracy theory, a metaphor for the larger breakdown of our world. And it’s the images from that film that have kept JFK’s assassination alive as a bad dream we’re still trying to wake up from.
 

I remember the first time I saw it. It was in 1975, on the late-night ABC program Good Night America — which was, in fact, the first time the Zapruder film had ever been shown on network television. Frames of it, of course, had been published in Life magazine, one of whose editors, Richard B. Stolley, purchased the film directly from Abraham Zapruder in the days following the assassination. But when you consider the place that the Zapruder film now occupies in our world, it’s extraordinary to consider that no one basically saw it until the middle of the 1970s, after Richard Nixon was out of office. Arriving on network when it did, on the heels of the televised bloodbath of Vietnam and the televised conspiracy of Watergate, the Zapruder film, with its grainy, blunt, ugly-beautiful, and enigmatic images, made you feel like it was something that had been locked up in a vault for a reason, as if that little film possessed secrets nearly radioactive in their potency. Now the time had come to view those secrets. It felt like the ultimate forbidden movie — a snuff film that was also the missing puzzle piece in some vérité noir. In 1975, as I settled into my family’s living room to watch it, I felt, for the first time, the feeling that has preceded every viewing of the Zapruder film that I’ve undertaken ever since. It’s a fusion of mystery and horror and awe that says: “I will watch this film — and when it is over, I will know.”