Zapruder

After watching the Zapruder film in class for the first time, quite honestly, there wasn't too much going through my mind. Yes, it was disgusting, greatly saddening, incredibly literal, yet still so mystifying, but it was still just another person getting shot in the head. I'm nearly 18, I've seen my fair share of blood and gore movies. There shouldn't have been anything extremely special about seeing someone get shot in the head, even if it was the President of the United States--that could have just been an actor for all I know. 

However, as the loop began to replay, I found that my eyes were uncontrollably drawn to the screen again and again. It was the same thing from the same perspective with the same [crappy] quality shot and the same brief frames of Kennedy ducking out of the frame and then quickly reappearing. It was one of those things in which you just couldn't tear your eyes away, despite you being disgusted with yourself for doing so.

Mr. Mitchell mentioned that there were people who knew this ~90 second clip by heart, frame-by-frame. I've only seen it... maybe 5 or 6 times, and was already getting quite sick of it. How many times do you have to see something before it goes from a recorded clip of a living, breathing human being getting his brains blown out and his hysterical wife scrambling across the car to scoop up his brains and skull in a futile, desperation-fueled manner to a lifeless, analytical sequence of pixels and physics devoid of any emotion? 

It's not exactly a big secret to learn that the brain can alter the way we take in information from the physical world and change it to what it desire--after all, how else did LSD work? Yes, that is somewhat oversimplified, but the idea that occurred to me in class is based off of these principles. After seeing this film dozens upon dozens of times, how many people saw the driver shooting Kennedy, simply because they wanted to believe it? If it's possible, it certainly could add an interesting twist to the set of conspiracy theories.