This is a film about grief – raw, directionless, sudden grief.  The film focuses on Mrs. Kennedy’s three days after the death of her husband, President John Kennedy, and how she does her best to cope with such a powerful, public murder.  From the opening sounds of strings being tuned down on a black screen (which become the signature musical motif), to long shots of Mrs. Kennedy (played by an excellent Natalie Portman – it would be a crime if she doesn’t get at least a nomination, she should win her 2nd Oscar for this role) wandering through the White House alone, switching outfits, searching for meaning and mooring like an unanchored boat.  You get an inside look into Mrs. Kennedy’s personality, her strength, her anger, and her love for her husband (despite the troubles that are only alluded to).  The film shows you as she begins packing up the White House for its new occupant and preparing her children for the inevitable loss that they cannot understand at such a young age.  Mrs. Kennedy is also shown obsessing over the legacy of her husband, a good man as she has said, whom she loves as he sits in his rocking chair with Caroline and John, Jr. at his feet.  This is the image that she leaves us with, one which some people who know about JFK’s philandering might ask why she still stays with him.  Her confidante and aide, Nancy Tuckerman (played by Greta Gerwig) is Jackie’s sounding board, her friend, and giver of best advice.  Peter Sarsgaard plays Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a grief stricken man who appears to have buried a brother before with the death of his older brother, Joe Jr., during World War II.

Jackie tells an unnamed reporter (who is probably Theodore White, journalist extraordinaire who has covered many presidential elections – article written 2 weeks after JFK’s death here) the inside scoop about what went on but is so meticulous and private that she edits what he is allowed to say.  This, according to the NYT film review, is where the Camelot imagery and myth surrounding the Kennedy presidency is begun.   But the larger question that comes through in this interview is how does Jackie separate herself from this very public tragedy.  She needs to be a mother to her two young children (and to two dead ones interred next to their father in Arlington National Cemetery) but she also has to be a grieving widow to the rest of the nation.  As the reporter put it, JFK, the nation’s father, had been killed, and Jackie, the nation’s mother, had to carry on with steel in her spine.  Try to imagine something that traumatic has happened to you, and you are one of the most famous people in the country.  How do you cope?  How do you grieve?  How do you move on? 

1. How does the film portray Mrs. Kennedy during her 1962 tour of the White House (original here – https://youtu.be/CbFt4h3Dkkw)?  How does she seem different / similar to First Ladies that you might know best – Laura Bush and Michelle Obama?  Why?
2. Did the film use the right amount of reference to JFK’s woman troubles, should it have explored these issues in depth more, or should they have been mentioned at all in a film about the man’s wife?  Why?
3. Why do you think Mrs. Kennedy asked the ambulance driver and the nurse who James Garfield and William McKinley were, and then Abraham Lincoln?  How did their answers transfer Mrs. Kennedy’s obsession with her husband’s funeral?  (Also, is this a fair comparison between Lincoln and Garfield and McKinley?  Why or why not?)
4. The movie seems obsessed with legacy and myth-making.  Jackie is one of the first to try and preserve her husband’s legacy, one time comparing him to Jesus and temptations in the desert, and at other times, to Lincoln and preserving the Union and freeing the slaves (though he technically didn’t).  Do you think President Kennedy deserved this kind of mythos surrounding him?  Why or why not? 
5. How did the film’s non-linear (jumping from time period to time period) story telling distract or add to the overall narrative, in your opinion?

Pick 4 of these questions (including #4) and answer them in a minimum of 300 words to get full credit for this extra credit assignment.  Due by February 17 before class.