This article contains moderate spoilers for Season 1, Episode 6 of A Love Story.
If every love story is a ghost story, as David Foster Wallace wrote, those who tell the story might consider how many ghosts of love are still alive. A Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn BessetteFX’s semi-fictional narrative about the relationship between an American prince and a reluctant princess has captivated audiences. Since its premiere last month, the show—a series of drama and camp, capturing the pain and freedom and lives of the people it portrays—has become the most-watched miniseries in FX’s streaming history.
A Love Story it proved to be very popular, however, with several people who successfully found themselves, without their consent, in production. On Friday, actress and activist Daryl Hannah—who had a long-term relationship with a Kennedy family aide before her marriage to Bessette—posted opinion essay in New York Times which sued his performance on the show. The Daryl Hannah of the series, troubled and needy and serving as a human problem for the love story on offer, is, Hannah claimed, a lie. The character arc “is not even an accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John,” she wrote. His essay came with a sad title: “How can you A Love Story Stop This?”
The show ends, of course, for the same reason many similar ones do: because exploitation can be entertaining—and very profitable. Half fictions to sell. A Love Story is the latest entry in the franchise, helmed by producer Ryan Murphy, featuring American Crime Story, American Sports Legendand Animal-many of which provide their own vaguely fabricated presentation of American scandal events. Hannah’s criticism echoes statements made in response to the franchise’s treatment of Jeffrey Dahmer’s abuse, the case of OJ Simpsonand the impeachment of Bill Clinton. They drew criticism from Jack Schlossberg, John’s 33-year-old nephew and current candidate for Congress, who called the Murphy-ized version of his uncle inaccurate and “disgusting.” Ironically, many such protests, however legitimate, double as publicity for the shows they criticize.
True crime, as a genre, balances its exploitation—human tragedies and traumas, which are reproduced for mass consumption—by holding emotions in focus on justice. His stories usually feature victims and criminals, their plots turning on fundamental questions of whether mysteries will be solved and criminals held accountable. They are, in that way, very moral. The Murphyverse takes that approach to a larger scale, taking popular true crime stories of the past and bringing them back to modern sensibilities: Monica Lewinsky who was invented half a year ago. Accused he was the main character rather than the punch line. (Lewinsky, in this case, was one of the producers of the series.) The ugly spectacle of the OJ Simpson trial was presented, in retrospect, as a moral failure.
These reforms have offered their own kind of mediation: They may use the stories of real people—they may reduce real people to soft half-fiction predictions—but they do so, or claim to do so, in the service of a broader sense of justice. They are correcting the record. They correct mistakes. If, in the process, they release a half-designed outrage, this is a small sacrifice in the scheme of things. Even justice, it seems, can bring collateral damage.
A Love Storyalthough it’s a self-aware departure from other Murphyverse shows, it uses the same logic. This is true love, used through criminal means. This love story has heroes and villains. It asks questions, retrospectively, about justice. And, as if to ward off accusations of exploitation that have plagued previous shows, A Love Story he goes out of his way to sympathize with his loved ones. It offers wealth as a gift rather than an insult: The show takes two people who, today, are best remembered for their tragic end (a plane crash that killed John and Carolyn at ages 38 and 33, respectively, handing them over to perpetual youth) and resurrects them whole and real. It takes the basic objection of those who have become real criminals in entertainment pieces—I am more than my misfortune– and make it again, on behalf of its citizens, a foundation. It turns real people into characters that are compelling and convincing. They are well written. They have played well as Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon.
As John and Carolyn fall in love, the show seems to fall in love with them too. The show’s John, “America’s son” and its most eligible bachelor, has inherited not only his parents’ jaws but also their sense of duty, charming charisma, and telegenic idealism. He, in today’s terms, is a perfect child; in showing, though, this is less his blessing than his curse. Principals, traditionally, have at least had a degree of job security. But John, as the “king” of the United States – as a dynasty in a democracy – struggles to make a name for himself. He is constantly caught between his desire to fulfill his birthright and apologizing for it.
Carolyn, for her part, is caught between her desire for a prince and her desire not to be a princess. A trendsetter—her personal style, in life, helped solidify ’90s simplicity as a timeless style—Carolyn is the Cinderella whose crystal slides took the form of skimpy ski dresses. And she is a beautiful girl, the show suggests, who is very hot. Early on, we see her sneaking around Calvin Klein’s offices (and occasionally gossiping with her best friend, the up-and-coming designer Narciso Rodriguez); enjoy dark clubs and cheap beer; and informs a drunk friend with whom he sleeps of his preference for keeping things “quiet and normal.” The show’s Carolyn takes the slogan—”I’m not like other girls”—and makes it real: She’s one of the few women in America, A Love Story suggests, who doesn’t care about John’s last name.
This is hagiography suitable for an age that prefers its heroes to be relatable. A Love Storyin turn, he elevates his lovers, sympathizes with them, humanizes them. Most of all, it empathizes with them.
But compelling fiction is fiction all the same. Love is not forgiveness. These versions of Carolyn and John are characters, ultimately, who claim to represent real people. And their viewers face a conundrum that plagues many series in the Murphyverse: The more each show engages as entertainment, the more it becomes suspect as a piece of fiction. When you turn real people into characters—when, for legal reasons, you preface each episode with a disclaimer that lets viewers know that the people they’re about to watch are real. and unrealistic—you can expect to hear complaints from those who have been fabricated.
And you can expect viewers to question what they’re watching—even, and perhaps especially, when they’re enjoying the show. The same skepticism that plagues Murphy’s true-crime works easily applies to this true love story: When do viewers become viewers?
A Love Story it is not certain. It makes certain concessions to the privacy of its protagonists. During the sex scenes, his cameras follow the pair closely—before, with pronounced discretion, they pull away. When the two are in public, the show offers small cinematic scenes: shots taken from afar, turning surveillance into beauty. The flapping of camera shutters becomes a sound. Yet the series retains its core values for the members of the paparazzi, which it portrays as vultures and stalkers and inimitable villains. The photographers and their cameras, scene after scene, threaten to turn Carolyn and John’s American love story into a horror story. But A Love Story it delivers its criticisms without seeming to question whether the semi-fictional work—the complete reflection of two people’s lives—is paparazzo in other ways.
When John F. Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, writer Norman Mailer predicted the cultural impact of his political rise: “American politics,” Mailer declared, “would now also be America’s favorite movie, America’s first soap opera, America’s best-selling.” He was right. He was right because democracies have their dynasties too: people raised by our tendency to confuse accidents of birth with acts of fate. A Love Story air and flow at a time when the Kennedy name has lost much of the cultural currency it once had. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president’s nephew who was assassinated by his cousin John Jr. he made a name for himself by turning conspiracy theories into national policy. Camelot, always a dream, seems more like an illusion. The episode’s version of Jacqueline Kennedy, speaking to John Jr. shortly before her death, warns her son that “the public always holds a flower in one hand and a stone in the other. Don’t forget that.” A Love Storytrying to keep the old romance alive, will be able to hold both.
