Time to cash in on the JFK file exposés; see my Winter Kills and Enemy of the State reviews. Not to mention the dollar crisis/BRICS standoff, along with Chinese debt control over Trump's America (see Richard Wolff & Michael Hudson), I found prophetic insights on both in this golden oldie conspiracy thriller Flashpoint (1984).
By Emad Aysha
It pays to count on art. Science gives you facts, art tells you what to do with them. It gives you ways of interpreting them, filling in for facts that we don’t know, and anticipating new facts we hadn’t thought were possible.
DUTY TO REMEMBER: Kris Kristofferson as border guard Bobby Logan in 'Flashpoint'. I think you can guess what kind of outdated Italian rifle this is, just shot from the 'front' this time!
Flashpoint is relatively slow and overly tight neo-noir starring Kris Kristofferson and Treat Williams. They’re Texan border guards and chance upon a derelict vehicle buried in a mudslide, with a dead body, a metal box full of money and an old-model rifle.
They keep the money, but the news gets out, and that’s when things go wrong. The feds come over, ostensibly to do a drug bust, and people start dying off like flies in an apparent cover-up. The only one who survives in the end is Kristofferson, being a former Green Beret and Vietnam vet.
In the closing scene, as he’s begging to know who the dead person is, the oldtimer sheriff tells him this was the second shooter on November 22nd. But what’s interesting is the motive for the murder of the president. The villain in the piece is played by Kurtwood Smith, a supposed drug enforcement officer who lets smugglers escape only to catch them again.
He pretty much says it all in this key scene, while talking to the hero: “Every morning I get up, I thank God for drugs and murder and subversion, because without them, we’d all be out of a job.”
The implication is that law enforcement took out the President because he was fighting a real war against organised crime and so threatened their paychecks, and ability to skim drugs and shakedown dealers and peddlers.
Notice also that the buried vehicle is a Jeep, implying that the assassin was a Texas Ranger. They were made unemployed just as the Border Patrol guys are under threat from the latest tracking technology.
There are Cold War and coup hints, mind you, such as in the newspaper clippings scene. But even then, you find FBI corruption mentioned. It may seem mundane and far-fetched, but take a look at the new files, specifically those related to the CIA asset Gary Underhill.
He told his friends that his life was in danger after discovering that a “CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics, and other contraband and manipulating political intrigue to serve its ends” had killed JFK (Newsweek, 19 March 2025).
This, in turn, is similar to Three Days of the Condor (1975), a suspenseful movie where a small outside unit investigates possible security leaks by analysing cheap pulp novels. Strange, but true, since one novel gets everybody killed except for one analyst busy buying sandwiches – the hero played by Robert Redford.
Weirder still, the novel in question has America invading the Middle East to secure its oilfields, which pretty much anticipated what happened with the Iraq War. But, and this is key, Redford’s character speculates that there’s a CIA inside the CIA doing covert ops for vested interest groups.
That’s essentially what Gary Underhill said, and what Kennedy found out, and what you see in muted form through the movie Flashpoint. Art truly is one step ahead. Oh, two more artistic connections before calling it a day.
ABUSE OF TRUST: Does law enforcement have a vested interest in 'not' capturing criminals, to shake them down instead? That's what is hinted at in this microfiche screenshot from the movie.
The first, amazingly, is The Wizard of Oz, since silver is preferred to gold in the novel. (Not in the movie, replacing silver with ruby slippers).
Wouldn’t you know it, in Flashpoint, the hero and his partner find that some of the money is silver-backed cash, a policy antidote to the Federal Reserve’s power at the time of Kennedy. (Yet another motive to kill him).
Secondly, Flashpoint reminds me of Sean Connery’s sci-fi movie Outland (1981)—a frontier, border town-type movie, down to the beards and brothels. There you have a drug ring that he’s trying to crack as a US Marshall.
The catch is they can’t investigate the bodies to find the drug that’s frying their brains. They’re ‘buried at sea’, just like Osama bin Laden was, to remove the evidence.
I know this is stretching it, but I think bin Laden died a long time ago, probably from natural causes like kidney failure. I think the guy the Seal Team 6 dude (Robert O’Neil) gunned down was an imposter on The Eagle Has Landed (1976) model.
Possibly a distant relative to fill in for him, and married to his widow for honour purposes. (The Al-Qaeda ‘joke’ makes no sense. In Islam it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead. And Saudis have no sense of humour).
When al-Malik al-Saleh died in Egypt, the last Ayyubid king, the Mamluks concealed this fact for the sake of the war effort and allowed his queen, Shajar al-Dur, to rule. Abu Muslim Al-Khurasani's army said he wasn’t dead, the same with the Shiite Imams from Hussayn onwards to the still hidden Mahdi.
In Viva Zapata! (1952) The peasants claim Zapata is still alive and in the hills, waiting to come back one day when they most need him.
I figure the Americans knew bin Laden was dead and so made sure his replacement ‘slept with the fishies’. Oh, and it’s easy to fool DNA tests if you have 70 siblings. Check out Mickey Rourke in Killshot (2008), and he only had two.
FACE OF CONSPIRACY: Kurtwood Smith in a screenshot from 'Robocop' (1987). He's the henchman in this JFK thriller as well. Talk about corporate crime.
Who would think there is something to intertextuality, just in the pursuit of objective fact instead of a post-modernist runaround. No surprise, then, that Flashpoint has detector technology on the border, similar to the equipment used in Vietnam.
It means immigrants won’t enjoy freedom in the US, but also hints at US crimes abroad coming back to haunt them at home – like military tribunals. So much for homeland security!