Pursuing my effort to solve the riddle of the JFK assassination (new CIA revelations), through the arts, I re-watched this Gene Hackman movie – The Package (1989). And a 'whole' lot of things became evident.

By Emad Aysha
I was amazed to learn that the director was Andrew Davis, the genius behind The Fugitive (1993). It’s a world of difference. While The Package is a well-written thriller with generous dollops of well-thought-out action, it’s a bit low-key and uninvolving.

It could be the director didn’t have enough experience at the time, or, more likely, not enough money. It feels a bit too grimy and blue-collar as well, and there’s hardly any close-ups of people’s faces.

The Fugitive is all about emotional involvement, being engaged in the detective work, and rooting for the hero (Harrison Ford) and his ultimate captor (Tommy Lee Jones). The colours are also lush, and the cast is exquisite, down to Julianne Moore in one of her early but very notable roles.

COMFORT PHASE: Julianne Moore in 'The Fugitive', the reasonable redhead who can see through the director's subterfuges.

Maternal, sexy, and a hard case all at the same time. The pacing was perfect, too. The Package is a bit too slow for its good, while very plausible to the point that you wonder why something like this didn’t happen!

To put you out of your misery, the dearly departed Gene Hackman plays a special forces guy in Germany tasked with delivering a renegade soldier – Tommy Lee Jones, of course, the ‘package’ – to the US to face trial. Then the prisoner conveniently escapes, revealing his entire identity to be a complete fabrication.

Hackman himself is already in trouble for failing to protect an American general from an assassination during key peace talks with the Russians in Berlin. The Cold War/WWII symbolism is evident to all, down to the cold weather (frosty relations).

Turns out the assassination (disguised as ‘terrorism’) was to silence the general who was going to expose a plot to kill the Soviet premier. But here’s the key, or catch. It’s a joint project between the Yanks and Russkies. (New KGB revelations).

They both want to keep their nuclear weapons, as ‘guarantors’ of peace. Meanwhile, the phony identity of the prisoner belongs to an actual person, a disgraced soldier who is given the job of infiltrating a neo-Nazi group.

He’s been told a cock and bull story that he’s going to flush out a KGB man planning to kill the US president. We’re told he’s a patsy, when he’s eliminated, and the writing of the character is near perfect. He behaves like a kid in a candy store while he’s at his cover job as a real estate agent.

He’s also obsessed with decorum, wanting to get a plaque with his name on it – like a medal in his way of thinking. He also gets into a fight with peace protestors. (A hint at Oswald in New Orleans).

The movie cleverly sneaks in hints at how the country is becoming fascist by having the neo-Nazis think that anyone who is a peacenik is a communist agent, seeing an armed America as a free America.

Words like ‘liberty’, ‘Yankee’, ‘federal grants’, and ‘to serve and protect’ are evident in key but subtle places; also funny masks for Reagan and Nixon. This was also true in Enemy of the State. (The Soviets are surprisingly blond here too, and one almost looks like a Gestapo man).

Other surprising linkups to real life pop up in the movie, such as the African American man in charge of security at the event where the disarmament treaty is going to be signed. He’s a stickler for detail and doesn’t care about politics; safety comes first, re-elections second.

This could very well be a stand-in for Abraham Bolden, the first black man on the White House secret service detail – at Kennedy’s insistence. And not coincidentally, the man who tried to expose the screw-up in Chicago when the Secret Service failed to nab a Cuban and his goons, with rifles, planning to kill JFK.

FALSE FLAGS: A screenshot from 'The Package', where they bump off the whistleblower general. It's made to look like a terrorist attack but Gene Hackman knows better... Too damn organized!

There are lots of little hints about dedicated minority types in The Package, which highlights the neo-Nazi angle all the more. There are minority types among the conspirators, too, but the plotters are all West Point or Ivy League types. One eats with one's hands from a plate, ironically!

There’s a scene in Flashpoint where Kris Kristofferson is juxtaposed with a deer’s antlers on the wall, making him look like a sitting target. He’s contrasted with his idealistic partner, Treat Williams. Likewise, Hackman’s character is who the nihilistic Tommy Lee Jones used to be. Jones treats him well, saying he reminds him of his dad.

Note how Hackman pesters his ex-wife (Joanna Cassidy) about her personal life, a classic motif of the paternalistic state. (Westerners seem to think sexual freedom is the same thing as political freedom, even when you ‘do it’ with your best friend’s wife!)

The intrusiveness of the state, the unelected elites that are, may be why the story starts in Germany, implying that the Americans have been staying in Europe for too long and learned to be like the very Fascists they once defeated.

That may be a historical hint in itself, since General Walker – the guy Oswald is supposed to have shot at – was stationed in Germany, and began spouting neo-Nazi propaganda and indoctrinating US troops under his command.

UNSUNG HEROES: Gene Hackman (RIP), Joanna Cassidy and Tommy Lee Jones, just not in the order of magnetism that you see them in the movie.

The ultimate contribution of this movie is an implicit understanding that something this big can’t be done, can’t succeed, unless the Soviets are in on it.

They have moles everywhere and could expose any US plot, no matter how well concealed, even from the US government. Look at all the JFK file revelations about Soviet warnings about Oswald, and even Martin Luther King.

Note the assassin’s rifle is Austrian, like the German Mauser found in the School Book Depository. For an even weirder linkup, you have 9/11 revelations, such as the CIA man who turned out to be vice-chairman of the American Nazi party!

Who needs congressional investigations with directors like Davis?!