I caught Oliver Stone‘s JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (Showtime app, currently streaming) a week and a half ago. The reason I’ve waited is due (and I’m sorry to say this) to a very slight sense of disappointment.

Most of the film is fascinating, and I have no argument with any of the “what if?” speculations. Nor do I doubt that Jack Kennedy died as a result of some kind of conspiracy. But one of the most bothersome aspects of the whole alleged conspiracy thing isn’t addressed. Not really.

I was expecting that the 118-minute doc would address the fact that the best visual record of JFK’s murder — the 8mm Abraham Zapruder film — doesn’t show a back-of-the-head blowout, which is what all the conspiracy theorists been telling us for years.

Nor does it explain how, when and by whom the Zapruder film was allegedly altered. Nor does it consider the viewpoint of Life magazine editor Richard Stolley, who saw the raw Zapruder film in Dallas before anyone had a chance to fuck with it.

“It’s not just the Parkland doctors who saw the gaping hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull,” a Stone colleague told me last summer. “It’s also in the declassified files of the HSCA; there are also just as many witnesses [who saw the same] during the Bethesda autopsy.

“That is what the film focuses on — the declassified files made possible by the Assassination Records Review Board. Which the mainstream media ignored.”

Here’s how I put it last July: “I’ve been all in on the JFK assassination particulars for decades. But I’m skeptical about the occipital head wound thing. I’m reluctant to accept that so many people could’ve worked so hard to alter the head wound and the Zapruder footage of same, and yet none had a single tearful deathbed confession moment…not one?

HE comment: I’ve watched many, many interview videos with those Parkland doctors, particularly around the time of the 50th anniversary (i.e., 2013), and not a single interviewer or moderator followed up with an obvious follow-up question, to wit:

“Nobody’s challenging the accuracy of your first-hand observations,” they should have been asked, “but how do you explain the bizarre lack of ANY visual evidence in the Zapruder and Nix films…why is visual evidence that shows a rear-of-the-head blow-out…why is this supposed evidence completely missing in the Zapruder and Nix films? How do you explain this?”

One could also mention LIFE’s Richard Stolley — the man who arranged for LIFE’s purchase of the Z film and who saw the raw Zapruder footage in Dallas right after it came out the lab — it’s surely significant that Stolley never once mentioned any discrepancy between the raw Z film and the various color versions that eventually became ubiquitous after the full Z film was aired by Geraldo Rivera in the mid ‘70s.

Think of all the people who were involved in the alleged alteration of the Z film…those at that alleged CIA secret Kodak lab in Rochester, not to mention Bethesda doctors who took pictures of Kennedy’s head wound during the autopsy, and how they all somehow managed to ignore or cover up the gaping occipital head wound WHILE AT THE SAME TIME creating fake images of the top of the head and right temple wounds…

Remember also how the blood and cranial brain matter somehow caught the sun’s reflected glare in Dealey Plaza in the Z film and how difficult it would have been to fake this.

Remember also that Jackie Kennedy’s white-gloved right hand touched the rear of JFK’s head right after the fatal shot and yet her glove wasn’t soaked in blood…

And then imagine the number of people involved in this alleged conspiracy to hide and deceive, and ask why none of them — NOT ONE ALLEGED CONSPIRATOR — ever blurted out any kind of deathbed confession. People are generally terrible at keeping a secret, especially over a period of several decades. And yet every last photographic conspirator kept their yaps shut for decades on end. EVERY LAST ONE stuck to Moscow Rules to their last dying breath.