In the weeks leading up to the thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon's death (December 8), a wealth of new Lennon and Beatles-related material is going up online and on TV. I've already blogged about the Beatles going up on iTunes, but there's more. I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of CNN's documentary, Losing Lennon: Countdown to Murder, going up this weekend, back to back with a documentary on John Lennon living in America
Losing Lennon is actually really good, sparing us some of the more lurid elements one would normally expect from a documentary like this. It features never before seen interviews by anchor John Roberts with people close to Lennon and his killer, Mark Chapman, and really focuses on trying to get to know the protagonists, leaving all the CIA-killer conspiracy theories that one's come to expect behind.
Now a great deal has been said about the Lennon assassination, and a great deal more will be, but this documentary manages to paint a compelling portrait of the protagonists. John Lennon, a family man, and artist devoted to his work and that of his wife, Yoko Ono. We're show his first son, Julian Lennon, and the way he was left behind by a Beatle trying to stay in the limelight, and his second son, Sean, whose birth give John a second chance to make a family. We're shown a thin, drawn Lennon listening to Ono's track, "Walking on Thin Ice" (which is, incidentally, very ahead of its time) again and again, trying to perfect it for the one he loves.
In contrast, Chapman is shown as a tormented individual, schizophrenic and struggling against the "little men" in his head. While any history of Chapman cannot help but be disturbing, the documentary goes a good way towards showing him as a tragic result of a society whose primary focus is fame. Chapman may have been brainwashed to kill Lennon, but it probably wasn't by the CIA; the answer, I think, was much closer to home. With abusive parents and a variety of conflicting influences, he was the perfect candidate to become obsessed with leaving a terrible mark upon history. It was the society that raised him that left him decentered and awash in the middle of an America he couldn't deal with; it wasn't money or politics or even beliefs that drove him to do what he did, but merely the feeling of being a "little man" in a world where, even as a "big man" he couldn't get any recognition. The desire to be whole, is somewhat akin to the desire to be recognized, for who couldn't be recognized (we tell ourselves) when they were a whole person, performing to the best of their abilities? Unfortunately, Chapman could only envision himself whole by dealing in holes.
The documentary leaves us thinking about people like Lennon. What a figure like that meant. Someone who wanted to go among the people and raise consciousness about the vicissitudes of modern society. Somebody who wasn't too serious but inspired millions to take up action against a world that was oppressing people and creating the kind of lacks that Mark Chapman felt so powerfully.
I recently marched with Copwatch in New Haven, a group of activists against the Police Brutality that is rife in this city. Without figures like Lennon to inspire us that peaceful protest is the way forward, we might not be marching, we might be channeling our rage in different ways. It is due to him and others like him that people started to imagine a better world without states, money and war. And we know, thanks to him and others of his generation, that, in make that world happen, we need to, in the words of Rudi Dutschke (also victim of an assassination attempt by a mentally unstable shooter) effect a "long march through the corridors of power."