The US vs John Lennon

I’m getting tired of documentaries that use events of the past to try to make points about the present. There comes a point where you have to ask whether it’s worth putting all this energy into remembering how things were rather than dealing with what is. On the one hand, it’s nice to be reminded that people can make a difference. On the other, who’s doing anything if all they’re doing is waxing elegiac about past victories? The genre of navel-gazing wish-fulfilment fantasy documentary is as annoying to me as the more violent gun-porn wish-fulfilment fantasies embodied in films like Shooter. But that’s an intellectual disquiet. I had fun watching Shooter and I had fun watching this documentary too. It’s full of visual pop, edited snappily and has lots of fascinating people talking about John Lennon.

I’ve never had much time for John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They just seemed like annoying twits. I have a new respect for them now, and that’s the good thing about this documentary. It shows you how brave sometimes someone has to be to do things that may not seem all that brave or courageous. Writing songs about peace, lying in bed for a week in the name of peace, they don’t sound like very threatening things. But Lennon’s celebrity status meant that he was viewed as a dangerous figure because he could mobilise public opinion in opposition to the government of the day. And so there were wiretaps, surveillance and an attempt to deport him back to Britain. But he didn’t stop; he took the Immigration service to court to challenge the validity of his deportation. And not only that, he started writing more songs and doing more things to protest man’s inhumanity to man.

There are many good things about David Leaf and John Scheinfeld’s film: wall to wall music by The Beatles and Lennon on his own; interviews with his lawyer regarding the deportation case; footage of the various protests Lennon and Ono participated in. They’re all good. But they’re let down by throwing in pointless interviews with people like Tariq Ali, Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky. Commentators rather than participants, they add very little to the colour of the story and are simply annoying. Far more interesting is former Nixon aiide G. Gordon Liddy, whose inclusion provides context to what people were protesting against and reveals just how ugly some of the people in power were back then.

The film clearly wants to say something about the present state of the world, but it has nothing interesting or original to offer. For all its banner waving and analogy drawing, it fails in this task. But as a report on a person from our collective past it’s wonderful. The best praise I can give it is this, I have never particularly liked John Lennon, but I now have a deep respect for the man.

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