“My work won’t be done until I’m dead and buried. And I hope that’s a long, long time.” -John Lennon in an interview on December 8, 1980, 2 hours before his murder.
Hard to believe but it has been 25 years since a crazed, sick man with a warped view of Catcher in The Rye, one Mark David Chapman, robbed the world of one of its greatest musical voices. John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, were about to enter their Manhattan apartment when Chapman came up and shot Lennon 5 times in the back.
It was an awful end to an amazing life. John Lennon had built the Beatles, a rock group that in its time WAS the world, and then left the band to go out for himself.
In both his Beatles and his solo work, no figure in rock and roll history had expressed the kind of idealism and honesty that Lennon had. In the process, he threatened the boundaries and cultures by which the vast majority of the world had held dear to. The great irony was that the ideals that Lennon preached and sang about (optimism, compassion, love) he only briefly realized in himself. One of the many great aspects of the re-released deluxe edition DVD of the 1988 documentary Imagine: John Lennon, to coincide with the 25’th anniversary of his death, is that it demonstrates this ultimate paradox in the man.
When Lennon was killed, he left behind some 200 hours of film, video, and audio content that he had recorded, most of which had never been seen or heard by the public. The film, which is hauntingly narrated by Lennon himself, opens with a beautiful sequence in his Tittenhurst Estate in Ascot, England where we see him sitting at a piano singing the lyrical and beautiful song “Imagine.” This simplistic opening sets the tone for the rest of the film.
The director Andrew Solt and producer David L. Wolper, much as they had done with Elvis Presley in the documentary This Is Elvis, set out to make the ultimate documentary on John Lennon. On some fronts, they accomplish their goal. This is unlike any other Beatles documentary made, mostly due to the fact that the emphasis is on Lennon and, in particular, the years following his marriage to Yoko Ono and the breakup of the Beatles.
The film starts out detailing Lennon’s childhood in Liverpool, England (his birth on October 9, 1940 was marred by an air-raid attack) and details his lonely, angry, trouble-prone youth. His parents divorced and abandoned him when he was a young child and was brought up mostly by his aunt. He had a brief reunion with his mother during his teens only to lose her following her being struck and killed by the car of a drunken, off-duty police officer. Lennon’s seething anger was the ammo for the music he would unload on the world years later. As a teenager, he wrote poetry, drew, and demonstrated no respect for authority or social conventions.
We see how Lennon met Paul McCartney in the early 1960’s and how, along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, the Beatles were born. They debuted in 1962 and, after 2 years of popularity in Great Britain, they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and conquered America. In no time at all, they were the most popular four men in the world. The Beatles represented not only a change in music but in the way people thought. They were, in many ways, the symbol of the youth movement, the changes that were sweeping the world, and a new social order of the 1960s.While that kind of popularity might seem wondrous and amazing; the reality was quite different.
Lennon often spoke of life with the Beatles as “ a trap.” He was referring to the pressures that came from the fame as well as the fears, including the death threats, record burnings, and KKK protests in the U.S. circa 1966 following Lennon’s infamous remark that “the Beatles were more popular than God.” We learn about their drug experimentation and how it influenced their music.
The fishbowl existence along with nonstop performing and recording, and John’s marriage to second wife Yoko Ono led to the band’s breakup in 1970. We get an eerie foreshadowing of his death in the scene where he confronts an acid-laden vagrant who had been sleeping in the bushes of his estate. Much like Mark David Chapman, this vagrant felt that Lennon’s music had been written FOR him. Lennon is so open and accessible that he invites the vagrant into his home and feeds him.
Lennon used the final years of his life, post-Beatles, to explore his music with Yoko and experiment with avant-garde art and politics. This , along with his drug arrest, led to the F.B.I. and J.Edgar Hoover going after him and trying to deport him from the U.S. John and Yoko’s legendary “bed-ins” for peace are explored and a debate between Lennon and Ono versus Al Capp, the extreme right-wing( think Rush Limbaugh only twice as stupid) creator of the comic Lil Abner during one of their bed-ins is priceless.
It is moments like these that make the film work overall because they are authentic and, despite Lennon always being aware of a camera on him, he is mostly genuine (for better or worse) and seldom seems to be compromising himself or his beliefs. John’s brief 14 month experiment of living without Yoko and his murder are briefly glossed over. Also glossed over is how Lennon was a non-existent, deadbeat of a father to his first son Julian, by first wife Cynthia, yet devoted himself to his second son Sean, by Yoko Ono.<!--page-->
While Imagine is in many ways an excellent look at the man, it sometimes suffers from a lack of focus. At 106 minutes, the film feels too short. The picture quality, unfortunately, is not great. Granted, much of the footage used is archival but there was obviously no attempt by Warner Brothers to update or remaster the print. The audio is much the same. Rather than give us a 5.1 mix, there is only a standard Dolby mix given. Considering the subject matter and music presented here, you would think that this would have been the area of focus for this release.
The extras are a brief but fascinating mix. There is the 15 minute A Tribute to John Lennon: The Man, The Music, The Memories which features interviews with the filmmakers, producer, and Yoko Ono and details the making of the film. The 5 minute BBC radio interview John Lennon: Truth Be Told focuses mostly on teen sex and the influence of Lennon’s music on society.
There is a Lennon Trivia Track which consists of a text-based commentary that scrawls across the bottom of the screen, an acoustic version of the song “Imagine,” an 8 minute tour of Lennon’s Tittenhurst Estate, and a 10 minute interview with the stiff headmaster of Lennon’s high school, William Ernest Pobjoy.
It is an enlightening insight into Lennon as a teenager. One can only wonder why Warners include a trailer for The James Dean DVD Collection except to infer that they were trying to package them both as tortured, genius artists who were ahead of their times.
“Though I know I’ll never lose affection.
Imagine – Deluxe Edition is available at Amazon . As of yet, there is not a release date for the deluxe edition in the UK. Visit the DVD’s database for more information.
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