Mania no no no

Rating: 1/10 (2 August 2019)

The late-sixties was barely breathing, but it still had a pulse, until Mark David Chapman(Jonas Bell) walked into a public library and began the process of pulling the plug. The security guard, the librarian, the other patrons: How could they have known that a madman was in their midst? Nobody looks like an assassin until they become one. He was "Nowhere Man". He was on an island. Chapman perused the fiction stacks, looking for "some kind of guidance" as he scrutinized authors and titles inscribed on spines, overlooking and sparing those works of literature the infamy of being weaponized. The Church of Scientology, we learn in Mark Piddington's "The Killing of John Lennon", was located right across the street from where Chapman worked as a security guard. He made repeated crank calls to its worshippers. Chapman believed that God should not take the form of a living author. And yet, he misconceived "The Catcher in the Rye" as a sacred text, unconsciously appropriating J.D. Salinger's words as scripture. The irony eluded Chapman. Unlike The Church of Scientology's founder, Salinger never claimed to be a prophet. Holden Caulfield, the disaffected teen who "was surrounded by phonies" wanted to kill himself, not other people. Chapman misinterpreted "The Catcher in the Rye", afflicted he was with a Holden Caulfield complex, the same as any religious crackpot, when he gunned down John Lennon outside The Dakota Apartments in NYC, circa 1980. Lennon was one of the phonies, according to Chapman. If the deranged young man listened to "God", an album track from "John Lennon & The Plastic Ono Band", and not the Salinger of his own making, he would have known not to "believe in Beatles". People loved The Beatles. People loved John Lennon. But in Salinger's own words: "People are always ruining things for you."
Rose Petrofsky(Wendie Jo Sperber) knows which mop top is left-handed. She begs Larry(Mark McClure) to stop the car so she can yell "Paul" into a pay phone and win free tickets to "The Ed Sullivan Show". Stock footage of screaming, hormonally super-charged young girls on black and white celluloid only tell half the story of Beatlemania, a pop culture supernova that started in earnest, but spread like a tempestuous wildfire, when the Pan Am that carried the four lads from Liverpool touched ground at JFK on February 4, 1964. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", the 1978 feature film debut by Robert Zemeckis, colors the disease by foregrounding those young women who lost it at the radio. Rose always carries a treasure trove of dimes in her pocket for a situation such as this. She intends on feeding one at the closest coin slot. Rose's condition is reaching critical mass. She threatens to jump. They don't believe her. Pam(Nancy Allen), Rose's best friend, should know better. Back at the record store, where vinyl copies of "Meet the Beatles" are selling like hotcakes, Pam witnesses her pal scream at a passing cardboard likeness of Paul. Cardboard, a processed paper good, simulacrum even more analog than the image on a movie screen or television set, puts Rose in a spasmodic bit of hair-trigger frenzy that bespeaks of an idolization that transcends the ordinary love you feel for your lover, your parent, or your pet. It was, quite simply, utter madness. Grace(Theresa Saldana), an aspiring photojournalist, insists that Larry drive on, and in the next instant, the film depicts how Beatlemania, at the outset, was a contagion without no known cure. Rose makes good on her threat. Janis(Susan Kendall Newman), the folk music aficionado, a proto-hippie who loves Bob Dylan, shrieks. Tony(Bobby DiCicco), a greaser out of time, can't believe that the girl riding shotgun propelled herself onto hard pavement from a moving vehicle, Later in the film, unfairly, it's Pam, engaged and not even half the devotee that her daredevil friend is, who sneaks into the Beatles' room at The Plaza Hotel. Suddenly, alone with men's things, famous men, something primal switches on inside her. Lascivious in nature, albeit abstract, like a concuspiscent groupie, Pam cheats on her husband, and worse, Rose, when she takes off her engagement ring and performs something resembling foreplay to Paul's bass guitar. At the "Ed Sullivan Show" taping, after "She Loves You" recedes into memory, Pam sobs quietly. The sweet single-minded love she lavished on the Hofner is consummated. She grips her skirt while the others help Rose recover from a fainting spell. Richard(Eddie Dezeen), a memorabilia collector Rose meets at the hotel, loves Ringo. Rose and Pam, both, love Paul; one like a silly schoolgirl, one like a cosmopolitan woman. Grace loves George. And finally, there is Janis, the future flower child, who is so mystified at Rose's lack of social consciousness when she cuts off Peter, Paul & Mary in mid-song with the thoughtless turn of a car radio knob. Someday, she will love John, and cry the hardest on that fateful day in December, when Yoko Ono lost a husband, Sean lost a father, and the yuppies lost their bridge to yesterday.
Should the world forgive Mark David Chapman? No. That's an irrevocable no. "Watching the Wheels", the third single off "Double Fantasy" was climbing the Top 40 when Chapman gunned down Lennon with hollow point bullets, in the back. "The Killing of John Lennon", albeit exploitative, works as a docudrama; it gets all the details right. Chapman meets the icon twice. John(Richard Sherman) signs his copy of "Double Fantasy" before he enters the limo, en route to a recording session with his wife. How could Lennon have known that he just signed his last autograph. When the ex-Beatle returns and sees Chapman loitering outside his apartment complex, he probably though the young man wanted another one. Chapman, serving twenty-years-to-life in a New York state penitentiary, continues to be turned down for parole, despite his repeated public affirmations of remorse for what he did yesterday, nearly four decades ago. "Yesterday", directed by Danny Boyle, has the unintended but unfortunate effect of being a fantasy that, arguably, benefits Chapman, because in this alternate universe, he is free as a bird.
"It burned in my head; it was like an electric current passing through my body," the killer narrates, as he clutches the book to his chest; he continues: "and lighting up all the cells in my brain." Chapman, a born-again Christian, gets to be Holden for real, in an extra-diegetical sense, because this time he does "catch everybody if they go over the cliff," instead of that ugly doppleganger who drops them. Who is watching the wheels on the bicycle that Jack Malik(Hamesh Patel) rides when he slams into a bus? "Yesterday" can be read as Mark David Chapman's double fantasy. A worldwide blackout corresponds to the assassin's described high wattage overkill as if Chapman is some intradiegetic narrator who telekinetically recontextualizes the cells that light up his brain. The world stops spinning, 'til he says spin. It's just like starting over. Why Jack, a mediocre singer-songwriter who calls it quits to the disappointment of Ellie, his manager, after he plays in a seemingly invitation-only tent at some midlevel music festival. Best known, by default, for "The Summer Song", Salinger fans will recognize that the novel is set in winter. The temporal distance between the hot season and the eighth of December is only equated by the spatial distance; another island in another ocean: Great Britain, the Atlantic, so far away from Mark David Chapman's genesis that ended so apocalyptically. Instead of John Lennon or Paul McCartney, it's the quiet Beatle, George, whom Jack Malik most evokes, since Harrison's attraction to traditional Indian music informed his songwriting, starting with "Love You To" and ending with "Within You Without You", a sitar-heavy album track from "Sgt. Peppers'...", in which The Beatles developed alter-egos, as a means to create some distance from the trappings of fame that engulfed them. The character George adopts for these practitioners of baroque harmonics has a name now: It's Jack Malik. The retired performer wakes up in a hospital, greeted bedside by Ellie, who hands her client a mirror that reveals two missing teeth, a metaphor that signifies the erasure of Lennon/McCartney as songwriters. As Ellie leaves, he asks: "Will you still love me when I'm 64?" and his bewildered manager wonders aloud about the chronological randomness. Jack was chosen for a reason to be the go-between for fantasy and double fantasy.
During that same visit to the library, Mark David Chapman climbed the stairs and picked out a second book; it was a coffee table hardcover about The Beatles. For no particular reason, he targeted John, finding an adventitious link between Holden's notion of phonies, described by Salinger as people who were "charismatic, wealthy, attractive, and superficial", and the song "Imagine", in particular, this couplet: "Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood of man". "Imagine", which finished recording in early July for an October release, encompassed the cyclical period that falls under the astrological sign that denotes a lion. Jack is not the only person who remembers the Beatles. Two sentients; one man, one woman, talk with Jack backstage after they interrupt a press conference. The man's name is Leo, Chapman's stand-in. They give the dishonest singer-songwriter the address to John Lennon, alive at 78, an everyman, at peace, in a remote part of England.
"Yesterday", without meaning to, validates the madman's grudge against Lennon. At a concert in his hometown, Jack Malik sticks it to the phonies, including his label's A & R woman, and alas, himself. This is the screenplay Chapman would write. Jack, in mid-set, announces to the world that he's not the author.
He abides by Lennon's own words: "Imagine no possessions," and releases "his" catalog online for free.
Jack Malik is no phony.