Anniversary Rememberings

So we're twenty-seven years on from the murder of John Lennon, who was gunned down in front of the Dakota on 8 December 1980 (I started this post while it was still December 8, but I'm not getting it up until the early hours of December 9). I was half a world away at the time, an exchange student in Japan, so it took us a little while to get the news and even longer to digest it. Lennon, of course, had been away from the limelight for quite some time (or at least what seemed like quite some time for a teenager in the '70s) and was just coming back to public performance again with what was, frankly, a mediocre album, but he was coming back, and that's what mattered.

I've always thought that there's a surreal quality to hearing serious news when you're on a vacation or otherwise out of your natural routine. It somehow feels like when you return to your own normality, the news will fade away, and the world will be back like it was. That surreality was exponential in a country where we couldn't understand or even read the language. I didn't believe the first person who told me the news--I wasn't sure why he'd come up with such a far-fetched lie for a joke in bad taste, but surely there was a reason. With the time difference, and all, I'm not even sure how old the news was by the time we confirmed it. A friend and I went out for a drink shortly afterward, and we found a record bar that mostly focused on jazz but somehow had a Japanese Lennon single that featured "Working Class Hero" (it may well have been "Imagine," which in some incarnations has "Working Class Hero" on its B-side, but I don't recall for sure.) We got the bartender to play it twice in a row, but he wouldn't keep it on any longer than that. Then we went back home, knowing the world was a lesser place than it had been earlier in the week.

This year has an added bonus to the commemoration of Lennon's life and death. A new movie has been released in the UK called The Killing of John Lennon (it'll be out in the states in January). The film takes Mark David Chapman's perspective of the events leading up to the murder, and it's getting mixed reviews (The Times liked it, The Guardian did not). What's more interesting is the backlash among some fans who are offended at the very idea of the film (there are examples among the comments at The Times review). Although it has been twenty-seven years--a generation and a half by some calculations--that kind of reaction is not a bit surprising.