Nearly 20 years ago, the movie documentary Imagine: John Lennon presented a picture of John Lennon's life, from his childhood to his years with The Beatles to his time as a solo artist to his life as a husband and a father. One element in every description of Lennon's life is his outspokenness, which led to political activism when he was in his late 20s and early 30s.In 1999, Jon Weiner, a professor of history at the University of California - Irvine published Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files. The book chronicled Weiner's attempt since Lennon's death in 1980 to obtain the files that the FBI accumulated on Lennon, mostly when he was a target of the Nixon Administration. The book also reveals that Nixon considered Lennon such a threat to his administration that he was surveilled and an attempt was made at deportation (which arose out of a suggestion from former South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond).
The new film The U.S. Vs John Lennon chronicles this period in Lennon's life and in American history, but rather than simply being another snapshot of Lennon, this is instead a tale about today and the parallels between the current Bush Administration and its Nixon predecessors. Producers and directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld have skillfully told the tale of Lennon's activist years with commentary from a variety of knowledgeable sources on the right and the left, and crafted it in such a way that the similarities to the present day are unmistakable. (Indeed, the bonus material for the DVD spends a lot of time explicitly talking about these similarities.) [Leaf, in addition to producing many films about pop culture, is also the author of The Beach Boys and the California Myth, an excellent biography of Lennon's contemporary Brian Wilson.]
The movie tells a compelling story, whether you know of Lennon's fight with the government or not. The paranoia of Nixon and his people has been well-documented over the years, but here - and in Weiner's book - is evidence of all the dirty tricks and underhanded scheming. When Lennon was said to be planning a series of concerts in 1972 to offset the Republican primaries and national convention, Thurmond wrote to Nixon and suggested deportation as a way to prevent political opposition. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the 26th Amendment had been passed, giving the right to vote to all 18-to-21 year-olds, who were thought to be among Lennon's primary audience. Nixon believed Lennon - and by extension, rock and roll music - had real political authority. It's to John Lennon's credit that this was likely very accurate. (As this article about the film in The Nation points out, this idea of activist rock musicians doing an election-related tour sat idle for over 30 years, until the Vote For Change Tour in 2004 by Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, R.E.M., The Dixie Chicks, and others who opposed the re-election of George W. Bush.)
Unlike the 1988 movie Imagine (an excellent film in its own right), this film doesn't focus on Lennon's contemporaries in rock music or popular culture to comment on his life. Instead, we hear from Weiner, Walter Cronkite, Carl Bernstein, G. Gordon Liddy, John Dean, Geraldo Rivera, Mario Cuomo, Ron Kovic, George McGovern, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Gore Vidal, and Tariq Ali, among others. All of these folks had some contact with Lennon personally in the years addressed in the film, even the likes of Dean and Liddy, who were on the other side - in the Nixon administration - and were following the story of Lennon at the highest levels of government.
Of course, Yoko Ono is also present in the film as a link to John himself. Perhaps no other figure in popular culture has been as unfairly maligned as Ono, who, in the most emotional segment on the DVD (in bonus footage), reads her letter to the parole board concerning Lennon's killer. Any fan of Lennon or The Beatles will be moved.The extras on the DVD are limited to additional interviews and footage of Lennon, as well as a print interview by Tariq Ali, done in 1971. (Other bonus footage would seem superfluous, anyway, so there is no "making of-" documentary of the documentary and no commentary on the commentaries in the film.) The extra footage is about an hour long, and it is excellent. The majority of it is must-see stuff, particularly the segments titled "Dissent Vs. Disloyalty" and "Then and Now," which make an explicit case that the excesses of power in the Nixon years have been exceeded by the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Only Liddy and Rivera - both right-wing spokesmen who presently earn their living from conservative propaganda outfits - deny the excesses of the present day. Even Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, concedes; although, to be fair, Dean has written recently of his belief that modern conservatives have been co-opted by authoritarian people and ideas.It's really a shame that these two segments in the bonus material weren't included in the film. Perhaps the filmmakers didn't want to make their point about modern-day parallels so explicitly. (Ironically, Lennon was not someone to hide behind subtleties; the subject of the whole film is him saying what he believed.) The film - taken as a whole on DVD - is much more poignant when one considers the injustices of Iraq, the Patriot Act, the failure of government to respond to Hurricane Katrina, the erosion of civil liberties and the other excesses of power of the Bush administration, with the realization that John Lennon's could have been a strong voice against them. The movie celebrates his spirit and his influence, which is still speaking out, and still in defiance of authority.
More info: The John Lennon FBI Files Web Site (Updated)
