Toronto Dispatch. 2.

The filmmakers of The US vs John Lennon, David Leaf and John Sheinfeld, say that they tried to make this film for at least ten years, without much interest from producers. Now it's here in Toronto, with a commercial distributor and lots of hype.

True to its title, the film looks at the price Lennon paid for his activism - surveillance and wiretapping by the FBI and a prolonged legal fight with the US government, which tried to extradite him on the grounds that a marijuana bust for two joints in England made him ineligible to live in the United States. He won, and he's lucky that he was rich enough to persevere in a legal war of attrition that most would have lost. All the while, Lennon and Yoko Ono were campaigning for peace, in bed before news cameras and on television. Richard Nixon, stung again and again by Lennon's wit, thought he had something to fear from this entertainer, and he tried hard to eliminate the threat.

There's a heavy archival dose of Lennon's times along with his life here in this slick authorized doc that moves from Lennon the childhood rebel (abandoned by both parents) to Lennon the "genius," to Lennon the rebel again, to Lennon the martyr. The Yoko-approved production often has an airbrushed quality, with re-mixed Lennon songs from the time as a constant accompaniment - polished in spite of the gruesome footage of the Vietnam War and police brutality. We're reminded again and again by talking heads that Lennon was not just a martyr, but a pure one. You find yourself imagining that things were a bit more complicated. Where were the drugs, the anger, and the other Beatles who were anything but Yoko's fans? Don't let the hagiography keep you away from this one - this is not the definitive story, but there's still plenty of real history in it.

The drama took place in the 1960s and 1970s, when Lennon and his new love, Yoko Ono, decided to live permanently in the United States (where the US-educated Yoko had been working as an artist for years). It was also at a time when Nixon was not just making enemies, but listing them systematically, and sending government agents to watch them and audit their taxes. Entertainers who supported groups like the Black Panthers or the Yippies (or who opposed the Vietnam War publicly) were a gnawing annoyance, as we hear in a telling video clip from Nixon acknowledging that show business figures who take political positions can have a huge influence. Nixon did deploy Sammy Davis, Jr at the 1972 Republican Convention. (Lennon's good-natured mocking was yet another reason for the resentful man to be jealous of someone.)

Bear in mind that the Republicans would throw it all back on their enemies eventually, putting the actor Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980. But as the old saying goes, Ronald Reagan was no John Lennon, although the two did share a public congeniality, even a way with the right zinger line at the right moment. Lennon was around thirty when all this was happening - when Reagan was that age he was fighting World War II on the Celluloid Front, safe in Hollywood from everything except the gossip columnists.

At the time, John Lennon was just what the Left thought it needed, a celebrity who gave a cause instant visibility, although here he was something of the gentle renegade, appealing for peace from his hotel bed with Yoko in Amsterdam or Montreal, doing an entire week on the Mike Douglas Show. We hear from witnesses to the whole thing like Yoko Ono and the former Black Panther Bobby Seale, who appeared on Mike Douglas with Lennon, and from former FBI agents who discuss the reasons for wanting Lennon neutralized. Lennon's humor cut through everything. All the more reason for Nixon to have felt threatened.

G Gordon Liddy, the Nixon henchman, is the film's right-wing heavy, playing into the predictable Nixon demonology as he recalls with bald-headed intensity how masses of young demonstrators struck fear into well-meaning cops with guns and clubs - what else could they do but shoot? We also hear extensively from Geraldo Rivera (now a Lennon expert?) and from Mario Cuomo, who gives his opinions on Lennon's significance. I guess you can never have too many celebrities in a movie, no matter what they say.

It takes the film a while to get to the direct confrontation between Lennon and the government - there's more than half an hour of "Lennon for Dummies" on the way there - but more illuminating is the venom from Strom Thurmond at the time, who denounced Lennon in writing and demanded his extradition. Piles of government documents hammer away at the same goal.

Those of us who felt the tragic loss of John Lennon will feel it again watching the documentary. (I'm assuming that the young audience born after Lennon's death in 1981 will be learning much of this for the first time. Better late than never, and better the official biography than nothing at all.) Lennon was candid when talking about his fear of being followed and watched, but he seemed fearless when he called for an end to the Vietnam War or when he defended his peaceful, satirical mode of calling for peace on TV or on billboards that he paid for all over the US. There were plenty of critics and skeptics at the time who wanted to skewer a star. Yet the man who was soft also sued to Justice Department - and won - when documents showing harassment and improper interference into his immigration case were made public. All during this legal fight, he would perform at benefit concerts and then gab for hours for the benefit of the TV heartland with Dick Cavett or Mike Douglas. Where are the entertainers like Lennon now? Where are the talk show hosts?

The doc makes you wonder about artists' politics and about artists in politics, and whether activist artists can accomplish much. Lennon could mobilize the daily press and the TV shows, and he could galvanize vast crowds at demonstrations who chanted "Give Peace a Chance," yet Richard Nixon, the man who persecuted him, was returned to the White House in a landslide in 1972. Had the showman achieved anything?

A similar question is posed by the New York Times reporter Gloria Emerson, an opponent of the Vietnam War, when she asked Lennon, with mocking incredulous condescension, whether the mass chanting and the happenings with Yoko in bed before the cameras were just silly and ineffectual. Lennon stands his ground, maintaining that an entire generation was talking about peace. Instead of peace, as we all know, we got an American withdrawal from a bloody war, and we got Watergate. Those turns of events troubled Lennon, yet his position wasn't based simply on results, but on the conviction that he was doing the right thing. Try to find public figures doing that today.

Throughout the doc, Lennon says again and again that he is an artist, not a politician - you'll see that the politicians on both sides of the battle didn't buy that argument at the time. The film gives context to those who think they're in the trenches of a culture war, that these battles began long before the National Endowment for the Arts stared giving grants to controversial performance artists. Lennon first came under attack in the mid-1960s, when he smirked for eternity that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ.

To be fair, it was a wild provocation from a man who knew how to play to an audience, although if you had asked teenagers at the time, they would probably have given you the same answer, and they wouldn't have needed Lennon to tell them. It was just the fuel that Lennon's enemies needed to rally innocent kids to burn their Beatles records - there are scenes of the Lennon-bashing and the bonfires, stoked by Ku Klux Klan men in hoods and robes. If you couldn't burn a Beatle, at least you could burn the anti-Christ's work.

You get a sense, watching The US vs John Lennon that those were vastly different times - not just that the players were different, but that the audience was, too. It's clear that the preachers calling for the burning of Beatle records then were extremist reactionaries on the fringe, and everyone knew it. Aren't these the people with "faith-based initiatives" who visit the White House regularly now? Aren't the illegal surveillance and wiretapping that helped get Lennon's extradition case dropped the kinds of weapons in the "war on terror" that Bush and Cheney want to keep in our arsenal? After 9/11, hadn't most of the country rallied behind a strategy to rush troops to Iraq as Bush, already faced with weakness of any evidence for Iraqi aggression, urged us to "give war a chance"? John Lennon wouldn't have fallen for it.

Posted by dwhudson at September 9, 2006 9:02 AM