John Lennon was shot to death 25 years ago today. His killer was an undistinguished and indistinguishable man named Mark David Chapman. He was arrested, brought to Central booking, and arraigned the next day, at which point he was remanded to the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital Prison Ward for Psychiatric observation and evaluation. As it happened, I was on-call the night he was admitted. (I was in the fourth year of my Psychiatric residency and was taking advantage of the opportunity to earn extra money by providing Psychiatric coverage to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.) For an emergency admission after the admitting office was closed, I had to do a brief evaluation, especially on the look out for agitation and dangerousness to self or others; I had to write admission orders and determine if any special precautions had to be adopted.
I had grown up with the Beatles and was saddened, though not surprised, when they broke up. They have left us some of the most memorable music from an era that produced an exceptional flowering of pop music in all its myriad forms. Their music will be with us for a long time.
When I heard the news of John's death, I was distressed and infuriated. At the time, many of us children of the 60's felt that the Beatles were speaking for us through their music. In our naivety, we believed that if we "imagined" a world at peace, it would miraculously come into being; such is the wisdom of adolescent fantasy. When I realized I would have to admit his killer to the hospital I struggled with my need to be professional. I did not know what to expect from the patient.
My memory of the occasion is layered. I remember John Lennon's assassination with the same vividness I recall JFK's assassination, and the Challenger disaster, and more recently the Columbia disaster and the attacks of 9/11. Certain events punctuate history; time stops and restarts with such events. Of all the disasters, John Lennon's death was the least consequential. His music was never as good solo as it was in collaboration with Paul, and much of the wisdom we believed we were finding through their music and in the spirit of the 60's has turned out to be based on illusion and fantasy. The reality is that he has left us some great music but the world, and human nature, did not change because of the coming of age of the baby boomer generation. Nonetheless, at the time, I felt a great injustice had been done (which is true) and was prepared to feel hateful feelings toward the perpetrator.
Instead, I felt very little. I spoke briefly with Chapman, did a cursory physical (part of the admissions process), wrote some orders and left. He was, in a word, remarkably unremarkable. He expression was vacant and his eyes were dull. He spoke softly in a near monotone and answered my questions without any elaboration. Perhaps in retrospect I am adding to my memory but I recall telling my wife when I came home the next day that he had struck me as a deeply empty person.
In past political assassinations, the motive of the killer was typically framed in ideological terms. Lee Harvey Oswald was attempting to further a muddled communist agenda; Sirhan Sirhan believed he was fighting the hated Jews for his vision of the Muslim Ummah; James Earl Ray was attempting to keep America safe and pure for white racists. All these cases are arguable but at least the case could be made they were motivated by some deeply held beliefs.
In many of the celebrity attacks in the last 25 years, we have seen a different pattern; an innocuous, even nondescript, person attempting to find notoriety by killing a famous person. (Think of John Hinkley, for example.) In the fashion of a true, failed narcissist, they attempt to fill their inner emptiness with the inverted fame of the celebrity. They have nothing and can never find a way to extract anything good from the world; since they still need nurturance, like the abused child who provokes his abuser to at least "pay attention", they will get our attention, even if it is negative attention.
[Even Squeaky Fromm indirectly fits the pattern. She was acting out the narcissisitic delusions of a disturbed mind, rather than a cohernet political agenda.]
With an irony that is amost surreal, John Lennon in many ways represented the antithesis of Chapman; his mirror image, if you will. Lennon was a tortured soul. For many years after the break up of the Beatles, he was lost in existential despair, rarely leaving his apartment, being ministered to by his wife/mother, Yoko Ono. This brilliant man, who at one time proclaimed himself and his band "bigger than Jesus" had an emptiness inside that could never be filled. He said in an interview that the song "Help!" was his cry from the heart; he needed "somebody, ... not just anybody":
Help, I need somebody,
Help, not just anybody,
Help, you know I need someone, help.When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody's help in any way.
But now these days are gone, I'm not so self assured,
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me.
You can hear the need in his voice across the years. What he tells us he needs is someone to take care of him. Yoko tried to fill that need. In the song, "God", from 1970, with the Plastic Ono Band, he wrote and sang of all the things he didn't believe in:
God is a Concept by which
we measure our pain
I'll say it again
God is a Concept by which
we measure our pain
I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in Tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in Mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in Yoga
I don't believe in Kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles
I just believe in me...and that reality
John Lennon, who broke up the Beatles in part because they could not provide him with the inner resources he needed, and and in part because none could tolerate his arrogant assertion of being the true genius of the band, could only believe in himself. His narcissism was successful narcissism; he could have anything he wanted and yet, none of it, not all the material possessions, nor all the groupies (women who he treated as objects), nor all the mind expanding drugs, could do for him what he wanted and needed them to do.
John Lennon said he had found some inner peace through his love for Yoko and I hope that he did before he died; his story is both sadder and more hopeful if he did.
Ultimately, perhaps the story of the disastrous collision between the failed narcissism of Mark David Chapman and the successful narcissism of John Lennon is a parable for our parlous times.
Recent Comments