John Lennon's early years are now on the big screen
(actually, the smaller screens in the art house cinemas, if you're lucky, if
not, rent it), this is about that.
The Lennon pic came first. I hadn't expected much. To tell
the truth, I had looked forward, with great masochistic relish, to being
tortured by one of my most pettest of pet peeves – the sound of an American
actor trying to sound English.
When one is a spiritual seeker (to put it one way), or a
philosopher seeking self knowledge (to put it another), part of the job is self
flagellation (to put it one way), or purposely seeking out really, really annoying
experiences (to put it another). It's not so much to seek out suffering as a
kind of romantic-narcissistic assumption of the crucifixion drama, but rather
to invoke suffering in order to understand it. Why does a fake English accent drive
me to the final razor edge of absolute hairy oblivion? I can learn a lot from examining
that.
So when I heard that there was a new movie in production
about John Lennon as a kid, I assumed the lead male would be an expensive American
actor expensively coached to deliver an excruciating cock-up of one of the most
difficult English accents to fake, and one which is thirty miles removed from
my native dialect. So I'm like, this is designed to hurt me, this is gunna be
down't snake pit wi'out yr wellies.
As I eagerly and with trepidation anticipated the New York opening of the
picture, two things happened. First I learned that it was an English job, the
lead actor was English. Withhold the lash! This guy is going to get it right,
maybe. Then I saw a preview of sorts on youtube, in which the fellow rendered
vowel sounds hitherto unknown to earthen tongues, let alone Scouse
(Liverpudlian). Oh exquisite pain worthy of Torquemada.
As it turned out, most of the youtube bits were outtakes. It looks like the crew chopped out all the
pieces where the kid sounds like an undercover Martian invader trying to sound
normal, and just went with the sequences where he got it right.
Nowhere Boy is about the life of John Lennon from his early
teens until he left for Hamburg
with the Beatles. It's a beautiful piece of work, and not because I'm Lennon-addled,
but because it a small scale ensemble drama with good actors on a really good
story. It's Oliver Twist, right? Not that the filmmakers aped Dickens. England does
that to a kid. Where do I belong? Nowhere. Can I have some more?
This is dangerous territory – the Beatle thing I mean. It
could have been really awful. It was brilliant. There's a hint toward the end
that indicates the filmmakers appreciate the hazard. John has come to tell his
legal guardian, Aunt Mimi, that he's going to Germany with his band; he needs her
to sign his passport application. She asks which band it is, what's the name of
the band this time? He says, do you care what we call it? She doesn't. It's a
nice touch. The B-word never comes up. It punctuates the point that this is a
guy from a particular, specific, and very small time and place who, through a
bizarre confluence of circumstances, defined "rock star" like Picasso defined "painter."
So what's the story? It has been told many times, but here
you go again. I'll tell it mostly as it is told in the film, because the film
follows the biographies with little flourish, so we can't go far wrong.
John Lennon was born in 1940 during the blitz. The Germans
bombed the hell out of the major industrial centers and ports of Britain. Julia
Lennon gave her son the middle name of Winston (after the wartime prime minister
Winston Churchill) in a fit of patriotism. Maybe there was some class-mobility
aspiration there too. That shows up right enough in the life story that follows.
John's father was a merchant seaman, Alf Lennon, who spent
the war years as a crewman on various of the vessels that kept England fed and
armed during the most perilous period of her history in a thousand years (so
goes the romance; it's not far wrong).
As we learn in the film, Julia — as her sister Mimi tells sixteen-year-old
John during the big confrontation where all the family secrets come out —
"always needed company, if you know what I mean." In other words, with Alf away
at the war work, Mimi wanted a lover. Now't wrong wi'dat. But birth control was
not so easy in those years, so Mimi had a daughter from a soldier while married
to the absent Alf. The daughter, Victoria (noble aspirations again), was "given
to the Salvation Army," as movie Mimi has it, and never heard of again. All of
this is cause for great shame and trauma. You fukin' wot?, etc.
Julia also had mental health issues. The film hints at it on and off, until this
theme peaks as Julia tries to tell John about it. She has spells, difficult
periods where she can't function. John doesn't get it. It's no excuse for
abandoning him as a kid, and his culture hints strongly that mental illness is an
indulgence for spoiled, weak-willed people who can't get on with it. When Mimi's husband, John's Uncle George, collapses
and dies minutes after sweetly and illicitly sharing a drink of whiskey and a
few laughs with his nephew, Mimi won't allow John to cry on her shoulder. She
says they have to get on with it, and
goes back to washing the dishes. During the blitz, the government issued a
poster, a simple silkscreen affair with a picture of the crown, under which
appear the words "keep calm and carry on." That's England right there, my dears.
Mustn't make a fuss.
Fuss or no, when you make a movie, you have 24 scenes and 98
minutes to tell the tale. You have to decide if the scene where a cop chases
boys off the Strawberry Field orphanage grounds is worth it. You have to decide
if it's important to show that Julia tuned John's guitar like a banjo until McCartney
straightened him out. Both of these episodes made youtube, but they didn't make
the final cut. No great loss. Feature film is necessarily reductive.
What emerges are the bare bones, the important bits. We get
the back story in flashbacks, which become increasingly clear as the story
unfolds. When John was five, at the end of the war, his father reappeared,
wanting to reunite with Julia and save the marriage. Julia wasn't having it, so
Alf kidnapped the boy with the idea of taking him to New Zealand. In those years, everybody
with a touch of ambition was going somewhere, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, the US. (Twenty years later, it was the
same deal. It brought my family to the US.)
The teenaged John keeps waking up part way into dreaming the
scene where, in desperation, Alf asks the five year old if he wants to go with
Dad or Mum. The boy says "Daddy"; Julia walks out. The boy runs after her, but it's
too late, he's declared his choice, she's out of there. Her sister Mimi steps
in and takes the boy home. What else can she do?
Mimi and George Smith lived in a nice brick house that
actually had a maid's bedroom, a left-over from a bygone era of middle-class affluence.
Mimi didn't keep a maidservant, but she maintained the relevant manners and
expectations. Twenty years after deciding to start a band, Lennon portrayed
himself as a working-class hero, but he was never working class. He never worked
a day in his life. He tested desperately and at the last minute into the elite type
of high school ("grammar school" in English terms) that his Auntie required he attend,
and then went to art college. Art school
was a fall-back. College was a must for Mimi's John in a way that today's
Americans might not understand. For the twentieth-century American middle class,
at least up until the Reaganites pushed every possible penny out of general
circulation and up toward the wealthiest one per cent, not going to college was
not an option. College was a mass phenomenon in America. In England in the
1940s-50s, going to college was something only rich people did, or privileged middle
class people, like Lennon. He fucked up at the posh secondary school, but they
got him into art college all the same, because shoving the children of the
managerial classes through college was what one did; it was a matter of middle
class channels. No way that motherfucker ain't going to get a degree. But then
there was the band.
In the movie, Lennon's music education mostly comes down to
Mimi and McCartney. In the biographies, Lennon sees movietone newsreels about
Elvis, and decides he wants to be that; that's his calling. In the film, in a
neat feat of conflation, Julia takes John to the cinema where he gets his first
glimpse of Elvis and realizes, all wide eyed and breathless, that his mother
and every other female in the joint is panting. That's me up there, he thinks.
I'm goan fer dat. And, as we know, he does.
The thing about Liverpool
at the time was that there was a thriving dive club scene. If you had a decent
band and you got organized, there were a lot of gigs to be had. And after one
clever club owner figured he could attract the secretaries of the business
district to his place for lunch if there was a band on, Lennon's group was
playing afternoons as well as evenings. That's how you get good, twice a day,
like.
The big moment comes when Julia is run over by a car. The
film doesn't rehash the details. In real life, she was hit by a drunk off-duty
policeman. She had been saving up money for John, and after her death, her
boyfriend handed John an envelope, there's a few bob in there. John uses it to
pay for the band's first session in a real r
He's a Real (Nowhere Boy)
John Lennon's early years are now on the big screen
(actually, the smaller screens in the art house cinemas, if you're lucky, if
not, rent it), this is about that.
The Lennon pic came first. I hadn't expected much. To tell
the truth, I had looked forward, with great masochistic relish, to being
tortured by one of my most pettest of pet peeves – the sound of an American
actor trying to sound English.
When one is a spiritual seeker (to put it one way), or a
philosopher seeking self knowledge (to put it another), part of the job is self
flagellation (to put it one way), or purposely seeking out really, really annoying
experiences (to put it another). It's not so much to seek out suffering as a
kind of romantic-narcissistic assumption of the crucifixion drama, but rather
to invoke suffering in order to understand it. Why does a fake English accent drive
me to the final razor edge of absolute hairy oblivion? I can learn a lot from examining
that.
So when I heard that there was a new movie in production
about John Lennon as a kid, I assumed the lead male would be an expensive American
actor expensively coached to deliver an excruciating cock-up of one of the most
difficult English accents to fake, and one which is thirty miles removed from
my native dialect. So I'm like, this is designed to hurt me, this is gunna be
down't snake pit wi'out yr wellies.
As I eagerly and with trepidation anticipated the New York opening of the
picture, two things happened. First I learned that it was an English job, the
lead actor was English. Withhold the lash! This guy is going to get it right,
maybe. Then I saw a preview of sorts on youtube, in which the fellow rendered
vowel sounds hitherto unknown to earthen tongues, let alone Scouse
(Liverpudlian). Oh exquisite pain worthy of Torquemada.
As it turned out, most of the youtube bits were outtakes. It looks like the crew chopped out all the
pieces where the kid sounds like an undercover Martian invader trying to sound
normal, and just went with the sequences where he got it right.
Nowhere Boy is about the life of John Lennon from his early
teens until he left for Hamburg
with the Beatles. It's a beautiful piece of work, and not because I'm Lennon-addled,
but because it a small scale ensemble drama with good actors on a really good
story. It's Oliver Twist, right? Not that the filmmakers aped Dickens. England does
that to a kid. Where do I belong? Nowhere. Can I have some more?
This is dangerous territory – the Beatle thing I mean. It
could have been really awful. It was brilliant. There's a hint toward the end
that indicates the filmmakers appreciate the hazard. John has come to tell his
legal guardian, Aunt Mimi, that he's going to Germany with his band; he needs her
to sign his passport application. She asks which band it is, what's the name of
the band this time? He says, do you care what we call it? She doesn't. It's a
nice touch. The B-word never comes up. It punctuates the point that this is a
guy from a particular, specific, and very small time and place who, through a
bizarre confluence of circumstances, defined "rock star" like Picasso defined "painter."
So what's the story? It has been told many times, but here
you go again. I'll tell it mostly as it is told in the film, because the film
follows the biographies with little flourish, so we can't go far wrong.
John Lennon was born in 1940 during the blitz. The Germans
bombed the hell out of the major industrial centers and ports of Britain. Julia
Lennon gave her son the middle name of Winston (after the wartime prime minister
Winston Churchill) in a fit of patriotism. Maybe there was some class-mobility
aspiration there too. That shows up right enough in the life story that follows.
John's father was a merchant seaman, Alf Lennon, who spent
the war years as a crewman on various of the vessels that kept England fed and
armed during the most perilous period of her history in a thousand years (so
goes the romance; it's not far wrong).
As we learn in the film, Julia — as her sister Mimi tells sixteen-year-old
John during the big confrontation where all the family secrets come out —
"always needed company, if you know what I mean." In other words, with Alf away
at the war work, Mimi wanted a lover. Now't wrong wi'dat. But birth control was
not so easy in those years, so Mimi had a daughter from a soldier while married
to the absent Alf. The daughter, Victoria (noble aspirations again), was "given
to the Salvation Army," as movie Mimi has it, and never heard of again. All of
this is cause for great shame and trauma. You fukin' wot?, etc.
Julia also had mental health issues. The film hints at it on and off, until this
theme peaks as Julia tries to tell John about it. She has spells, difficult
periods where she can't function. John doesn't get it. It's no excuse for
abandoning him as a kid, and his culture hints strongly that mental illness is an
indulgence for spoiled, weak-willed people who can't get on with it. When Mimi's husband, John's Uncle George, collapses
and dies minutes after sweetly and illicitly sharing a drink of whiskey and a
few laughs with his nephew, Mimi won't allow John to cry on her shoulder. She
says they have to get on with it, and
goes back to washing the dishes. During the blitz, the government issued a
poster, a simple silkscreen affair with a picture of the crown, under which
appear the words "keep calm and carry on." That's England right there, my dears.
Mustn't make a fuss.
Fuss or no, when you make a movie, you have 24 scenes and 98
minutes to tell the tale. You have to decide if the scene where a cop chases
boys off the Strawberry Field orphanage grounds is worth it. You have to decide
if it's important to show that Julia tuned John's guitar like a banjo until McCartney
straightened him out. Both of these episodes made youtube, but they didn't make
the final cut. No great loss. Feature film is necessarily reductive.
What emerges are the bare bones, the important bits. We get
the back story in flashbacks, which become increasingly clear as the story
unfolds. When John was five, at the end of the war, his father reappeared,
wanting to reunite with Julia and save the marriage. Julia wasn't having it, so
Alf kidnapped the boy with the idea of taking him to New Zealand. In those years, everybody
with a touch of ambition was going somewhere, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, the US. (Twenty years later, it was the
same deal. It brought my family to the US.)
The teenaged John keeps waking up part way into dreaming the
scene where, in desperation, Alf asks the five year old if he wants to go with
Dad or Mum. The boy says "Daddy"; Julia walks out. The boy runs after her, but it's
too late, he's declared his choice, she's out of there. Her sister Mimi steps
in and takes the boy home. What else can she do?
Mimi and George Smith lived in a nice brick house that
actually had a maid's bedroom, a left-over from a bygone era of middle-class affluence.
Mimi didn't keep a maidservant, but she maintained the relevant manners and
expectations. Twenty years after deciding to start a band, Lennon portrayed
himself as a working-class hero, but he was never working class. He never worked
a day in his life. He tested desperately and at the last minute into the elite type
of high school ("grammar school" in English terms) that his Auntie required he attend,
and then went to art college. Art school
was a fall-back. College was a must for Mimi's John in a way that today's
Americans might not understand. For the twentieth-century American middle class,
at least up until the Reaganites pushed every possible penny out of general
circulation and up toward the wealthiest one per cent, not going to college was
not an option. College was a mass phenomenon in America. In England in the
1940s-50s, going to college was something only rich people did, or privileged middle
class people, like Lennon. He fucked up at the posh secondary school, but they
got him into art college all the same, because shoving the children of the
managerial classes through college was what one did; it was a matter of middle
class channels. No way that motherfucker ain't going to get a degree. But then
there was the band.
In the movie, Lennon's music education mostly comes down to
Mimi and McCartney. In the biographies, Lennon sees movietone newsreels about
Elvis, and decides he wants to be that; that's his calling. In the film, in a
neat feat of conflation, Julia takes John to the cinema where he gets his first
glimpse of Elvis and realizes, all wide eyed and breathless, that his mother
and every other female in the joint is panting. That's me up there, he thinks.
I'm goan fer dat. And, as we know, he does.
The thing about Liverpool
at the time was that there was a thriving dive club scene. If you had a decent
band and you got organized, there were a lot of gigs to be had. And after one
clever club owner figured he could attract the secretaries of the business
district to his place for lunch if there was a band on, Lennon's group was
playing afternoons as well as evenings. That's how you get good, twice a day,
like.
The big turning point comes when Julia is run over by a car. The
film doesn't rehash the details. In real life, she was hit by a drunk off-duty
policeman.
Te film says she had been saving up money for John, and after her death, her
boyfriend handed John an envelope, there's a few bob in there. John uses it to
pay for the band's first session in a real recording studio. You can probably buy
that first recording online. You can have it in three minutes. Given the set up
in the movie, the song is about Julia. I always thought it was sort of lame,
four teenagers around a microphone trying to sound like Buddy Holly doing a
ballad. But in the film it's very moving. I and the three other guys in the
cinema are teary-eyed at this point.
After that, the Hamburg
gig comes up. That's where the movie ends — John walking off down the road with
his guitar.
The four teenagers get recruited to play long sets in a
strip club in the Liverpool of Germany. They play for hours and hours every
night. They play everything they can think of. They have to learn tons of tunes
to keep up the show. By the time they got back to England, they'd played together on stage for thousands of
hours. Their brains were totally wired for rock and roll, and they were very
hot. They were spotted by a gay businessman who fell for Lennon on first
sight — well, that's one version — and the rest is rock and roll history.
See this.
