Roger Ebert

Friday, Dec 8, 2000 8:00 PM UTC

John Lennon, 1940-1980

First published two decades ago, this essay has lost none of its power. It stands as an eloquent tribute to one of the 20th century's most gifted artists.

By Roger Ebert

more
- All Share Services

It was that troubled autumn of 1968 that John and Yoko came to Chicago, to show their new movie in the film festival. The shouts of the Democratic Convention had scarcely died down, and Woodstock had not yet been held, and “Hair” was onstage at the Shubert, and here was this goofy home movie by John and Yoko about a butterfly that took 26 minutes to fly in slow motion from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen.

What was the movie about? We didn’t have questions like that then. There were still hippie children getting married in Lincoln Park, still little VW Bugs with McCarthy flower stickers on their bumpers, and you didn’t ask what it was about, a butterfly in slow motion. Such images explained themselves, in 1968. John Lennon and the other Beatles did more, perhaps, than any other four people to bring about that state of our cultural mind from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.

As long as the people who were young at that time still live, the songs of the Beatles will evoke that period as poignantly and heartstabbingly as the music of other eras still draws tears to other eyes. And as long as the Beatles themselves were all still alive, as long as people could kid themselves that there might be a reunion, a final concert, one more album, that time in history was itself still a little bit alive.

Monday night it died with John Lennon in a brief, violent moment that didn’t make any sense. And a lot of flower children who maybe still had their tie-dyed jeans hanging in a closet somewhere, who maybe grinned the last time they found love beads in the bottom of a drawer, could contemplate the fact that they were damned near 40.

God, it was so long ago, that first moment when we first became aware of the Beatles, and then quickly began to realize that they were changing rock music forever — and then, that they had changed all of our pop music, had a lasting influence on the way we sang and wrote and listened to songs.

It is easy for me to remember the first time I heard about the Beatles, because the moment is locked in tandem with another I can never forget, the time when John F. Kennedy was shot. A few days before Nov. 22, 1963, there was a cartoon in the Daily Illini, the student paper down at Illinois. It showed some beetles in an audience, listening to some humans onstage. No caption. You had to understand it, and even then it wasn’t funny. But who had ever heard of the Beatles? And then, in what seemed like only a week or two, we had all heard of the Beatles, Prince Charles was no longer the only kid who wore his hair long, and the Daily Illini was interviewing campus barbers who said business was lousy.

That summer of 1964, I went to see the movie “A Hard Day’s Night.” Perhaps because it came at the right moment in my life, or perhaps just because it was such a liberating film, so free and filled with joy and music, it moved me as few films ever have. Yes, it truly did — that formless, anarchic black-and-white movie with the Beatles running around in an empty lot, and Ringo going off to walk by himself, and John and George and Paul racing through a train and singing in the wire-mesh baggage compartment while hundreds of little girls screamed and squealed.

The concert footage from “A Hard Day’s Night” caught better than anything else I’ve ever seen the mesmerizing mass effect of the Beatles. And there is one young girl in that film I will never forget. She is blond, she is perhaps 13, she has tears running down her cheeks, she is screaming the name of a Beatle over and over again, hopelessly crying out her passion. To see the scene is to smile: It is the instant crush of an adolescent fan. But the innocence of it, its clean lines of emotion, stand for me as an image of that time.

There had never been anything before quite like the Beatles. Elvis had been as popular but nobody had ever been as popular and as musically important, both at once, and had also had such a fundamental influence on the way we dressed and on our attitudes. There is a sense in which the hippies, the summer of 1968 and the whole Vietnam protest movement blossomed out of the climate that was sung to by the Beatles.

The news that John Lennon was dead came as an immense shock, infinitely sad, because one was grieving not only for his death but for the death of an era, and for the Beatles songs that played all through that time, over and over, giving it texture and a bittersweet flavor. The silly, innocent songs, like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and the songs so deep they were poems, like “Eleanor Rigby,” and the albums that a generation scrutinized for secret messages.

What is most touching, when you remember how we used to study the album covers and try to listen between the words of the songs for the messages the Beatles had allegedly hidden there, was that we really believed the Beatles had a message worth listening for. At their height they commanded more ideological currency than all of the candidates in the last presidential campaign — not because they had more to say, but because they were in a world still eager to listen.

Now Lennon has been shot dead and the Beatles are no more. Ringo, Paul and George still live and the albums are still on the shelves, and Monday night all the radio stations were playing them over and over, but there is no kidding ourselves. The era they sang to, which hung on here and there long beyond its time, is over now. When I first saw “A Hard Day’s Night,” the Beatles looked so very young. Now when I see it they look younger, and younger, and younger.

Thursday, Sep 15, 2011 3:01 PM UTC

I do not fear death

I will pass away sooner than most people who read this, but that doesn't shake my sense of wonder and joy

By Roger Ebert

more
- All Share Services

Roger Ebert

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. “Ask someone how they feel about death,” he said, “and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you’re really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don’t really exist. I might be gone at any given second.”

Me too, but I hope not. I have plans. Still, illness led me resolutely toward the contemplation of death. That led me to the subject of evolution, that most consoling of all the sciences, and I became engulfed on my blog in unforeseen discussions about God, the afterlife, religion, theory of evolution, intelligent design, reincarnation, the nature of reality, what came before the big bang, what waits after the end, the nature of intelligence, the reality of the self, death, death, death.

Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” I say, “Look for me in the weather reports.”

Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

O’Rourke’s had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

That does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed “the distinguished thing.” I will not be conscious of the moment of passing. In this life I have already been declared dead. It wasn’t so bad. After the first ruptured artery, the doctors thought I was finished. My wife, Chaz, said she sensed that I was still alive and was communicating to her that I wasn’t finished yet. She said our hearts were beating in unison, although my heartbeat couldn’t be discovered. She told the doctors I was alive, they did what doctors do, and here I am, alive.

Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally — not symbolically, figuratively or spiritually. I believe she was actually aware of my call and that she sensed my heartbeat. I believe she did it in the real, physical world I have described, the one that I share with my wristwatch. I see no reason why such communication could not take place. I’m not talking about telepathy, psychic phenomenon or a miracle. The only miracle is that she was there when it happened, as she was for many long days and nights. I’m talking about her standing there and knowing something. Haven’t many of us experienced that? Come on, haven’t you? What goes on happens at a level not accessible to scientists, theologians, mystics, physicists, philosophers or psychiatrists. It’s a human kind of a thing.

Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at my memorial service.” I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named “Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh.” Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself “a simple worshiper of the external Buddha.” Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.

Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.

To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

That is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, “Not by foot, I hope!”

Continue Reading Close