Beyond the Multiplex

A fascinating look back at the right wing's sordid attempt to deport John Lennon. Plus: Al Franken! Juliette Lewis! Orlando Bloom!

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, John Lennon, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Al Franken, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Photo: Lions Gate Films

Yoko Ono and John Lennon in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon."

Sept. 14, 2006 | There's a confrontation in the fascinating new documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" that sums up why the most sardonic, most earnest and most intelligent of the Beatles can still drive people nuts, 26 years after his death. It's the early '70s, probably 1972, a year that marked a turning point in Lennon's life and, if you ask me, in American history. Sitting alongside his wife, Yoko Ono, Lennon is locked in heated conversation with Gloria Emerson, then a famous (some would say infamous) foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

The scene is brief but electric. (The same clip reportedly appears in the 1988 film "Imagine: John Lennon," which I haven't seen since its release.) There's none of the star-fucking or ego-fellation that today characterizes celebrity interviews. Emerson and Lennon are both angry, and getting angrier. She finds the Lennon-Ono publicity stunts and peacenik ballads naive and simplistic, and she's letting him know that. Eyes boring into her, Lennon says he doesn't care about that, that his only goal is to end the Vietnam War and save lives. "You can't possibly believe that you've saved a single life!" Emerson says in her exaggerated upper-crust drawl. "Dear boy, you're living in a dream world." Lennon flicks her away like an insect, pointing out that "Give Peace a Chance" had become both a pop hit and the unofficial anthem of the antiwar movement.

As most viewers probably will, I instinctively sided with the working-class Liverpudlian rock star against the Upper East Side WASP lady with the ludicrous accent. But the scene stuck with me and wouldn't go away, and eventually I came to grips with it. First I realized that Lennon and Emerson were engaged in an important cultural debate, and neither of them was exactly wrong. Viewed in hindsight, Lennon and Ono's political theater of the early '70s had a Zen-meets-Dada brilliance and clarity that thrilled and engaged an entire generation. It may well have helped shorten the war and save lives. But Emerson isn't entirely the creep she at first seems to be; she saw their work leading toward an intellectual and political cul-de-sac, and she was right.

After that I became grief-stricken: Pop culture and journalism in our own time have been so thoroughly drained of content, and genuine confrontation, that nothing close to this could happen today. It's nice, I guess, that Bono is working with Paul Wolfowitz on Africa's debt crisis, and that Eminem wants young people to vote. But you're not going to see them arguing with a prominent journalist in front of the news cameras, and no prominent journalist (Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert aside) would even dare.

If Lennon was a dangerous figure to the pro-war American establishment of the early '70s -- and he clearly was -- so was Emerson. Her scathing, mournful reporting from Vietnam, which repeatedly lambasted the idiocy and incompetence of military planners and commanders, did a great deal to cement middle-class opposition to the war (and won her newspaper the lasting enmity of the right wing). Emerson's magnum opus was the 1976 book "Winners & Losers," the best and perhaps only journalistic attempt to capture the war's effects on both Americans and Vietnamese. Like Lennon, she was a spiny and difficult character, and we could use more like both of them. She lived much longer than Lennon, but also departed under painful circumstances. Gloria Emerson committed suicide in August 2004, in her New York apartment, at age 75.

David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's documentary dredges up the sordid and largely forgotten tale of the right-wing attempt -- spearheaded by Strom Thurmond and J. Edgar Hoover, no less -- to get Lennon deported as an "undesirable alien." The reasons are not mysterious and at this late date the history is not in dispute. After the breakup of the Beatles, Lennon and Ono moved to New York in 1971, where they became increasingly visible figures on the antiwar left -- and almost immediately targets of the FBI.

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