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Mangiaracina: Looking back as anniversary of murder approaches

By Nick Mangiaracina

Thursday, December 4, 2008

The plastic case was on a pedestal in the center of the room in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I stopped and stared into the case. No way, I thought to myself. The bloodstained oval glasses sat there. The white placard to the right confirmed what I had thought. These were the glasses John Lennon wore the day that Mark David Chapman killed him.

This image came back to me as the title screen of the great but disturbing film “The Killing of John Lennon” began.

The background was black as the camera panned across Chapman's deranged face. The phrase “All Chapman's words are his own” appeared.

The film tells Chapman's story through his eyes and in his own words. What is most startling about the film is how it shows an ordinary man slowly losing his grip on reality and descending into a world of megalomania.

At the beginning, Chapman lives in Hawaii with his wife. Scenes of lush palm trees and shots of him at the beach abound. However, the bottle of alcohol inside of a paper bag that Chapman drinks while driving shows that something is wrong.

Later, Chapman gives his wife a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” to read. After finishing it, she tells him that she doesn't understand it. Chapman starts to lose it. The incident then spurs a tirade that culminates in Chapman saying that she would understand him if only she understood the book and its main character, Holden Caulfield.

And so his obsession with the book begins. Chapman re-reads it several times within a few months. Soon Chapman convinces himself that he is Holden Caulfield and the catcher in the rye. The line between fact and fiction blur. They merge in and out of each other just like the film walks the line between documentary and fiction.

The connection to Lennon emerges at the library as Chapman discovers a book about him. It is here that his anger with his wife and with himself finds an outlet.

Chapman becomes increasingly enraged as he sees pictures of the gaudy dress of Lennon as he thinks of songs such as “Imagine,” where Lennon talks about imagining a world with no possessions. Chapman later learns that Lennon also owns a yacht, at least two vacation homes and several cars.

Chapman then decides to plot to kill Lennon. After buying a gun, he abandons his wife, travels to New York City and arrives outside Lennon's residence at the Dakota Building. However, before his rendezvous he sees the film “Ordinary People” and decides not to do it and instead returns home. The scene shows his last bit of humanity before killing Lennon just weeks later.

It was on a cold dark night on Dec. 8, 1980, that Chapman pulled the trigger five times. Lennon died as Chapman stood there with the gun. He didn't try to run or hide; he just stood there. At that moment, Chapman found his identity; he became the person who shot and killed John Lennon. As the movie poster reads, “I was nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on earth.” However, finding an identity didn't save him. Soon after, Chapman regretted the murder and 20 years later the effects the death has had on Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono.

Since 1981 Chapman has spent his time at Attica prison in New York, serving his sentence of 20 years to life. He will most likely spend the rest of his life there as he's already been denied parole five times, most recently in August. Regardless of what happens to Chapman, Lennon is not coming back. In his place his music lives on — with all its flaws and triumphs, from a human being, not a God, just like Mark David Chapman.

— — Mangiaracina is a Lenexa senior in journalism.

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