Insight denied

Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon on 8 December 1980 as he returned to his New York home after a recording session. As Lennon entered his apartment building, Chapman drew a pistol, called out to Lennon, then shot him several times. This film, based on Chapman’s own journals as well as various transcripts, is told almost entirely in Chapman’s own words, beginning with an opening, raspy voiceover that goes: ‘There was no emotion in my blood, there was no anger, there was nothing. It was dead silence in my brain; dead cold quiet. He looked at me, he looked past me. And then I heard a voice in my head. It said “Do it, do it, do it” over and over again.’ Later, Chapman would, of course, say, ‘I was a nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on earth.’ If only he could have appeared on The X-Factor. Now, at least, there is a place for those whose hunger so often exceeds their talent. He’d probably even be on his seventh album by now.

I suppose this movie would have a point — beyond the further somebody-ing of a nobody — if only it added to some understanding of Chapman, but, alas, there is no satisfying Ordinary People moment; you know, with a psychiatrist unravelling the reason for everything in a single, blinding moment of insight, as only happens at the movies anyway. The Chapman narration is thoroughly chilling, but I’m not convinced his reasons add up to much. He was an unloved child. His mother was ‘straight out of The Glass Menagerie’. He talks about his first homicidal fantasies, which involved killing his father because his father once pushed his head down into a bowl of spaghetti.