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Our personal stories reveal who we are. They tell the listener how we think, what we think about, what motivates us, our personal histories and so forth. Such is the concern of the psychologist who tells us to lie on the couch and tell us all about ourselves.

As one of my professors used to tell me, the main difference between psychology and sociology is that the former is retail, the latter wholesale. The stories that societies tell about themselves often reveal the same things as personal stories, but on a mass scale.

Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner coined the term ‘social drama’ to describe the collection of cultural symbols, often propagated through mass media, which expresses who we are as a people. As Fred Fogo put it, social drama describes “…a transcultural phenomenon by which cultures reveal their fundamental tensions, their meaning systems, and their relations to power.”

Social drama theory describes cultural narratives within four stages of their development. The first is the ‘breech’ stage, where something so anomalous has occurred that we’re forced to take notice of it. The second stage, ‘crisis,’ happens when the story, and the import of its meaning, expands to more segments of society. It is here where the conflict over the interpretation of facts and the symbols begins. ‘Redress,’ the third stage, describes the practical means by which we act or react to the anomaly, according to how we interpret it. The last stage, ‘reintegration,’ is the resolution of the crises brought on by the anomalous event and the conflicting meaning it has to various parties. On occasion, reintegration entails the complete acceptance of one view by either a vast majority of the people or through a virtual consensus. Sometimes it involves a compromise between one or more opposing viewpoints. Most times, however, all sides simply acknowledge their disagreement, and propagate their cause, each hoping that someday their efforts will propel their beliefs into the mainstream.

We can perhaps sympathize with Ringo Starr, and his anger towards a teeming mass of people for reducing such a close friend to a mere symbol. Yet John Lennon’s life, despite its flesh-and-bone reality, also had profound ideological and semiotic ramifications. Because of how the story of his life unfolded in the press and within popular narrative, Mark Chapman too became symbolic. Between these two men, we have two separate social dramas, each of which has played out a number of times over a number of years.

The first social drama is one you’ll find scripted many times in The X-Spot: namely, the story of the lone angry nut. Over the years, we have watched an endless parade of amateur killers, people who have in fact never committed any serious crimes at all, undergo extraordinary measures to murder a politically or ideologically significant figure for, as Professor Melanson would say, “muddled personal reasons.” President John Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin all succumbed to the bullets attributed by some angry loner, portrayed by contemporary accounts as someone not quite right in the head. Despite the fact that some political faction (in the above cases, the hardliner right wing) had something to gain in each of these slayings, the pronouncement of guilt upon the angry lone nut was immediate, no more than a few hours at most.

The second social drama deals more with the symbology of the 1960s, the role of the Beatles during that era, and the role of Lennon in the Beatles. From the 1980s on, many have contested the meaning of that particular time in history. These conflicts reflect an ideological divide that most Americans and Europeans have seen widening over the course of their lifetimes. On the one hand, there are people who see the ‘60s as a period of growth, a period in which the public took collective action to right the wrongs of previous eras. On the other hand, some see the ‘60s as a turbulent period of endless strife, and narcissistic rebellion against authority. For both sides, Lennon’s death represented not just the passing of an individual, but a continuing struggle to define the meaning of a dead decade.

Of course, we don’t see the violent death of famous people everyday. So Lennon’s death was the anomaly, the point of contention, which triggered the social dramas. As two of the first public figures to comment on the event, Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford epitomized the shock felt by many. The subsequent newspaper coverage, the attention paid to Chapman during those first few days in the press, the live coverage of the memorial service in Central Park, and so forth, marked this as the kind of singular event that would stay in public consciousness for the next thirty years (and counting).

Before Lennon actually died, the police had a suspect in Chapman, just as Dallas police had a suspect in Lee Oswald only hours after President Kennedy’s assassination. Moreover, both the NYPD and Dallas Police attributed the actions to only one person almost immediately. Such authors as (the recently disgraced) Gerald Posner championed the narrative of the single shooter in the JFK assassination, as did the Warren Commission, and former Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. All of these narratives really focused on Oswald, in the same way that Jack Jones focused on Chapman in Let Me Take You Down. In their interpretation of this drama, the angry lone nut becomes a force of nature, a reckless killing machine destined for only one individual. Perhaps they do it to become famous. Maybe they do it for personal reasons. In the end, however, the killers’ motivations do not matter, for this narrative relies in part on the suspect’s presumed mental illnesses (characterized by their failure to live “normal” lives) to explain away why this crime occurred.

This conflicts with another interpretation of the angry lone nut scenario, one often championed by so-called ‘conspiracy theorists.’ This contending interpretation readily points out that the other side has fixated on the accused killer, sensationalizing, demonizing, and dehumanizing him in the process. Moreover, the angry lone nut scenario often doesn’t take into account other evidence to the same degree as the potential pathology of the presumed shooter. In this interpretation, the facts are usually not in dispute. The dispute lay in what they mean.

Here, the facts in toto, replayed a number of similar events that immediately come to mind. The immediate and conscious comparison, by attending emergency room doctors and police in the hours after the event, between Lennon’s death and the JFK assassination most aptly shows the presence of a pre-established narrative taking hold. For the most part, society redressed the crime by arresting Chapman and allowing him to plead guilty to the offense. Reintegration came mainly in an overwhelming belief in the dominant narrative, that of the psycho killer. Yet there are those who vehemently disagree. While both have some means to make their sides known, they have not had, nor do they currently hold, equal public attention.

Perhaps more important is how some have used Lennon’s death as commentary on the 1960s in general. For those who saw that particular decade as an assault to hierarchical order and little else, Lennon’s death represents the danger and natural consequence of permissiveness: excessive drug use, excessive sex, sloth, irresponsibility, hypocrisy, and, of course, naiveté. In his 1994 book I Read the News Today: The Social Drama of John Lennon’s Death, Fred Fogo asserts that Albert Goldman and others used Lennon to attack the graying counterculture, writing, “Goldman goes for the jugular of both the Lennons and the sixties generation in a dramatic refutation of the last hippy image of Lennon presented in the media just before and after his death.”

Goldman’s biography relied on interviews with such people as Marnie Hair, a neighbor of John and Yoko at the Dakota, who sued them after her young daughter sustained injuries at a party for Sean. Ono fired another Goldman informant, their personal assistant Fred Seaman, when she discovered that he had stolen her late-husband’s journal/diary and a number of photographs, which he then showed to author Robert Rosen (who in his book Nowhere Man pokes fun at Lennon’s friend Elliot Mintz for suggesting the author might have been a CIA agent). According to Rosen, Seaman misrepresented Lennon’s wish that they collaborate on a biography based on said documents. These and other informants had an animosity towards John and Yoko. Not surprisingly, a number of friends and family, including each of the surviving Beatles, condemned Goldman’s work as bordering on pure fiction. Even Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner panned it, despite the fact that Wenner had a major falling out with Lennon.

Here in the Twenty-First Century, we can see that redress comes in all forms and all sides. The anti-war activists protesting the Iraq invasion immediately pointed out the similarities between that conflict and Vietnam. They used similar tactics to influence their respective governments—by enlisting public support through demonstrations, during which many sang Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance”—not to go ahead with plans for offensive war.

Fogo also discussed the post-mortem use of Lennon as a commodity, or as social historian Stuart Ewen might put it, a symbol divorced from its cultural context. This is another form of practical action, or redress that stems from Lennon’s death. Recently, Sean Lennon has found it necessary to defend his mother for giving permission to use John’s image in an automobile advertisement. From his comments, I gather he wasn’t too happy about the commercial, although he accepted Yoko’s reasoning for going ahead with it.

It stands to reason that once a person is dead, they’re hardly in a position to object to how their thoughts, their work, or even their identity can be manipulated by others. In Forrest Gump, for example, we see an unrealistically depoliticized Lennon who can do little more than understand a simple mantra (“give peace a chance”), but only after the title character voices it first. In the movie Chapter 27 we see Lennon (ironically, played by an actor named Mark Chapman) as an empty icon, a mere tool through which the protagonist (the other Mark Chapman) realizes his aspirations. In some really-far-out-right-wing-(are-they-serious?) pages linked to by earlier commenters in this series, Lennon becomes a decadent, hypocritical figure of little true talent but great hype—something rather close to Goldman’s depiction.

It’s clear that in regards to the cultural meaning of Lennon’s death, it has been reinterpreted in the context of so many other rock stars of that era who suddenly died before their time. Some see this as meaningless coincidence. Others see it as a likely consequence of lifestyle (drugs are frequently mentioned in this respect). Mae Brussell, Alex Constantine, Fenton Bresler and their ilk see this more as one assault against an ideology by eliminating the iconic figures of its culture. While this last interpretation of the hippy narrative receives derision from the mainstream, it often has at least some evidence to support its basic tenets, as is the case here.

Depending on your point of view, your education, your ability to understand (or as John himself might say, “imagine”), your prior beliefs and so forth, the social drama that you might weave of this might be your own, or more in line with either the conspiracy or mainstream beliefs. You can see it as an assault of the ‘60s and the New Leftism associated with its counterculture, or you can see it as affirmation of the period’s most negative stereotype.

In other words, the depiction of Lennon’s death—just like the depiction of the ‘60s and the JFK assassination—will continue to reveal breaches in the social fabric between generations, between left and right, and between those who presume power maintains itself passively and those who believe that shadowy forces sometimes plot and scheme (or in other words, “conspire”) to preserve the status quo.