John Lennon liked to fuck with us. He was not a liberal or a peacenik, he was not wicked smart or deep. But he did have a crafty sense of theater about him. He knew how cool we thought he was, and handled that aspect of his public personality very well. He never let on who or what he really was.

The movie Let Him Be, which I have here, is a typical Lennon tease. The premise of the movie is that a young Lennon fan (who looks enough like Lennon to be his son) stumbles on a discarded recording showing an older John Lennon alive. He then searches for Lennon in an area north of Toronto where the tape was discovered. He finds a man who looks and sounds like Lennon, but is in the end disappointed. His girlfriend discovers that the Lennon-lookalike does not have bullet wound scars in his back. Therefore, not Lennon.

That’s a nice tease, as it plays with the idea that Lennon was really shot. But what if he wasn’t? I am so inured now the fake death that I imagine he had left New York that day, and viewed news coverage of his death from a safe hiding place and cracked jokes about it.  They can fake death on TV very easily, as people imagine that everything they see on the news is true.

Typical of Lennon, Let Him Be is a switch inside a switch. We are led to believe that a man named Mark Staycer, a Lennon impersonator, is the star of the movie, and that they have fitted him with a face mask to look like him. But deep down, we are to suspect Mark Staycer is John Lennon dressed down so as NOT to look like Lennon.

As I said, Lennon does like to fuck with us. Mark Staycer is not Lennon. He’s misdirection. But there is in the movie a man who look and sounds an awful lot like John Lennon. His name in the movie is Noel Snow, but he is really John Lennon. Yes, Lennon too faked his death. (And no, he was not on the Space Shuttle Challenger that day either.)

But it was difficult to get a straight on shot of Lennon in the movie, as they went to great lengths to camouflage him. There’s nothing useful on the Internet. So I went to the movie, and took a picture of our TV screen as Lennon was singing, behind a large microphone of course. See below the fold for the results.

Continue reading “Mark Staycer fakes being fake John Lennon” →