What goes through the mind of a murderer when he pulls the trigger? In this age of saturated communication, there is definitely a niche for movies like The Killing of John Lennon,"" the story of psychotic murderer Mark David Chapman.
But, while the American audience has a small contingent ready to take pleasure in stories of the dark byproducts of our society, there is a wider message to be taken from the movie. As is sometimes the case with works of art however, the events surrounding the release of ""The Killing of John Lennon"" have given it a message Director Andrew Piddington might never have intended.
The movie begins in Hawaii, where Chapman is like sandpaper to everything he touches. In the voiceover narration (taken directly from the writings of Chapman) he talks about his difficult childhood, his violent, sociopathic tendencies and his frequent inability to interact normally with the world around him. He is obsessed with J.D. Salinger's ""The Catcher in the Rye,"" relating to the book's main character, Holden Caulfield. Like Caulfield, Chapman abhors phonies, and chief among them, according to Chapman, was Lennon, who sang of abandoning possessions despite incredible wealth.
Piddington portrays Chapman's killing of Lennon as a senseless act of violence, which is the widely accepted interpretation of Lennon's assassination. However, a few times throughout the film, it appears Piddington is trying to broaden the context of the film, pitting Ronald Reagan's optimism against Chapman's paranoid fatalism. It may not be a stretch to suggest that Piddington's use of Reaganisms serves double duty - showing the extent to which Chapman represented a perversion of the American ideal, and also how Reagan's ideal is the product of violent rhetoric.
More important are the events surrounding the release of the film. On March 5, Eve Carson - the student body president of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill - was killed in what was called a ""random act of violence."" Less than a month earlier, six were killed at a Northern Illinois University shooting. Less than a year before that, 32 were killed at Virginia Tech. The list continues.
No one can refute that gun-related deaths in the United States dwarf those of any other nation not suffering from severe political turmoil or civil war. It is easy to see why there has been strong opposition to gun control in the past, since this country was founded as a nation of warrior-citizens, exercising their constitutional right to turn suburban split-levels into fortified compounds. However, we have come a long way from the age of the militia, and our laws should reflect that. We have evolved a bit from the time of Chapman who, though he spent part of his life in a mental institution, could still easily acquire a handgun. But, if the endless shootings on college campuses are any indication, gun ownership is not keeping the American people safe.
We need to focus on individuals like Mark David Chapman, to keep ourselves safe. We should do more to mitigate the violent tendencies of men like Chapman instead of forcing innocent Americans to enter into a sort of small-scale arms race with the criminally violent.
It's our job to demand protection from our elected officials. After all, most of us (even John Lennon) don't have a secret service detail to protect us.
