I use that word - "merged" - deliberately, because the movie portrays John and Oko not so much as man and wife, business partners or artistic collaborators, but as two people who had spent so much time alone together on various planes of awareness that they had started to act as if they were one - like twins or an old married couple. The effect is of a psychic barrier between John and Yoko and the rest of the world; they're inside looking out.
Those final years were the end of a long journey for the restless boy from Liverpool who had a lonely, unsettled youth, who was raised by a beloved aunt, who was violent and moody and then burst forth into one of the greatest songwriters of modern times. Lennon was above all an artist - his music will live as long as songs are sung - but the Beatles made him into a cultural hero as well, a star who lived inside a bubble of wealth, fame and adulation and could rarely feel alone and off-guard. It was a form of heroism that led him to live in New York as if he were an ordinary person - insisting on walking the streets, going to movies, going to the park with his son, as if those freedoms were the right of anyone, even an ex-Beatle. That delusion was ended by Mark David Chapman.
"Imagine" is not an obituary, however, but a memory. What it remembers most clearly were those enchanted and befuddled days of hippies and flower power, bed-ins and the love generation, when John and Yoko spent their honeymoon in bed together, holding press conferences to advise people to grow their hair and work for peace. The whole time comes rushing back in one long sequence where John and Yoko have a debate with Al Capp, the right-wing creator of L'il Abner, about the effectiveness of their bed-in. Capp is a performer, aware all the time that he's being filmed. In the face of his debating points, John seems bewildered and a little petulant.
The revealing moments in this exchange are there because they were filmed by outsiders, by documentarians who were trying to look through the lens and see what was happening. Other moments in the film are revealing precisely because they were not filmed self-consciously.
They are the home movies, sometimes seemingly made by turning on the camera and sitting in front of it, sometimes perhaps made by John or Yoko or friends. In the sequence that opens the film and provides its framework, we see John at Tittenhurst, his country manor in England, in 1971, sitting at a piano, composing and singing. There is something so simple and pure about these images that they set the tone for the whole film.
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