Imagine … Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy
Nowadays, most of us enjoy what academics in the same manner as to call “parasocial” lives, in which we feast steady the doings of our celebrity heroes even more voraciously than we hearken to the ups and downs, triumphs and embarrassments of our actual families and friends. Hence, perhaps, the current gusto for memoir of everything kinds.
- Nowhere Boy
- Production year: 2009
- Country: UK
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 97 mins
- Directors: Sam Taylor-Wood
- Cast: Aaron Johnson, Aaron Johnson, Anne-Marie Duff, David Morrissey, David Threlfall, Kristin Scott Thomas, Kristin Scott Thomas, Thomas Sangster
The slender narratives of Wags and sportspersons hustle Booker shortlisters out of the bestseller charts. It’session not just the red-tops that trade on the private behaviour of the famous; posh Sundays hold their pages through the sexual exploits of long-dead literary giants. Cinema, still, can go along where print can’t. Its reimagined, improved and tastefully dramatised equivalents of the medieval lives of the saints leave Hello magazine standing.
Sometimes, however, we parallel to crack up our interest in the behaviour of the great to be more than mere greed for gabble. It’s pleasing to imagine that our urge to state bare the secrets of our betters springs from something other than prurience. Genius is a vital part of the mystery of what it means to be human. Surely it’s our duty to put to the test and understand it. A life’s work fustiness somehow be entwined with vitality experience. Thus, we can reassure ourselves that while lapping up sensation and scurrility we’re engaged in a worthy task.
If people treat Nowhere Boy in this way, we can’t blame its director. Sam Taylor-Wood offers us her portrayal of John Lennon’sitting teenage years without much hint as to its potential implications towards his oeuvre. Indeed, she amuses herself by carefully excluding from the film any mention of the word “Beatles”. Nonetheless, hers isn’t an account of the formative years of some fictional or anonymous adolescent. She chose as her subject one of the most intriguing and original artists of our stage of life. So I thought I might as well ask her: did she think there was any connection betwixt the events she’s delineated and her hero’s subsequent output?
She didn’confidentially treat the verbal contest as irrelevant or uninteresting. The desire to answer it, she said, was at least part of the reason why she’d wanted to make the picture. She’d wondered what could have created as iconic a figure as Lennon. To get more kind of idea, she’conclusion compared his brawling youth with the ferment of her own betimes life. She’fragments concluded that people who experience trauma in their formative years may seek peace and safety in the world of the imagination.
This may well be true, but it doesn’t go far towards explaining the genesis of Sgt Pepper or The White Album. Cinemagoers may of course spot insights in Ms Taylor-Wood’s film that she didn’t pick up on herself. Maybe Lennon’s fraught relationship by Mimi shaped the opacity of his figures of speech: the film ends with the announcement that in spite of his aunt’s stern attitude towards him he continued to phone her every week of his the breath of one’s nostrils. Perhaps maternal desertion inspired a thirst for affection that fuelled the yearning in his lyrics. Oedipal tendencies could be the subject of influenced his tangled view of relationships. Stroppiness engendered by in one’s teens discontent may have driven him to reject conventional musical norms.
Or, on the other artisan, perhaps not. Nowhere Boy may be riveting, but its contribution to the exegesis of its hero’s musical legacy seems limited at in the highest degree. Ms Taylor-Wood says she doesn’t want her film to be viewed as a biopic: this is one reason why she doesn’t dwell on Lennon’s handover to his aunt at the age of five, even though it’sitting this actual observation that underpins the drama she chooses to fashion. Nonetheless, few full-blown biopics are any more illuminating about their subjects’ creative achievements. The big screen, it seems, can indulge our adulation of our gods and goddesses; the enigma of their sagacity remains beyond its be advanced to.
