{"id":486693,"date":"2026-05-15T22:01:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T22:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/486693\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T22:01:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T22:01:08","slug":"john-lennon-the-last-interview-at-his-happiest-and-most-messianic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/486693\/","title":{"rendered":"‘John Lennon: The Last Interview’: At His Happiest and Most Messianic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThere are two key moments in Steven Soderbergh<\/a>\u2019s \u201cJohn Lennon: The Last Interview<\/a>\u201d that really capture John Lennon \u2014\u00a0at his most compelling and humane, and also at his most messianically annoying. (As a Beatles believer since I was a little kid, I\u2019ve never written the word annoying in a sentence with a Beatle before. But there\u2019s a first time for everything.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first moment comes early on, when Lennon is talking about the song \u201c(Just Like) Starting Over.\u201d \u201cThe Last Interview,\u201d as its title states, presents the very last media conversation that John Lennon ever had \u2014 and, chillingly, the interview took place on the day he was murdered, Dec. 8, 1980. A few hours before that earth-shaking tragedy, John and Yoko sat down inside their apartment in the Dakota to talk to a small crew from the radio station KFRC in San Francisco. It was the one radio interview Lennon had agreed to give in conjunction with \u201cDouble Fantasy,\u201d the comeback album that had been released three weeks beforehand. (Just before the interview started, John and Yoko were upstairs in their apartment doing what became the iconic Annie Leibovitz photo session for Rolling Stone.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c(Just Like) Starting Over\u201d is about John and Yoko, after coming out the other side of some stormy years, celebrating the renaissance of their hard-won, long-term, stronger-than-ever love story. The song\u2019s tone is upbeat, though tethered to a slightly rueful awareness of everything they\u2019ve gone through (\u201cIt\u2019s been so long since we took the time,\/No one\u2019s to blame, I know time flies so quickly\u201d). The song celebrates coming back together.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the interview, however, Lennon declares that the song has a larger meaning. He talks about the separation between men and women that had emerged in the culture, going back to the rise of third-wave feminism in the early \u201970s; he felt that this gulf was now winding down. So in \u201cStarting Over,\u201d Lennon explains how he intended the song\u2019s message of reconciliation to apply to men and women in general. It\u2019s about time, he says, that they started to get back together. That\u2019s an arresting thought, and a touching one. It shows you how instinctively Lennon could take in the big picture and reflect it back to us.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the second key moment in the interview, while just as revealing of who Lennon was, is more\u2026problematic. \u201cDouble Fantasy\u201d was Lennon\u2019s first album in five years, marking the end of the break he\u2019d taken starting in 1975, when he and Yoko\u2019s son Sean was born. At that point, he became what he called a \u201chousehusband\u201d (a novel term back then), putting his guitar on the shelf to devote himself to raising Sean. At the time, this was kind of a revolutionary idea; it marked the dawn of an age when men would start to be thought of as domestic nurturers in a way they hadn\u2019t been before. Lennon, as in so many things, was on the cusp of a movement, but he had never spoken about it much. In \u201cThe Last Interview,\u201d he talks about what his experience as a househusband was like.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019d get up early and fix Sean some breakfast (nothing with sugar!). We hear that and think: Yep, sounds like a good way to start the day. He\u2019d make sure that Sean watched \u201cSesame Street\u201d rather than commercial television. And then, at some point in the morning, the nanny would take Sean out, and those two would spend the rest of the day doing whatever they were doing. I have to confess that I heard this last bit and didn\u2019t know whether to laugh or choke. For here is John Lennon setting himself up as a new kind of hands-on daddy. He took five years off from making music to do it. But after all that, his kid was still raised by the help. On the one hand, this marks Lennon, for all his forward-looking rhetoric, as a man with one foot stuck in an older era (which is no crime). And I\u2019m not suggesting that there\u2019s anything wrong with having a nanny. What I\u2019m saying is that if John was going to let his nanny spend most of the day with Sean, then maybe he shouldn\u2019t be lecturing the rest of us about the virtues of househusbandry.<\/p>\n

\n\tI raise the issue only because John, in \u201cThe Last Interview,\u201d comes off as just about the happiest he has ever been. But he\u2019s so high on the life he\u2019s leading that he\u2019s also at his most messianic. And a little of that goes a long way. There\u2019s a side of Lennon that was a born cynic with an acid tongue, who would use it to cut through every piety he came across. But there\u2019s another side of Lennon that was almost the sentimental counter- reaction to his own cynicism. I\u2019m talking about the side that wrote \u201cImagine,\u201d and that inspired him to treat his marriage to Yoko as an ongoing piece of instructional performance art. That\u2019s the Lennon who\u2019s on full effusive display in \u201cThe Last Interview.\u201d I could have used a bit more of the acid cynicism.<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m not trying to make light of \u201cThe Last Interview\u201d \u2014 I\u2019m just out to describe what the movie is like, despite the haunting circumstances that surround it. That Lennon was killed just hours after he said all this stuff is a wrenching reality to behold; it lends the movie an inescapable poignance. And Soderbergh has done an ace job of illustrating \u201cThe Last Interview\u201d by turning it into a dreamy archival collage, accompanying John\u2019s words (and Yoko\u2019s too) with hundreds of photographs I had never seen before. (He also uses a handful of fantasy images created by AI; if they\u2019d been devised with older technology, no one would care, and no one should care now.) You really get a candid sense of Lennon at home, and occasionally with the Beatles. (You also see how miserable he was during the Lost Weekend period.) The needle drops, which include Lennon songs and Beatles songs, are impeccable and irresistible. I especially dug the exquisite use of \u201cLove\u201d over the closing credits.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet part of it is that Soderbergh is doing all he can to make this interview more momentous than it actually was. One of the conditions of the interview was that John wouldn\u2019t be asked to talk about the Beatles or \u201cthe past.\u201d That\u2019s quite a restriction! I get that he didn\u2019t want to rehash old stories, but what that means is that \u201cThe Last Interview\u201d actually presents one of the first of a new breed of promotional interview. Lennon is such a commanding personality that he goes off on tangents anyway (I dug hearing him talk about how much he loved disco), but his tone of relentless bonhomie can be a bit much; on some level he\u2019s marketing his happiness to sell the album. I have to say that I preferred the let-it-rip Lennon showcased in the famous Jann Wenner interview known as \u201cLennon Remembers,\u201d and when it comes to Lennon documentaries, \u201cThe Last Interview\u201d isn\u2019t nearly as revelatory as Kevin Macdonald\u2019s recent \u201cOne to One: John & Yoko,\u201d<\/a> which caught the complex tumult of the couple\u2019s first two years in New York.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, in \u201cThe Last Interview\u201d John Lennon has a message \u2014 to himself, and to us \u2014 that was almost a sequel to the Beatles\u2019 message of love. It was a message about women, and about how the time had come for a new kind of equality that turned on something deeper than power. For Lennon, that was the new square one. And what\u2019s bittersweet about \u201cThe Last Interview\u201d is that it actually gives you a concrete vision of where John Lennon would have been heading had he not been felled by a madman\u2019s bullet. He talks about wanting to perform live again, about his desire to give concerts with the kind of musicians he\u2019s made \u201cDouble Fantasy\u201d with. Lennon was 40 when he died; he\u2019d been out of sorts for much of the first half of the \u201970s, and largely out of view for the second half (though he was an avid New Yorker). \u201cThe Last Interview\u201d reveals that he was revving up to rejoin. Watching the movie, you realize he\u2019d only just begun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are two key moments in Steven Soderbergh\u2019s \u201cJohn Lennon: The Last Interview\u201d that really capture John Lennon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[264],"tags":[18,117,19,17,212498,337,39012,74243],"class_list":["post-486693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-john-lennon-the-last-interview","tag-music","tag-steven-soderbergh","tag-yoko-ono"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116580851910943536","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}