Is there any possible reason why "Where his children gather round, bright like stars with glory crowned" might be preferred to "Where like stars his children crowned, all in white shall wait around"? Is there some objection to the w-word? It's political correctness gone mad, I tell you.

The Killing of John Lennon

"Look then to be well edified, as the fool delivers the madman."

So, let's see. The murder of John Lennon, re-enacted on the spot where it occurred. (Allegedly.) John only briefly on screen, represented by an actor but his face in shadow: all we see is his hair-cut and his specs. (Can you say "iconic"?) Captions on the screen, start out giving the date, but end up just saying "Two days remain", "Three hours remain". Interminable voice-overs by Mark Chapman (Jonas Ball). The arrest, prison, a brief trial, the same quote from Catcher in the Rye for the third or fourth time. The killer taken off to jail. A final, redundant caption telling us he's still there. No John Lennon song over the credits. This tiny-budget movie couldn't possibly afford one.

What have we just watched? The story of the death of John Lennon? Everything which normally goes into a a "story" – tension, suspense, motivation, resolution – is excluded in principal. No tension or suspense, because we already know the ending. No motivation because this is an account of an essentially motiveless act. No resolution, because, well, there's no resolution. It's a work in progress: one day, Chapman will get out, go on the talk-show circuit, get shot by someone who takes John's message of peace and love a bit too seriously. A Greek tragedy, the re-enactment of a sacred death? An exploration of the mind of a sociopath? Or just another excuse to pick at an extremely masturbatory scab; to blubber once more over the fact that the man who caused the sixties was killed for absolutely no reason at all.

Not so much The Assassination of John Lennon By The Coward Mark Chapman, more a passion play where the camera never leaves Judas Iscariot. The Beatles are bigger than Jesus, after all.

About two thirds of the way through, we come to the actual murder. We see Johnandyoko in their car; we see them leave it; we hear Chapman call out "Mr. Lennon!". We see slow motion bullets going right through actor-Lennon's body, leaving bloody holes in it. (Chapman's gun dealer tells him that a burglar would just laugh at him if he'd only bought a small gun.) It's an arresting image, of course: but it's far too pleased with itself to be actually shocking. It's a special effect. We know that dumdum bullets make big holes in people: we know that people who've been shot bleed a lot. (Lennon had lost 80% of his blood when he reached hospital.) It doesn't bring us into the event, but distances us from it. Neither Chapman, nor Yoko, nor, one imagines, John, could possibly have perceived events in this way. It's happening purely for the enjoyment of the audience. The Imagine documentary represented the assassination with a single image of a pair of glasses flying through the air. This brought me no closer to imagining the literally unimaginable.

The film is confused about its viewpoint. Most of the time we're inside Chapman's head: which is not, funnily enough, a particularly interesting place to be. We see him shooting the two "homos" he can hear having sex in the next room at the YMCA, and then we see him back on his bed, deciding not to shoot them after all. (I must admit, that had me thinking "Gosh; I never knew he did that", for a second.) We even see him in that field of rye, trying to keep the little kids from falling off the cliff. Quite a meta-textual knot, if you think about it: an actor playing a lunatic imagining that he's a mentally unstable fictitious character imagining that he's a figure in a folk song.

So: if it's all from Chapman's point of view, whose benefit are all those "Ten minutes remain" captions for? Lennon didn't know he had only a limited amount of time to live. Chapman only realized on the night before the murder that tomorrow was the big day, and obviously didn't know exactly when John would step out of the car. Is it simple audience manipulation: a cheap way of creating tension in a movie which announces its ending both in its title and its choice of subject matter? Or is there some reason why the film has to keep saying "Look at me – I'm a film"?

A couple of weeks before the murder, Chapman decides to go home to his wife. (I'd forgotten that Chapman was married. To a Japanese girl, at that.) He triumphantly tells her that he nearly did something terrible, but he's now defeated his demons. Because of the loonies-eye-view of the action, I couldn't quite tell if Chapman really went back to Hawaii, or just thought of doing so. Not that it matters: in a different kind of film, this would be a clever, tension filled, will-he-won't-he false ending: but here it is just one more move in the stations of the cross. And that could be the point: the fact that we know exactly what is going to happen mirrors Chapman's deranged conviction that he's doing something he's predestined for.

Director Andrew Piddington took the courageous decision to depict Chapman only through words that he really spoke. The voice-over describes, and the action reenacts, the moment when Chapman chances on a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in a public library, and feels that the book speaks to him directly: that, in fact, he himself is Holden Caulfield. We also see him discovering, also by chance, a book about John Lennon and deciding that he is one of Caulfield's phonies and therefore it's his job to kill him.

The film tells us that Chapman particularly objected to Lennon's having said "Imagine no possessions", even though he himself had a few bob set aside for a rainy day. "I had to kill him because he was a hypocrite" is at least intelligible; expressions like "I had to kill him because I am Holden Caulfield" and "The phony must die, says the catcher in the rye" are simply without meaning.

But hang on a moment. How do we know that Chapman was set on his homicidal path by happening upon a copy of Sallinger and a celebrity biog of Lennon? Well, because Chapman said so: we are listening to the post-murder Chapman explaining the pre-murder Chapman's state of mind. But Chapman, I think we can agree, is not terribly, terribly sane. Is there any particular reason to think that he remembers these events correctly, and even if he could, that he would describe them honestly? (When we hear the name "John Lennon", "Imagine" is the first song which comes to mind. That wasn't necessarily the case in 1980. Is the "no possessions" angle one that Chapman thought up after the event?)

Once you've spotted this, the movie starts to unravel. For the first half Chapman is a dull, self-absorbed, chauvinistic, homophobic sociopath. ("Cold blooded killer in 'not very nice' shock.") But after the murder, he becomes much more human and is transformed, instantly, into a victim. (Does the film give a fair view of the brutality of the American criminal justice system? It beggars belief that Chapman was deemed mentally competent to enter a guilty plea at his trial. If the law says that this fruitcake murdered Lennon while of sound mind, the law is an ass.) He's also much less clear about his motivation. Only a few hours after he has killed John, he is wishing that things could "go back to how they were before". He tells the police that he doesn't know why he did it; he tells the psychiatrist that there were lots of different reasons – but can't actually specify a single one. These sequences are – presumably – based on contemporaneous accounts and transcripts. We're looking at a recreation of Chapman as police officers and psychiatrists actually saw him; where before, we were looking at a recreation of Chapman as he wanted us to see him or as he imagined himself. Chapman's voice tells us – in the past tense – that while awaiting trial, he re-read Catcher in the Rye and had some kind of supernatural visitation in which he felt that his brain cells were on fire. As a result, he realizes that the point of the murder is to promote the reading of Catcher in the Rye. (Not quite so interesting as discovering that, say, Yahweh is the ball of fire at the earth's core; or that the world ended in AD 70 and everything since then has been an illusion. Perhaps God was having an off-day?) How much of the rest of the narrative is a retrospective rationalization based on this epiphany?

So. Punishing Lennon for being a hypocrite. A peculiar act of self-identification with a fictional character. A publicity stunt for J.D Sallinger. While in his cell, Chapman sees a news report about the attempted shooting of Ronnie Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. He comments (and again, this is presumably something which someone actually heard him say at the time) that if he hadn't been able to get to Lennon, he might have killed Jackie Onassis or Johnny Carson.

And I still think, depressingly, that this is the most believable explanation: a mad attempt to achieve celebrity by the ultimate act gratuit. Before the murder, we follow Chapman into a cinema where he watches Raging Bull and Ordinary People. The films-within-the-film take up the whole cinema-screen; but Chapman's silhouette is superimposed over them. We're watching him, watching them. Straight after the murder, Chapman says that John fell down like something out of a movie; and that now, he feels as if he is watching his own life like that of a character in a film.

"I was a nobody, until I killed the biggest somebody on earth." So what have we done? We've put him in a movie.

I don't expect you
To understand
After you've caused
So much pain.
But then again,
You're not to blame.
You're just a human
A victim of the insane....

So. Is it child abuse to describe little Jimmy as a "cultural Christian", do you think?

Thought for the Day

Dave Sim: Having just finished a biography of William Blake, I understand he suffered terribly from this. In many ways, he was the original self-publisher.

I mean, I really want to do a good multilayered story with Cerebus, and I have a compulsion to say a lot of -probably too many- things in the six thousand pages.

But, man, at least I don 't have a sense of being put here on Earth to put everything right. To me, Blake clearly thought he was Moses or Jacob or the heir to their legacy, anyway.

Chosen by God to tell the world what really happened, get everyone to agree that every Renaissance painter he didn't like was a fraud and everyone he did like was a prophet or a beacon on the hill. everyone he liked was an angel from his personal God until he didn't like those people anymore, at which time they were one of the Legions of Hell sent to torment him.

People like that I find very worrisome....

Alan Moore: ...If (Blake) occasionally seems to have an inflated opinion of himself, it would seem to me only a natural counter-reaction to his seeming wretchedness and failure in all save the eyes of a few close friends (and, of course, posterity).

You're right in naming him the first self-publisher, near as damn it, and I think that you might find more in common with him than there seems to be at first glance: a man who had a vision and decided that the best way to convey it was by devoting his life's work to an extended fantasy narrative, a symbolic world where invented characters would play out the drama of the creator's divine insight

....This is not to discount your own view of Blake of course, simply to suggest that my own is maybe a bit more forgiving and more prepared to overlook the occasional bout of hubris.

Lord knows, Dave, we're not above the occasional bout of hubris ourselves, are we? And we haven't even written London or painted Glad Day yet.

(William Blake: Nov 28 1757 - Aug 12 1827)

Thought for the Day

Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other and that's it - the Daleks cease to exist. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations, can live without fear, in peace, and never even know the word Dalek. But if I kill, wipe out a whole intelligent life form, then I become like them. I'd be no better than the Daleks.

Thought For The Day

Here lies a whole world after one
Peculiar mode; a buried sun,
Stars and immensities of sky
And cities here discarded lie.
The prince who owned them, having gone,
Left them as things not needed on
His journey; yet with hope that he,
Purged by aeonian poverty
In lenten lands, hereafter can
Resume the robes he wore as man.

And here's another one

This time, we manage to go from "People sometimes support football teams from towns where they don't live" to "The Government has a policy to stamp out History and Geography" via "Children don't know dates and maps as well as they did in the Olden Days. Is this some kind of complex multi-layered parody, do you think?

Spider-Man, And So Forth...

Why are elephants large, grey and wrinkled?

Because if they were small, white and smooth, they'd be aspirins.

The BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko didn't actually tell us a great deal we didn't already know. The Amazing Spider-Man and Doctor Strange were very good; but after Steve Ditko stopped drawing them, they were never quite so good again; pages 1-4 of Amazing Spider-Man #33 are very good indeed; Ditko's post-Marvel work is very odd; Ayn Rand isn't very sensible.

But in the course of the programme, Jonathan Ross achieved something which I don't think anyone else has ever managed. He caused Stan Lee's mask to slip.

I don't know whether Woss is at all heard-of in Americaland; but I can only think that his TV persona – part foul-mouthed simpleton, part film-buff comic-buff fan-nerd – caused Stan to lower his guard.

At the beginning of the interview (a five minute segment of an hour long show) Lee is playing the role we all know and love. He's Stan The Man, egomaniac huckster who thinks nothing of comparing himself with God. ("....then we did Spider-Man and then we did the X-Men and of course on the seventh day I rested.") But he's also Smilin' Stan, the father figure who praises his collaborators to high heaven. Steve Ditko (or, as it may be, Jack Kirby) was a genius; one of the greatest guys he ever worked with; he was heart-broken when he decided to quit.

He's more than usually frank about the idiosyncrasies of Marvel Method. At first, he says, he would give Ditko a detailed plot to work from: but even at that stage: "(Steve) would draw the strip any way he wanted...he would add in a lot of things I hadn't even thought of." Later on, Lee says his input was reduced to a one-line summary such as "Hey, let's use Sandman as the next villain – let's have Sandman kidnap Mary Jane – I might not say any more than that."

If this is literally true, then Lee was giving Ditko an even freer hand than Kirby: a typical Stan Lee Fantastic Four plot seems to have run to at least a paragraph. But it probably can't be taken literally. Ditko would have been quite surprised at being asked to write a story in which Sandman kidnapped M.J, since M.J didn't debut until three months after he'd stopped working for Marvel Comics.

Lee concludes by saying "After a while, I wouldn't even say that much to Steve. He would just go and do whatever story he wanted."

So: Steve Ditko created part of the storyline for the early issues of Amazing Spider-Man (#1 - #13, perhaps?); most of the storyline for the middle issues (say, #14 - #25) and all the storyline for the latter issues -- say #26 - #38. This confirms what every informed fan already believed: the primary creative force behind the good issues of Amazing Spider-Man was not Stan Lee but Steve Ditko. Lee was only the "writer" in so far as he added speech bubbles and captions to Ditko's finished work. In the final year of the collaboration (issue #25 onwards) Amazing Spider-Man was credited as "Scripted by Stan Lee; Plotted and Drawn by Steve Ditko"; but we now have it direct from Stan The Man that several of the issues prior to that – rather pointedly credited as "Written by Stan Lee; Illustrated by Steve Ditko" -- were primarily plotted by the artist.

But this leaves us with a metaphysical, not to say theological question: "Who Created Spider-Man"? The answer, rather boringly, seems to be 'It depends what you mean by "created" ; it depends what you mean by "Spider-Man".' "

Stan Lee's first stab at an answer applies the tin opener to several very large worm cans:

"(Steve) had complained to me a number of times when there were articles written about Spider-Man which called me the creator of Spider-Man. I had always thought I was, because I am the guy who said 'I have an idea for a strip called Spider-Man and so forth.' Steve had said, having an idea is nothing, because until it becomes a physical thing, it's just an idea. He said it took him to draw the strip and to give it life so to speak and to make it actual, something tangible, otherwise all I had was an idea. So I said to him 'Well I think the person with the idea is the person who creates it', and he said 'No, because I drew it.' "

Spider-Man is a fictitious character. As such, he can only be thought of in the context of a particular story. If someone who had never read Shakespeare asked us "Who is Romeo?" we would reply "He was a young man who fell in love with the daughter of his family's worst enemy; and killed himself when he believed she was dead." That is: we would tell some version of the story which Shakespeare wrote. The Sam Raimi movie follows the story of Amazing Fantasy #15 rather closely and is therefore recognisably about Spider-Man: the 1977 TV series doesn't and isn't. Lee happily admits that the stories in which Spider-Man is embedded were partly, mainly, or entirely created by Steve Ditko: doesn't this mean that Ditko is partly, mainly, or entirely the creator of Spider-Man? Or is there some essence-of-Spider-Man which exists separately from any particular story about him?

Lee's claim to creatorship rests with him having said "I have an idea for a strip called Spider-Man, and so forth." This point is not in question: when a fan asked Ditko in 1965 who created Spider-Man, he replied that "Stan Lee thought the name up. I did costume, web gimmick on wrist & spider signal."

More recently, Ditko claimed that Lee's original idea had involved a teenager who used a magic ring to turn into Spider-Man – or at any rate, that this was what happened in Kirby's rejected treatment of Lee's idea. If that's right, then we would have to add "radioactive spider" to the list of Ditko creations. I'm inclined to think, based on what Lee said in the Origins books and elsewhere that the "idea" was to do a comic book in which a teenager was the main hero, not the side-kick; where the hero was a fallible everyman figure who had to struggle to beat the bad guys; and who would be treated with a modicum of realism. Would a fallible teenager with a different origin, somewhat different powers and an entirely different costume be recognisably Spider-Man?

People who are not themselves creative often believe that successful writers have access to a mysterious commodity called "ideas". They think that it is the lack of those "ideas" which is preventing them from becoming famous novelists; and if only they could learn the trick, they too would have "ideas" and the rest would be easy. If only I'd been the one to have the idea about a boarding school for wizards...then I'd be as rich as J.K Rowling...this writing business is a racket, you know.

Sometimes, it works the other way round. A saddo wrote to the careers section of the Grauniad the other week, explaining that he has lots of ideas for novels which he doesn't actually want to write and asking who he could sell them to. Dear-Jeremy's reply was exemplary:

"The dismal truth is this: there are very few naked ideas that are obviously so original and promising that they have immediate value...Jot down a list of highly successful plays and novels...and then try to distil any one of them into an 'idea' that would have been instantly snapped up by an experienced producer or publisher...I bet you'll find the 'idea' was seen to be a great one only when it had been masterfully developed by someone who possessed unusual talent and a quite specific style. You simply can't disentangle an original idea from its subsequent treatment....Even funny sketches, which are more dependent on the basic idea than most things, are subject to this rule. 'A man goes into a pet shop to complain about his dead parrot' isn't going to strike anyone as immediately hilarious."

Well, quite.

Finally, let's note that Stan has relegated Steve's role back down to "I drew it". Perhaps it is true that when he claimed to be the creator on the grounds of having said "I have an idea for a strip called Spider-Man and so forth" Ditko replied "I created it because I drew it." But he surely should have added: "And designed the costume; wrote most of the stories; devised the web-shooters and [maybe] the radioactive spider; and created at least several of the villains." (*)

However, Lee goes on to say that he conceded Ditko's point ("because I could see it meant a lot to him"). He went so far as to write him a letter stating that he had "always considered him to be the co-creator of Spider-Man". (Another terminological inexactitude, by the way: we've just been told that Stan hadn't always considered him to be so.)

And now comes the Frost-Nixon moment:

Jonathan Ross: Do you yourself believe that he co-created it?

Stan Lee: (Very long pause) I'm willing to say so.

Jonathan Ross: That's not what I'm asking you, Stan.

Stan Lee: No, and that's the best answer I can give you.

Jonathan Ross: So it's a "no" then, really?

Stan Lee: Pardon me?

Jonathan Ross: It's really "no"?

Stan Lee: I really think the guy who dreams the thing up created it. You dream it up and then you give it to anybody to draw it.

And there you have it. Stan Lee's believes that the actual, significant moment of creativity occurs when someone says "Let's do a strip called Spider-Man, and so forth". This is "the thing". Once you've done that difficult "dreaming-up" part, it's simply a matter of giving it to some third party (who could be "anybody"); whose role is simply to "draw it". This is bordering on cognitive dissonance: Lee seems to simultaneously know that Ditko wrote some, most, or all of Amazing Spider-Man, while at the same time believing that all he did was "draw" it.

Of course, Lee realises what has happened, and he immediately tries to re-assert the Smiley Stan persona:

Stan Lee: But I don't want...you made me say that in this documentary that you're doing, and I'm sorry I said it because I'm happy to say that I consider Steve to be the co-creator.

But it's too late to put the mask back: we've seen the scar on the face of Doom. Amazing Spider-Man #13 included the poisonous credit: "Author: Stan Lee. Illustrator: Steve Ditko." And that, it seems, is what Stan still really believes.

*

Just to get it out of the way: to say that Stan Lee wasn't the primary creative force behind The Amazing Spider-Man is not the same as saying that he had zero creative input; nor to denigrate the man himself. After Woss's interview, no-one can ever again say that Lee is a credit-hound. He is willing, remarkably willing, to give Ditko credit as the originator of most of what was good in the Spider-Man comic book. This makes his clinging to the idea that he is the source of some Aristotelian essence-of-Spider-Man which exists apart from any particular story, and any particular artistic telling of that story, all the odder.

Stan Lee wrote the words. Alan Moore says that the first four pages of The Amazing Spider-Man # 33 depend wholly on Ditko's pictures and not at all on Stan Lee's dialogue. This is unquestionably true. "I did it! I'm free!" might be the most redundant caption in the whole history of comics. But against this, we could set the remarkable final page of Amazing Spider-Man #10. Surely J Jonah Jameson's character is advanced further through Lee's speech balloon: "I can never climb to Spider-Man's level, so all that remains for me is to tear him down, because, heaven help me, I'm jealous of him" than by the fact that Ditko chose to depict his face in shadow?

And of course, it was Stan Lee who wrote Spider-Man's Groucho Marx banter; Doctor Strange's incomprehensible magic spells; Benn Grimm's New York wise-cracks and Norrin Radd's agonized soliloquies -- as well as some of the funniest captions ever. And precisely because he wasn't the main creator, his writing was detached from the action; almost as if he was providing a midrashic commentary on Steve and Jacks stories. This gave Marvel a weird, post-ironic tone that not even Alan Moore has ever been able to replicate. And it can hardly be said too often that neither Kirby nor Ditko ever produced on their own work which was as memorable or significant as what they produced with Stan Lee.

If I notice that there is no cake shop on the High Street, rent some property, hire the best pastry chef in town and tell him to make two dozen cherry pies, then there is no doubt at all that you have me to thank for your pudding.

But by no stretch of the imagination does that make me a baker.

(*)This is probably the biggest point in Lee's favour: the new villains who appeared in the purely Ditko plotted issues were The Spider Slayer robot, The Crime Master, The Molten Man, The Cat Burglar, The Looter / Meteor-man, some more robots, and 'a guy named Joe' – none of whom have anything like the iconic status of Doc Ock, the Lizard, the Vulture, the Green Goblin or Sandman. Does this suggest that Lee was inputting "high concepts" which Ditko on his own wasn't capable of?

Right.

Suppose I'd better start trying to catch up, then.

Thought for Today

"It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was, and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies and threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace."