One To One: John & Yoko is the Beatle and his wife coming to Greenwich Village, New York City amid turbulent 70’s America.
Director: Kevin Macdonald
New Zealand International Film Festival 2025.
Maybe the most revelatory part of this documentary is to restore some of the mana of Yoko, who was still in the maelstrom of hate and grief which followed the Beatles break-up in 1970.
Early into the movie, Lennon is talking about the hate and vitriol she was subjected to. Heavily racist and blatantly derogatory.
They called her ugly, and she’s not that. She’s quite attractive. And there are genuinely ugly people around…
Taking on this virulent nonsense comes in the latter part of the doco, when Yoko is addressing a women’s conference in the States.
Eventually after all the hatred I was elevated to the status of a witch.
But Yoko Ono was an avant-garde artist in her own right. Her wealthy family escaped the fire-bombing of Tokyo in 1945.
She had schooling from the exclusive Sarah Lawrence American college. Her music and art flourished under mentors like Edgar Varese, John Cage and particularly La Monte Young (who mentored John Cale and the origins of the Velvet Underground).
She gained some notoriety with the Fluxus art movement and their inspiration from the original Dada Movement of 1914 Zurich. Which was how she came to the attention of the Beatles in London 1966.
An amusing side-play through the documentary is her attempt to secure thousands of flies for an art installation. However, I would recommend extreme caution when trying to listen to her Fly (1971).
A review of a Yoko Ono tribute album is here.
The documentary centres around a benefit concert they gave in 1972 at Madison Square Gardens.
There are newsreel shots of the Willowbrook State School in New York. What could be called a psychopaedic institution, which does look shocking and brutal on first glance.
We had the equivalent here, as the investigation into historic institutionalised child abuse uncovered recently.
John and Yoko with the Elephant’s Memory band. Guests included Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack and Sha Na Na. (They had a great 70’s TV show featuring classic Doo-Wop which I adored). They raised 1.5 million US dollars for Willowbrook.
The concert sound is quite stunning and worth the entry price alone. Come Together and Instant Karma are urgent driving Rock’n’roll anticipating the Clash. The best could be Mother which becomes a ferocious love song of loss and loneliness.
The documentary plays out like a seductive montage of the optimism of the Sixties, coming up against the pragmatism and violence which followed in the wake of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy Senior’s murders in 1968.
Centres on 1973, when Watergate broke, Vietnam was still being carpet bombed, and political dissidents were being jailed.
John and Yoko were looking to find Yoko’s estranged daughter, when they came to America.
We see clips of the Village apartment, where they held bed-ins. Lennon became a TV junkie.
Like all drugs, how bad or evil a medium is, is purely dependent on how humans act around them.
TV was being blamed in the Seventies, for embedding violence into children. Nowadays, the Web and social media are evils that children need protecting against by direct government legislation. Need to wait for the dust to settle there.
No different to drugs. Opium/ morphine/ heroin/ codeine are wonderful and essential gifts to mankind. The social behaviour around them determines whether they are seen in a good or bad light.
John Sinclair, White Panther, poet, manager of the legendary MC5, was jailed for possessing a joint. Free John Sinclair was sung at the concert. He was released subsequently.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin appear. Both left wing activists and helped found the Youth International Movement. The Yippies. Accused of anti-Government conspiracy following the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. All charges later dropped.
One became a businessman. Yippie to Yuppie. One committed suicide.
Came under the orbit of the Lennon’s. So, Flower Power didn’t work. So what! Nothing to say it won’t work the next time around says John.
The planned Flower Power tour did not eventuate, but we hear the voice of Allen Klein, ex-Beatles manager and now Lennon’s, spinning on a coin as he pivots to the whims of his clients. He was the pragmatic voice to John and Yoko’s, and probably unfairly maligned in the end.
Finally, the documentary touches on the activity of Intel. The alleged phone taps of the Lennon’s and the FBI file on them.
One To One: John & Yoko now comes crashing into another prescient documentary of these times, Orwell: 2+2=5. Both screened at this year’s New Zealand Film Festival.
Rev. Orange Peel
