#understanding john

It’s easy to forget the link between the two because they’re technically 6 months apart. But it feels underappreciated how much Brian’s specter looms large over the entire India trip. And not just because they delay the grief process several months in the name of Paul’s favorite coping mechanism. But because Brian dies the week they first meet the Maharishi:

Tuesday, August 22: The band’s first recording session since June; they record takes 1-8 of Your Mother Should Know

Wednesday, August 23: Recording take 9 of Your Mother Should Know and Brian stops by

Thursday, August 24: The Beatles first meet the Maharishi at a lecture in London. At the end of the day, they hold a press conference, get a 90-min private meeting with the Maharishi, and plan to go to Bangor, Wales for a 10-day training in Transcendental Meditation (TM) the next day.

Friday, August 25: They travel to Wales, the first time in years they’re traveling without Brian or Mal or Neil, and it’s chaotic; after they arrive, they get a message from Brian saying he will join them on Monday.

Saturday, August 26: Following a day of training, they renounce drugs in a press conference (well, LSD at least). Brian spur of the moment drives back to London from Kingsley Hill after the guests he invited for the weekend don’t make it.

Sunday, August 27: Brian dies from an overdose of sleeping pills the previous night; he’s found around noon, the Beatles are inducted into TM before the news about Brian reaches them. They had a private meeting with Maharishi about their grief (he talks about reincarnation and the need for positive thoughts about Brian to help this process). Then Paul goes back to London while John and George are forced to make a statement for reporters staked outside.

Monday, August 28: Paul presents the idea for the MMT film and convinces them to keep working rather than go to India now.

That’s one week.

Whether you want to look at it as fate, consequence, or coincidence, TM and Brian’s death are linked forever because of this timing. The simple act of losing Brian factors into the disparate grief reactions and subsequent burnout symptoms seen visibly in each band member after India and across the next year. But this timing would haunt anyone. And not just because those around Brian report him feeling jealous about their diverted attention toward the guru this week. Just dumb what ifs that grief can haunt your brain with: what if they hadn’t heard about the lecture, what if they hadn’t gone on the Bangor trip or had invited Brian to join them on the train, what if they hadn’t appeared on camera announcing they were giving up drugs because of the Maharishi’s influence, etc etc etc.

This link between TM and Brian’s death is especially worth considering for John, who I believe is the only one who ever directly expresses guilt over his death. This isn’t unique as he expressed guilt for all deaths around him in an opaque way believing he’s a curse on people he loves. But it also is understandable because he had some warning. Pete Shotton talks about a worrying tape message John receives from Brian a few days before. Brian’s father died only 6 weeks prior, and Brian’s secretary finds a suicide note dated just before that. There seems to be some uniformity among those closest to him at this time that while he may have been actively considering suicide earlier in the summer, he wouldn’t have after his father passed out of concern for his mother. Still, even with the idea it was all just a terrible accident, those dumb what ifs would creep up in a case like this.

When you add in that Bangor is a spur of the moment trip, that it’s the first one they’ve taken in years without Brian’s planning and guidance, and that telling Brian or inviting him to join them seems like an afterthought? Well, it’s not hard to see how that close link and the guilt that it inspires would have factored into John’s desperation for finding that answer in India. And his anger when it doesn’t deliver. It looks like a desperation to make a consequential choice matter. Searching for the answer to life guided by a holy man makes TM and the Bangor trip meaningful. It makes it important. But to a guilt-filled brain, the idea the man is a fraud means Brian died for nothing. It’s a 60 foot drop into the earth, nothing but a deep dark hole of emptiness.

oh hmm, good question! i will try my best to answer it!

first, a disclaimer: i'm not mentally (or professionally) equipped to go full DSM-5 on him at the moment, but here are my observations, based on A) what i know about him as a public figure, B) that degree in psychology i never finished, and C) my own experiences having ADHD/C-PTSD:

so like, vibes alone, i definitely look at him and my gut instinct is "this is not a neurotypical person!" he's got the stink (affectionate) on him, whatever that means. like gaydar but for fellow neurodivergents, yanno?

(side note: all of the beatles ping this for me, and given my own experiences with making close friends and being neurodivergent, i feel like this explains a lot about why the bugs were so tight for so long. see also: george and bob dylan 👁👁)

anyway, back to john! he definitely has some (or a lot) of the dreamy/inattentive/fidgety/impulsive/obsessive/hyperfocused energy and Mood Disregulation™ that can come with ADHD. we've seen him call himself lazy (often a big red arrow pointing toward neurodivergence), as well as struggling to do things he doesn't want to do, which points to executive dysfunction. (describing song writing as "torture" and saying he literally cannot bring himself to play with his son, even though he wants to.)

he's also self-reported serious problems with impulse control (violence, overeating, verbal abuse, risky behavior, drug abuse, etc.) that he later feels shame or regret over. he's got a lot of internalized ego-dystonic behavior that comes with ADHD!

keep in mind, though--a lot of the above can also be attributed to PTSD, C-PTSD or BPD, which are diagnoses that i would be most confident putting money on. BUT, these are often comorbid with neurodivergence, and i'm inclined to argue that neurodivergence makes someone way more predisposed to developing C-PTSD or BPD.

sooo...i dunno! i think he's someone you could easily project ADHD onto, if you were so inclined, with a fair amount of reason to back it up. writing this out has certainly made me think about it more, and it might be something i intentionally include in future characterization.

in closing, i just want to say that i don't think there's any meaningful ethical concern wrt speculating about historical figures' personal lives and playing in the space and writing meta about your blorbos. as long as you aren't doing it AT them, where they'll likely see it, or in a way that might affect their career, i don't see the issue. (and, uh, that's definitely not a problem here lmao.) basically, if you can write fic about them, then you can write meta and armchair diagnose them for funsies 🤷‍♀️

but yeah! this might be something i actually dive into at some point. i skimmed some interviews for this, and the more i read, the more i'm like "oh...yeah. hmm!"

*Sigh* Must every person who likes John go through this?

I’m gonna answer about this topic once so I won’t have to do it again.

If John had spent his entire first marriage beating and humiliating his wife, there’s no fucking way I would admire him, so it’s not “a fact”.  No, I’m not saying I would be fine with an every other day beating either. I know it’s very tempting to see a post by someone here with “sources” (like some article written by someone who also does zero reading about John and is based on the lies Philip Norman said on his book) or that quote of his and find it enough to classify him as abusive, human garbage, hypocritical and a monster. But take the words of anyone actually close to him and everything Cynthia has said on the matter and you’ll see things are not quite like that.

As we all know, he could be a violent young man sometimes and he expressed shame more than once of the way he treated women in his youth. I believe that slap during that fight definitely happened because Cynthia said so, but I also believe Cynthia when she said she only took him back (they broke up for three months if you’re not familiar with the story) if he promised he would never do it again (and so never did). What he did was disgusting and terrible and inexcusable, but I mean, have you searched dirt on the other Beatles too? Because let me tell you, there is, and it’s not pretty either. If I decided to forever unstan for being an occasionally (not all that frequent as the word or John’s dumb ass may lead you to believe) disgusting youngster, I would have to unstan them all forever, and if you ask me, it’s very interesting how only John’s awfulness that is repeatedly brought up EVERY DAMN TIME. Now, I just don’t believe for a second there was an actual routine and cycle of abuse going on and I have reasons for that. Of course, I would never deny the fact that he was a shitty husband. Not only he cheated on her, but he could also be “verbally unkind” as she put it (yes, he could be very nasty and cruel with his words) and the whole leaving her for Yoko situation was ridiculous the way it was handled, Cyn deserved a lot better.

Your question about how I feel about it: of course, it doesn’t feel good to know your hero (of sorts, I’m too old to consider him my hero in the full sense of the word) could be a faulty human being, but I believe this in itself is a redundant phrase, since making mistakes is part of being human. John did a lot of them, especially as someone who needed psychological help and never got any, but love him or hate him, you need to acknowledge the fact that he admitted his and felt shame for them and tried to better himself. Look up anything he said about peace and treatment of women in general during the 70s and you’ll see he is not a hypocrite, just someone trying his best after doing some truly terrible things. It’s very clear to anyone who follows me that I love John and it took me a long time to admit it to myself and to let me because I was also blindly believing every horrible thing I read about him. But after doing some research, I can confidently say I don’t love a bad man because he never was. So, what I feel now is caution about my own admiration for him and a desire to know John for everything that he was. I’m still a new fan, but I’m getting to know him quite well, I would say, and I would literally rather die than be blind to any of John’s faults, that is really not how I like to get to know people (as much as a fan can). My opinion of him is the same as Cynthia’s:  “John is neither a saint, nor is he a sinner. He was just human, like the rest of us.”, but I don’t feel the need (or rather, I’m pretty much always fighting this need) of constantly letting people know that I am aware he wasn’t perfect. I just want to love him the way I want to, without focusing on every mistake he made.

If you want to know more about John’s relationship with Cyn: [x]  [x]

Gifts from the Heart by Elphen

Thelma's account of John is most often cherrypicked by detractors as evidence he was some lifelong wifebeater. While the violence in the incident she describes is clear, the nuance that makes her account so vivid gets lost in the debate.

I keep coming back to her account for her picture of John at a crucial time, only a few months after Julia is killed.

John’s girlfriend in the autumn of 1958 was Thelma Pickles, a new and interesting student at the art school, just turning 17. Initially, she thought him “a smartarse,” then changed her mind when she witnessed his reaction to a girl who asked if what she’d heard about his mother was true. “She said, ‘Hey John, I hear your mother’s dead.’ He didn’t flinch. He simply said, ‘Yeah.’ She carried on, ‘It was a policeman that knocked her down, wasn’t it?’ Again he didn’t react, he just said, ‘That’s right, yeah.’ I was stunned by his detachment, and impressed that he was brave enough not to break down or show any emotion. Of course, it was all a front.”30

Soon afterward, John and Thelma sat talking at the Queen Victoria Monument and each revealed being deserted by their dads. “He pissed off and left me when I was a baby,” John said of Alf, which was far from correct but no doubt how he felt. Thelma’s father had left home when she was ten; she was sensitive to the stigma of having only one parent and emotional when anyone mentioned it. “I couldn’t sustain the detachment John managed,” she says. “I thought it was quite an achievement to be able to behave like that.”

Suddenly, John and Thel, as he called her, were “going out.” The shared soul-baring cemented it, and also they fancied each other. Thelma was the first female John allowed to get close after Julia’s terrible death. She was given glimpses of his other side.

When we discussed it between ourselves I realized he was clearly more sensitive than he appeared. He spoke of the pure shock of losing his mother, and he said what a loss it was (though I don’t think he used the word “loss”). At such times, he spoke in a much softer, more explanatory way than usual, and though he never demonstrated extremes of emotion, his pain was clear. The other side of the coin was that he’d detect any minor frailty in somebody with a laser-like homing device. I thought he was hilarious, but it wasn’t funny to the recipients.31

Thelma was witness to a rare occasion at Mendips, when John, Paul and George all stood in the kitchen and played their guitars. Mimi was out, and before she was expected back Thelma and the two lads scarpered. John knew Mimi didn’t want them in the house and would raise merry hell about it, and he just didn’t need the headache. For a while, though, John and Thel took regular advantage of Mimi’s going out (it seems she went to play bridge one night a week). The plan, carefully formulated by John, was for Thel (who lived in Knotty Ash) to take the bus to Woolton; she and John would meet and sit across Menlove Avenue in a shelter on the edge of the golf course, and when Mimi left and walked down the street, over they’d go. “I only ever saw Mimi from a distance, in the dark,” Thelma says.

Mostly, Thel found John “enormous fun to be with, always witty, and when we were alone together he was really soft, thoughtful and generous-spirited.” He made them tea and toast, he made her laugh, and he made love to her in his little bedroom above the porch. “We didn’t call it sex—that word wasn’t really used by people then. John called it ‘going for a five-mile run,’ because he’d read or heard this was the amount of energy a man spent.” They used no protection, trusting only to luck, and John told Thel he was glad she was no “edge of the bed virgin”—his euphemism for the kind of girl who would take him half the way there but no further.

John and Thel often took afternoons off from art school to go to the pictures. He liked the old horror films at the equally old Palais de Luxe on Lime Street, and they also went to see Elvis’s final pre-army film, King Creole, which reached Liverpool Odeon in mid-October 1958. Though John very occasionally wore his glasses at college, he definitely didn’t do so in public, and without them, even sitting near the front of the stalls, he could hardly make out how his idol was faring up there on the big screen. He kept nudging Thelma, nagging her to describe all the action: “What’s he doing now, Thel?”

—Tune In, Ch. 9 (June–Dec 1958)

Her account of the beginning of their relationship supports Paul and Cynthia’s characterization of young John as a kid that put on a public front to mask fear and insecurities and grief. She is surprised by his detachment to loss, something she wishes she could attain. (Echoes of this story of John and Paul. Like recognizes like?) Yet with further scrutiny, she sees the detachment as a facade and discovers a shared trauma, and they bond over opening up about their family losses.

After this recognition, they become close. When alone, Thelma sees the softer side to John, thoughtful and generous. When in public, she notices his awareness of the eyes of others, mocking frailties of others while walking around half-blind himself. She finds him hilarious as long as his target is someone else, feeling a sense of specialness by being part of his crew. You can see echoes of John and Paul's mean girls schtick here.

It's notable that by 1959, John has made a habit out of bonding over shared grief/trauma. John meets Paul just after his mother dies, and John lost his father figure a few years before that. John meets Thelma after Julia’s death and they bond over absent fathers. John goes on to meet Cynthia, who has just recently lost her father.

Her account of the end of their relationship supports how John would lash out when power shifted and exposed his insecurities. This lashing out comprises not only one hit in a moment of anger, but several days/weeks(?) of public mocking in response to her ending the relationship over his own actions. Notice how he mocks her with a lie they both know isn’t true all because she wounded his ego? It’s the performance of it all that sticks with me.

And the only way she gets him to shut up is to match him in being equally vicious back. The games of adolescence perhaps, but its echoes in John’s other significant relationships suggest a pattern. Mind games, more than anything, is the weapon of choice.

[Quotes and sources under the cut]

I feel I could give up all this.

We talk in code to each other as Beatles...Talking is the slowest form of communicating anyway. Music is much better.

What if we disappeared for years and years, wouldn’t that work?

We’re all going to live there, perhaps forever...

He did buy the island.

ok so, to preface, i love baby john, and i think he's cute as hell and i would GLADLY wife him, but like... he was SO obviously unhappy with his appearance (his self-portrait is uhhhh heartbreaking lol) and i don't think it was just because of his weight?

and like?? mostly it's weird seeing fellow mclennons (and more mainstream fandom obv) doing the thing where paul is this soft little feminine creature who needs protecting (or is COY and BEGUILING, as though he is a WOMAN...but that's another post lol), and john is the big manly man who must protect him, because he is a MAN, and therefore SO TOUGH and SO MEAN.

like you can play with your blorbos however you want, but to act like that reflects reality at all is, uh, patently untrue?

"I look at early pictures of meself, and I was torn between being Marlon Brando and being the sensitive poet - the Oscar Wilde part of me with the velvet, feminine side. I was always torn between the two, mainly opting for the macho side, because if you showed the other side, you were dead."

literally how can you hear him say this with his own human mouth and think that he was happy or comfortable being forced into traditional masculinity?