John Lennon: "(Just Like) Starting Over" (1980)

Making a posthumous music video is a delicate task, let alone for a single that reflects as painfully and poignantly upon its creator’s death as “(Just Like) Starting Over.” Yet in some ways, “(Just Like) Starting Over” isn’t really a music video so much as a short film that happens to be scored by Lennon’s late masterpiece – a tribute to his life with Yoko Ono that ends at what would shortly become Strawberry Fields, with a slow pan up to the Dakota. That perhaps makes the film sound more chilling than it is, though, since it opens on quite a different note – an excerpt from a 1970 interview in which Lennon imagined himself and Ono at sixty-four, living in a small cottage off the coast of Ireland, “looking at our scrapbook of madness.” Proceeding to a series of gorgeous, photographic shots of the Irish coast, most of the film takes place within that “scrapbook of madness,” as we’re introduced,  slowly, to the cottage that Lennon and Ono might have called their own – first, through a series of establishing shots, followed by a series of still interiors, evocative objects, photographs tracking Lennon and Ono’s lives together and, finally, a more mobile segment in which all the photographs and objects spin outside and coaelsce into a short animated vision of the couple. At times, the effect is partly of a memento mori, while the destruction of Lennon’s glasses along the way – still exactly the same style at the age of sixty-four – often makes it feel like an attempt to repair and heal his and Ono’s apartment at the Dakota from the last day that they left it. At the same time, though, there is a sense that this cottage is gradually coming to life, rather than closing down, loosening Lennon’s spirit a bit from the shackles of tragedy and allowing it to breathe as effortlessly as it does across the whole of Double Fantasy. At one level, that’s because the song itself shifts periodically from quite melancholy, minor-key segments to jauntier, janglier McCartneyisms, but it’s also because the cottage itself – quite improbably – feels like a forerunner of the spaces that would come to characterise MTV and music video. Quaint it certainly is, but there’s also a porosity, a gradual yet irreversible ballooning of interfaces and points of access to Lennon, that actually has the effect of making it feel as if he is still in some sense alive, which is perhaps why it feels so right when he and Ono emerge animated, computer-generated, out of this supposedly naturalistic, nostalgic fantasy. One of the key motifs of early music videos was musicians witnessing their proliferation across different media platforms – or realising that their living, breathing selves were just another platform, no different from the rest – and by the end of “(Just Like) Starting Over” you can’t help but feel Lennon is watching over these versions of himself as well, more present because he is even more displaced, transformed and transfigured rather than completely removed.