Plot
On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman shocked the world by murdering 40-year old musician and activist, John Lennon, outside The Dakota, his New York apartment building. Chapman's motives were fabricated from pure delusion, fueled by an obsession with the fictional character Holden Caulfield and his similar misadventures in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. In one instant, an anonymous, 25-year old, socially awkward and mentally unstable fan of The Beatles, who had fluctuated between idealizing Lennon and being overcome with a desire to kill him, altered the course of history.
A man whose painfully restless mind thrashes about uncontrollably between paranoia, sociopathic lying and delusion is summed up in such character revealing comments as "I'm too vulnerable for a world full of pain and lies" and "Everyone is cracked and broken. You have to find something to fix you. To give you what you need. To make you whole again."
From his lies to cab drivers (identifying himself as The Beatles' sound engineer) to his socially unacceptable behavior around Jude, a young fan he meets outside The Dakota, to his argument with paparazzi photographer Paul, Chapman keeps the psychoses bubbling below the surface as his grasp on reality deteriorates into a completely misguided rage.
Read more about this topic: Chapter 27
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)