‘Self Portrait’: Yoko Ono’s 42-minute film of John Lennon’s semi-erect penis
In 1966, Yoko Ono unveiled a work titled ‘Yes’. At the top of a ladder hung a magnifying glass. When you held the magnifying glass to the roof above, in a small, scratchy print, the word “Yes” was etched onto the ceiling. This was the piece that made John Lennon swoon. ”It was positive,” he reflected. ”I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something, it said ‘yes’.”
Lennon would later claim that he knew little to nothing about Yoko Ono before the exhibition, and she would state the same about Lennon, the world’s most famous man at that point. But, thankfully, they fortuitously met that day in the gallery, and within three years, they’d be taking a magnifying glass to Lennon’s manhood in a 42-minute film titled Self Portrait. The movie shows a single shot of The Smart One’s spam javelin quivering on the point of erection until the climax reveals a small globule of ejaculate has formed.
It’s certainly no Top Gun, but in its own ludicrous way, it showcases Yoko Ono’s profound influence on Lennon and The Beatles, in turn. As Lennon said of ‘Yes’, “I thought it was fantastic – I got the humour in her work immediately. I didn’t have to have much knowledge about avant-garde or underground art, the humour got me straightaway.” Soon, he would be the frontrunner of the avant-garde world. So, his shivering stiffy might seem somewhat bizarre, tedious and unnecessary, but it derives from the same sense of experimentation that brought the world ‘A Day in the Life’.
In fact, it is no accident that he described his intentions for the latter as thus: ”I want it to be like a musical orgasm. I want it to start from absolutely nothing and increase in tremendous tension and build up to the most overpowering sound you’ve ever heard in your life.” While they failed to recreate this with 1969’s Self Portrait, it is. Nevertheless, the limp inverse of this, with Lennon even admitting that the secretion of a weak drizzle of semen in the final throes of the 42-minute anti-epic was accidental.
However, it is unfair to judge Self Portrait too harshly – though some have argued that it eclipses A Hard Day’s Night – as the project remained unfinished. The intention had been for Yoko Ono to secretly film audience reactions to the slow-motion, minimalist shaft movie at the first showing and then splice that footage into a split-screen film with one half focusing on the bespectacled Beatles’ winking yoghurt cannon, fluxing its way through various states of mast, and the other fixed on the confused faces of critics, furrowing their brows through 40-odd minutes of flitting tumescence.
Alas, the project failed. The equipment filming the critics was faulty, and nothing was recorded, leaving nothing left but Lennon’s cock and ball story. So, the project was swiftly forgotten, and the footage was seemingly destroyed. This renders Self Portrait a fabled piece of what is now termed ‘Lost Media’. This is perhaps just as well—it’s not something the family-friendly Beatles museum is shy of. And that quip alone is indicative of Lennon’s bizarre and truly unique position in pop culture history.
The Beatles are family-friendly, and yet at the same time, they were producing ubiquitous hits like ’Yellow Submarine’, that have lived on in society like folk rhymes of old, they were dropping their trousers for mano manhood combat on top of a roof for a weird short film. Can you image today’s biggest celebrity doing that in the name of art?
This wasn’t the only minimalist experimental film that Lennon and Yoko Ono made together, either. There was also Smile and Two Virgins, which were both recorded on the same day in a Kensington garden. They essentially superimposed their faces on top of each other for 19 minutes while experimental psychedelia from the accompanying Two Virgins album plays in the background. Then there was Up Your Legs Forever, which featured almost 400 pairs of legs. Fly, which showed a bluebottle crawling its way around a woman’s naked body. And, most controversially, Rape, in which a random female was incessantly stalked by a cameraman.
For better or for worse, and for most people, a prick fidgeting on the brink of a stiffy for nearly an hour would certainly be for worse; this is the liberated way that John Lennon and Yoko Ono navigated life and art in the heady tail-end of the 1960s. Self Portrait might now stand as a lost portent of how that can go too far, but John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was just around the corner to prove that there can also be a positive side to simply saying ‘Yes‘ to your passing ideas. As the perfect poised Self Portrait proclaimed, some might flop, some might fortify, and others might tiresomely twitch between the two three-quarters of an hour.
