I’ve been reading through you J+P analysis and love it! I hope you don’t mind but I wanted to add my two cents on the idea that Paul’s statements and mentions about John have potentially gotten over effusive to please the press and have fed into him over romanticising his relationship with John. I think this is somewhat true but I believe the reality is a lot more complicated and symbiotic.
It's undeniable that Paul is on a bit of a bizarre post-mortem honeymoon with John at the minute due to nostalgia and the pro-lennon/mccartney stuff coming out. There’s no way that isn’t colouring his thinking and you’re right, there’s a discrepancy between Pauls more contradictory statements closer to John’s death vs now. People pleasing does have something to do with it, but it goes both ways. In that 1987(?) interview with John’s sister Julia, Paul says that he tried to downplay his relationship with John as people didn’t want to hear it, which partially explains his scrambled ‘oh we were the best of mates but you don’t get close to mates’ 1980s interviews. That interview is also important as Julia allows him to voice the belief that he skirted round in other interviews, which is that he was the person who knew John best. That’s a bold statement to make, and puts his tentative ‘one of the closest people to him. I can’t claim to be the closest, although it’s possible … but I wouldn’t… I don’t need that credit.’ in a different light. Linda was also talking about the intensity and depth of their relationship early on (deeper than any of us will ever know, like the mirror image of each other etc) and pre-breakup Paul was casually describing he and John’s extreme closeness to a friend and their telepathy. So some of Paul's more effusive stuff he’s coming out with in interviews in the last decade or so is probably partly to do with the shift in narrative validating all of these feelings that he always had about John but felt unable to say/reckon with at the time of his death. It could be a bit like a pressure valve releasing slightly and all of it just flooding out.
Like the soulmate thing, it could be Paul rambling and getting to an extreme point but also he would never have been able to say that in the 80s/90s without backlash (I do find it telling that Paul’s PR guy also openly called John a soulmate to Paul, sure its good for brand image but also he would be more conscious than anyone of what Paul is okay with being put out there. Also the Howard Stern one where he reacted badly to the LOML question was likely due to the romantic connotations/Howard’s lack of boundaries). We also shouldn’t caricature-ise Paul’s people pleasing tendencies when it comes to his feelings and emotions. Sure he leaves harder stuff out and likes to focus on the positive, but he’s also Fort Knox possessive/private about his feelings and downplays them or shuts off (he’s done this recently like when he refused to tell Colbert about his dreams about John in detail). He fully owns to the press that the situation was complicated and his feelings aren’t straightforward. That he tends to downplay intensity as a general rule DESPITE greater intensity feeding better to the press should throw starker light on the strength of his feeling rather than doubt.
The more extreme statements also match what he’s saying in his personal life to friends and family (multiple people have said he constantly brings up the Beatles even when they themselves are asked not to and Julian mentioned that when he discusses John he talks about it as if it was a great love) and his personality. Paul was never getting over John because he loves profoundly and its not in his nature to let go. He’s the man who spent £70,000 in the 70s doing up a car that had fallen into a lake for ‘sentimental’ reasons, the man who bought the railings from Please Please Me to install in his studio and the man who, according to some reports, turned his whole house into a Linda shrine after she died. He’s also the man shattered by his mother’s death to the point he’s still agonised over laughing at her over something silly. The press have exacerbated the situation and his uncertainty over their relationship to the point that he has to prove it to himself which is horrible, but in all likelihood he was always going to fill his houses and studios with John’s items and over 40 years later privately mull over if hugging John more would have helped, especially given how John died.
Paul is not creating a narrative that didn't exist but zooming in on an aspect that was already there and choosing to focus on that. It’s become a bit of a feedback loop, ie Paul watches Mclennon videos on youtube then sends them to producers as inspiration as to how they should present their relationship in a documentary which again pushes a narrative onto fans which they embrace and so on. Ironically, I see the interviews and press as not just a perpetuator but also an outlet for Paul’s grief and trauma that was going to exist regardless of media involvement. Media is the thing that tore them apart and kept them apart initially but now its the medium where again Paul gets validation for his relationship with John as well as an outlet to speak about it in a way which he would normally be too repressed to do. Is his view on John different now than when he was alive? Sure! Is it romanticised? Probably? But likewise, was the petty bullshit that clouded his judgement during their worst period the true snapshot of their relationship either? It’s a whole messy question of whether there is ever one true version of something as shifting as a volatile relationship and if our relationship with the dead ever really ends/our views on the dead become more or less valid with paradoxical clarity/obscurity of distance.
Essentially what I’m trying to say is that Paul romanticises and creates narrative through omission, not exaggeration and that his more extreme statements are likely true to him. Love is a conversation and sometimes becomes an echo when the other person isn’t there yada yada yada.
Thank you for taking the time to write all of this out :)
I agree with a lot of this actually! Though I do also think that we shouldn't ignore the fact that Paul still regularly reveals his feelings towards John to be kind of mixed at times when he talks about the breakup specifically. But on the whole, your thoughts really align with mine and if I at times seem more cynical, it's probably because I find the specific way people talk about Paul on here can get very reductive.
You summarized the nuance of it very well here:
It’s a whole messy question of whether there is ever one true version of something as shifting as a volatile relationship and if our relationship with the dead ever really ends/our views on the dead become more or less valid with paradoxical clarity/obscurity of distance. Essentially what I’m trying to say is that Paul romanticises and creates narrative through omission, not exaggeration and that his more extreme statements are likely true to him. Love is a conversation and sometimes becomes an echo when the other person isn’t there yada yada yada.
