Walt Disney Studios has taken the hundreds of hours of film that Michael Lindsay-Hogg directed in January of 1969 and turned it over to the filmmaker responsible for bringing Tolkien to the multiplex; Peter Jackson. The end result, the three part docuseries The Beatles: Get Back (2021), is an epic portrait of a band on the brink of collapse. Jackson opens up the dramatic beats of Let It Be (1970) and ties those moments into the wider context of The Beatles’ history.
Unlike Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Jackson’s concerns are not with myth making nor the preservation of some monumental egos. Jackson’s film is about pulling back the curtain and revealing the very human men behind the most important Rock band of the twentieth century. Jackson can address Brian Epstein’s suicide, Billy Preston’s role in the sessions, Allen Klein’s bid for management and the brief period when George Harrison quit the group explicitly; drawing on the “unseen” footage to tell these tales “just as they happened”.
The issue with a documentary of The Beatles is that, no matter how candid the filmmakers are, The Beatles themselves cannot help but perform. It’s worth noting that when real band changing decisions are to be made that they happen off screen in private. What the camera records is what The Beatles wish to show the world. On occasion there’s a slip up and an argument is caught on film but this is really the exception that proves the rule. What this kind of documentary can do with its duration is enable the viewer to detect the protective facades in place and perceive the subjects’ humanity beneath a veneer of comical clowning and goofing around.
The Beatles: Get Back is roughly four times the length of Let It Be so while they share many of the same characteristics in terms of style and content, Jackson’s version operates with a whole other modus operandi in mind. The long duration of The Beatles: Get Back not only allows the viewer to find humanity in the subjects and engage the history of the band in greater detail, but also takes the viewer into the highly repetitious operations of the recording process. A handful of songs are traced from their genesis to their final take over the course of Jackson’s film. Essentially Jackson is applying Jacques Rivette’s theoretical process in La Belle Noiseuse (1991) to the musical documentary.
What’s interesting about focusing on the creative process of The Beatles is that this process itself acts as a kind of drama that reveals the weaknesses in the group that would lead to its demise. As fascinating as this may be it is hardly revelatory to those who have been reading scholars and historians like Mark Lewisohn for the last thirty years. For fans of The Beatles Jackson’s film is a lot like watching Heinz Schirk’s Die Wannseekonferenz (1984). But to the uninitiated or the casual fan The Beatles: Get Back will probably be shocking. Hopefully one of the best things to come out of this project will be the public vindication of Yoko Ono.
All of that aside there is plenty to enjoy on a superficial level in Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back. There’s a quietly tender moment where, before Lennon and McCartney arrive, George takes a crack at helping Ringo with his latest composition “Octopus’s Garden”. In that same episode there is a delightful visit from Linda’s daughter Heather who announces upon entering the studio that her cat has had “kittens this small”, to which Lennon retorts “are you gonna eat them?”. Then of course in the first episode any shot of Mal Evans whacking the anvil with a hammer is bound to put a smile on anyone’s face.
There really is just so much happening in The Beatles: Get Back; it’s enough to distract one from the obvious question of “why hasn’t Disney also released Let It Be?”. As was suggested above, The Beatles: Get Back isn’t the myth busting spectacle it was marketed as (at least not to fans of the group). Is Let It Be being withheld because it is so similar to Jackson’s movie? Will a mass revisit by audiences to Let It Be reveal the systemic racism that has burdened Yoko Ono with the responsibility of breaking up The Beatles? The answer to all of these questions is “yes, of course”. But there is also the concern of viewers opting to watch the much shorter Let It Be instead of Jackson’s newly minted cash cow.
The frightening thing that The Beatles: Get Back represents is that in addition to Marvel, Lucas Films LTD., and 20th Century Fox the Walt Disney Corporation has added The Beatles to its collection of intellectual properties. Disney is slowly taking over the entertainment industry and will undoubtedly conquer the world.
