Get Back

Growing up, The Beatles were annoying.

Y’all will never know what it’s like for your parents’ generation to have a complete stranglehold on pop culture… the Boomers utterly dominated society for decades, and by God, they were gonna make us listen to their shit whether we wanted to or not. Half the movies and music of the ‘80s were dedicated to them looking back at their childhoods, or regurgitating their glory. Our affection for hair-metal was mostly just a way of pissing them off.

But as I got older, I softened. I embraced The Who, Pink Floyd, and The Stones, and I bought George Harrison and Paul McCartney CDs. (Cloud Nine and Flowers in the Dirt, for the record.) But I continued to reject both The Beach Boys and The Beatles, because goddammit, people wouldn’t stop telling me how perfect Pet Sounds and Abbey Road were.

It wasn’t until my late 30s that I began to appreciate The Beatles. (I still haven’t come around to the Beach Boys.) But even if I hadn’t finally surrendered on my own, I think Peter Jackson’s Get Back would have convinced me.

I mean… holy hell! First, the magic that Jackson and his team produced in sharpening up all that 16mm film footage from 1969 and turning muddy, cross-talking audio tracks into clear-as-a-bell conversations is nothing short of amazing. And the fact that he was able to extract a narrative from it is just as impressive.

But like most people watching the show, I’m mostly stunned at just how much I like those four little shits. For a group of boys who were bigger than Jesus, they come off as shockingly pleasant, compulsively polite individuals who just couldn’t figure out how to get along. These are four guys I’d have liked to hang out with… they’re goofy and funny and thoughtful.

And in those moments —already becoming rare by 1969— when Paul and John fully engaged their mind-meld… wow. It’s like watching twins finish one another’s sentences, in musical form.

Not every second of those three very long episodes is fascinating… Jackson doesn’t flinch from showing us the agonizing (and sometimes tedious) birth process behind pop music’s most famous collection of songs. But that’s part of the experience, I think. You have to sit there —like Yoko and Linda— and watch it happen, even the boring bits. Because the boring bits are part of it.

Speaking of Yoko… as with the boys themselves, Jackson has done her memory a huge favor. Yes, she’s weird and occasionally off-putting, but it becomes obvious pretty quickly that she’s only involved because John needs her there as a security blanket. If he weren’t so threatened by Paul’s ascendancy, and was more confident in providing leadership himself, she’d have been off doing something that actually interested her rather than knitting and occasionally, playfully screeching into a mic.

(It’s impossible not to notice that Linda’s daughter is far more intrusive in one day than Yoko was over the course of weeks.)

All of which means that Get Back is my favorite Peter Jackson work since The Frighteners, and I guess I kind of love The Beatles now. Didn’t see either of those coming.