The Parable of The Beatles: Get Back

Screengrab from The Beatles: Get Back (Walt Disney Pictures/Apple Corps/WingNut Films)

There is this moment in the “The Beatles: Get Back” that feels almost like a parable being played out.

The endless discussion that dominates “Part 1: Days 1-7”, variations on the theme of “What’s the show gonna be?” that go round and round eventually dominates everything else going on in the Twickenham Studios at the moment. Everything, that is, except for Paul McCartney playing the chord progression on a piano that will become immortalized as Let It Be, utterly oblivious to it all. But finally, even he relents, pulled into a scrum discussion fussing over the details of an elaborate performances that we know will never happen before the group calls it a night. The next morning it is McCartney, first in and grunting through questions about the show from the previous evening’s discussion before brushing them off with “I better go put in some piano practice” and mostly to himself banging out the embryonic stages of The Long and Winding Road while the discussion about the “The show” once again kicks up around him. When interrupted yet again with the same question, Paul retorts “We’re going on a farm in Scotland” before shrugging off his overcoat, offering a “Kidding” and going right back to writing a now-classic Beatles song. Then another. Then another. Finally, with the whole band present, they make music together, along with the joking, comradery, and brotherhood shining through for a few moments along with snippets of music and smiles of those involved.

And then, again, someone starts talking about “the show,” and like a switch the mood changes, the spell of playing music together broken, the reality and the gravity of being The Beatles once again pulling everyone down.

It’s like watching a loved one in a cancer ward. Almost as if Paul intuitively knew the only cure for what ailed the biggest band in the world was to make more music, but like the chemotherapy that kills the disease right before the patient, the effort to sustain the dying body would leave nothing left. One-fourth of The Beatles dialed in was just enough to push the rest ahead a little while longer, but only just.

Jackson treats all this as close to unfiltered as a project that might be the most digitally filtered ever can be. Having invented an AI program to go through the massive amount of audio, isolate it, clean it up, and then link it back up to hours and hours of footage that likewise had to be renewed, restored, and recut was a massive undertaking. As it turned out, “The Beatles: Get Back” is the perfect project for a Covid-19 limited world. Jackson says his own cut of this epic project runs 18 hours, much more than the two something hours of the originally imaged featured film, and longer than the merciful eight hours Disney is putting out for the public. The hardcore fans will think it too short, but it’s still a bit long for the average audience not already invested in The Beatles. But there is so much there. From the dramatic, like George Harrison’s walk out, to the mundane of yet another meeting over “the show,” to the nearly meta of John Lennon playing a Hank Williams song with Yoko Ono’s head on his shoulder at the piano.

Jackson leaves all this magically stitched together story mostly free to tell itself, only using some title cards and a calendar graphic to keep things together. Those title cards inform us that some liberties were taken to match video with audio, and there are other moments like John and Paul being recorded from a hidden mic in a flowerpot where Jackson gives us panning shots of an empty table and said representative floral arrangement. The editing and production work on “The Beatles: Get Back” cannot be praised enough. Sure, not everything is perfectly synched, but it almost works in the project’s favor, giving some rough visual edges to this peak into something half a century gone. Having a narrator would have just been in the way. This is a work for the invested viewer, and no middleman is needed. Indeed, if you need one, this probably isn’t The Beatles documentary for you.

It all lends to being as much a parable as a music documentary. Jackson’s opening montage to build the backstory pivots around John Lennon’s now-infamous comments about Christianity, Christ, and The Beatles that shifted The Beatles from a touring act to a studio one. A pivot that made the latter efforts revolutionary but the absence of the former taking away some essential life force a band needs to center itself. But it is more subtle than Jesus sitting everyone down and going “There was four lads from Liverpool who grew apart as men.” It’s hard to remember watching “The Beatles: Get Back” that though the band is dying before our eyes the men involved are not yet 30 years old, and George Harrison as the youngest, barely 26. Equally jarring is that only two years after Lennon’s “We’re more popular than Jesus now” quip comes these fraught sessions in January of 1969 of The Beatles indeed fading before their final disbandment some 8 months later. Or that 11 years after that breakup John Lennon would be dead, and The Beatles would never get the reunion now so common among big groups that break up too soon.

The parable, as it turns out, is that all too often we miss the eternal for the chaos of the moment. Like Paul McCartney playing the now iconic “Let It Be” unnoticed to the dozens of people surrounding him, all trying to plan out something epic that never happened when that very thing was in their presence all along. Constantly interrupting him to remind him that there are a thousand things pulling the thing he loved apart, but doggedly trying to finish the song anyway, even if it is one of the last songs.

Fortunately, the cameras were rolling for this parable. And we get to watch. Them that has ears, and eyes, and eight hours of free time, let them hear.