A Close Read of the Beatles in “Get Back” (2024)

I suspect that no one—truly, no one—could have imagined the success of the new Beatles documentary, “Get Back,” the director Peter Jackson’s recut of the footage shot in January of 1969 that produced the dim documentary “Let It Be.” After having taken on the task of reshaping our entire conception of the First World War in his previous “updated” documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Jackson has now taken on the harder task of reconstructing our view of Paul’s quarrel with George over the guitar riffs in “Two of Us.” Even so: nearly eight hours of guys making desultory passes at old songs, painfully constructing new ones through hours of repetition and the testing of tentative lyrics—“Is Tucson in Arizona?” John checks with Paul as they write “Get Back”—all the while mildly bickering and talking past one another in a family broth of warm memories and clouded quarrels? Really? Only the remaining coterie of grizzled Beatles fans, surely, would respond. But the documentary works and, apparently, has been an astonishing success both in the numbers of people who have watched it and the number of responses it has provoked.

The entire phenomenon, fifty years on, is an unexpected echo of the original Beatlemania in America, when their appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February of 1964, just months after the tragedy of J.F.K.’s assassination, lifted a depressed American mood. This return comes just as we begin to emerge from the similar-sized shock of the pandemic—the assassination obviously much smaller in scale but significantly alike in its emotional panic, the sense of what couldn’t happen happening. The arrival of the Beatles was a deep breath and a restart, as Billy Joel once said. That year, Bruce Springsteen wrote in his recent memoir, “there were no more magical words in the English language” than “the Beatles”—and his sidekick Steve Van Zandt, in his book, compared their cultural impact to a “spaceship landing in Central Park”—the transformative moment in countless musical lives.

Yet it’s puzzling that what is supposedly revealed during the almost eight-hour bath of material in “Get Back” was already well known to anyone who was paying attention. (Well, O.K., to adopt a revision suggested by an editor under thirty: “already well known to pathetic Beatles obsessives who think of little else.”) That the band was still happy together when they played, and hardly in the unending misery that John—who always said whatever came into his mind—later claimed, had been apparent even in the earlier “Let It Be,” when the high spirits of the rooftop concert trumped the squabbles that preceded it. (And those squabbles were edited in a way to make them seem more squallish than they really were.) That Yoko was not the agent of the band’s dissolution—that she did not “break up the Beatles”—has long been generally accepted; she seems in “Get Back” a benign and, one episode of improvised collective wailing aside, a rather passive figure. Paul’s pensive remark recorded here about her presence—“It’s going to be such an incredible sort of comical thing, like, in fifty years’ time, you know: ‘They broke up ’cause Yoko sat on an amp’ ”—was true to his public tone throughout.

It was also known that the “Let It Be” sessions were not marred by fistfights or shouting matches but rather were a series of smoldering hurt feelings and strangled misunderstandings. (One otherwise intelligent commentator insists that there has to have been more to George’s walking out than is shown, when the whole point is that there need not have been; being ignored and quietly shushed was enough to force him into a gesture of independence.) Indeed, true obsessives will already have read, if not heard, much of the “new” dialogue in the film, having encountered it fifty years ago in the long out-of-print book of audio transcripts that accompanied the original “Let It Be” box set. These remarks include Paul and George’s memorable dig at the readiness of their record label, EMI, to get an eight-track recorder out for the Beach Boys but not the Beatles (“We subsidize EMI,” George says) and Paul’s pained “We’ve been very negative since Mr. Epstein passed away” (referring to the original Beatles manager and father figure, Brian Epstein).

Yet the Beatles moved us now, and then, as a metaphor for family. No: as a family, a willed one—and seeing the intensity of their family relations, even when under stress, is what remains moving. Ringo, though chronologically the oldest, is the perfect youngest sibling. The last to join the band, he is everybody’s favorite: the peacemaker, playing piano with Paul, “writing” a song with George. George is a classic neglected middle child, with the bossy older siblings absent-mindedly nodding at him and never taking him entirely seriously; when asked, they’re quick to say that he’s talented and important, but they’re too self-involved to say it when it counts. The sequence in the film that ends with George quietly quitting the band, his eyes clouding over with hurt after he tries to make genuinely sweet and helpful comments while John and Paul ignore him and sing strictly at each other—in a song that is obviously about each other, “Two of Us”—is a study in the damaged feelings of an open heart.

John is the clear oldest, dominating, though unaware even while being so, and Paul a classic second, just as he calls himself (“I’ve been sort of secondary boss”), domineering as well but accustomed to maneuvering rather than forcing his way forward. Far from being actually bossy, he tries to act bossy—and then apologizes for acting bossy. Paul is excellent, too, at an older sibling’s evil skill: feigning distraction in place of what is in fact disinterest. There is a touching bit where George, with younger-brother enthusiasm, generously praises and plays an old Paul song, “Every Little Thing,” and Paul benignly accepts it as no more than his due—with George then adding, sincerely, that he hopes this album can be like the previous one (“the only album, so far, I tried to get involved in”), only to get a minimal response from Paul. (Paul then immediately does an old John song from that previous album, “I’m So Tired.”)

Meanwhile, the twinship between Paul and John, the core of the band, remains intact even when John seems disabled—in part by drugs, surely—and Paul testy in his presence, jokingly asking him to pay attention in a way that makes it plain Paul isn’t joking. There is a lovely scene in the fictional film “Nowhere Boy” in which John, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Paul—played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, the drummer kid from “Love Actually”—meet. Though the encounter is doubtless a touch cosmeticized, the two good actors capture the pair’s essential chemistry. Paul is attracted to the older boy’s arrogance and charisma and self-confidence—his cool. John recognizes the younger boy’s superior musicianship and good looks, and decides to both befriend and dominate. One suspects that not a day went by when that was not the parsed equation of their partnership. (At one startling point in the movie, John says to Paul, apropos some overlapping lyrics in a couple of their songs, “It’s like you and me are lovers,” adding, instantly, “We’ll have to camp it up for those two.”)

Throughout the new documentary, Paul’s compulsive musicianship is everywhere evident, taking over even the arrangement of John’s best song, “Don’t Let Me Down.” “It should be different beat and all onto light things and cymbals,” Paul instructs Ringo, and, of the bridge, coolly reminds John: “That’s a weak bit of the song, that.” Yet how gentle the Beatles are with one another, in the pained, semi-articulate way of families! Nobody says a harsh or impatient word. John and Paul, secretly recorded talking about George after he’s quit, do not call him a prima donna but only regret that “it’s a festering wound that we’ve allowed.... And we didn’t give him any bandages.” Paul’s talent as a musician does dominate the sessions—but he dominates mostly by cajoling and including rather than by insisting. The now legendary sequence in which Paul, playing full chords on his bass guitar—a difficult thing to do—composes “Get Back” in less than four minutes is still perhaps a bit misunderstood. Paul does it, but he does it for the group. He starts with a keening minor-key wail, interesting in itself, then finds the familiar chord pattern of the song. But Ringo and George are the necessary audience. “It’s good. It’s... you know. Musically and that, it’s great,” a till-then bored-seeming George mutters—and, on his Telecaster, instantly answers with a sharp, Steve Cropper-style upstroke riff, one that might well have found a home in the finished song. Ringo starts clapping out the rhythm. Then John walks in, late, and, without saying a single word, immediately finds—as a rhythm guitarist should—the right A dominant-seventh chord on his Epiphone electric and casually starts filling out his part. It’s a movie moment, of the kind that used to happen in forties musicals, when the big band on the sleeper car suddenly finds the song. But here, it just happens. That’s a band.