PETER JACKSON’S BEATLES SERIES GET BACK IS A FEAST FOR ONE PARTICULAR KIND OF FAN

Peter Jackson’s Beatles series Get Back is a feast for one particular kind of fan

Peter Jackson’s Beatles series Get Back is a feast for one particular kind of fan

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PeterPeter Jackson’s eight-hour Disney Plus docuseries The Beatles: Get Back, an extended behind-the-scenes accounting of the recording of Let It Be, features one particular scene that foreshadows The Beatles’ dissolution. It’s January 1969, and the group is desperately trying to flesh out their new song “Two of Us.” They’re under immense pressure. For this project, they’ve tasked themselves with writing and arranging 14 new songs to be recorded live, for a studio audience, in two weeks’ time. Cameras are there to capture their effort. They also capture John Lennon and Paul McCartney ganging up on poor George Harrison, squeezing out any sonic space for his guitar. Harrison quits the band, throwing the future of the inchoate album into jeopardy.




The Beatles — Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Ringo Starr — originally hoped the aptly titled project Get Back would return the band to its roots. They would leave behind overdubs or studio tracks, rolling back the ways of working in the studio that produced their most acclaimed albums, in lieu of a bare approach. Those recording sessions have long been known as a miserable time for the band.
But Jackson has explored 60 hours worth of 16mm film footage shot by filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and 150 hours worth of audio, to reveal a different reality. While vexation and exasperation color every other minute, so does joy, laughter, and camaraderie. Unfortunately, these nuggets, which recontextualize Beatles lore, aren’t easy for Jackson to translate.
Get Back opens with a grating, haphazardly produced montage of The Beatles’ hits, mixed with clips of their career touchstones — their fated meeting, the beginning of the raucous Beatlemania, their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, the backlash against Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” quote. Jackson’s brief, tacked-on rundown of the band’s early career represents the lone olive branch he will offer casual or newer Beatles fans. The rest of the docuseries’ eight hours are dedicated to the hardcore — the kind of viewers who can spot every splice of a studio outtake, every non-album track, and all the songs the group covered throughout their time together.

Get Back chronicles the meetings that led to the weakest studio effort of the band’s late-career peak, Let It Be. Jackson reveals the band’s dynamics, introducing the main players and the sharks circling the waters, leading to The Beatles’ demise. He concludes with a testament to their genius: the 1969 rooftop gig that was their final concert as an official band. But Jackson’s Get Back is a grueling endurance test, prone to repetition. Its fleeting rhapsodies of song creation spontaneously overflow with magic, but it still wasn’t designed to win any new converts to The Beatles’ music.

It’s almost comical to see the biggest band in the world rendered so small: Their simple setup barely takes up a corner of the studio, they don’t have any recording equipment, and the acoustics of the space are dreadful. They rummage around their incomplete melodies, first with jocularity, then with frustration.

Though the band meanders, the specter of time limitations hangs here over the proceedings. Not only hasn’t the band written and arranged their songs yet, they haven’t even settled on a location for filming their television special. (They kick around the Sabratha Amphitheater in Libya as an option). Like to the group, Jackson is hesitant to push the action. The director abandons any hint of a discerning eye. Instead, he splays out every minute detail from their time at Twickenham, debilitatingly edited by Jabez Olssen (The Hobbit trilogy). It all plays out in almost real time, without any regard for watchability.

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