And in the end -
You must have seen it. Or heard about it. You either care or you don’t. Rave, or shrug. After all, the three-part Disney+ series Get Back is more than seven hours long. Its content warning includes not only the usual Mature Language, but also Smoking. There is a great deal of smoking. An incredible amount of smoking. You can almost feel the sting of burning tobacco, as blue clouds curl around the very young faces of John, Paul, Ringo, and George. It was 1969. Fifty-two years later, those hazy trails are magic made visible.
When Michael Lindsey-Hogg filmed sixty hours of footage over twenty-one days, he could not have imagined what Peter Jackson would distill from it. The Lord of the Rings director spent four years making a different, quieter, more intimate and revealing film. More chamber piece than epic, it gives us a carefully curated view of the Beatles in their last weeks as the Beatles.
Here’s the story, edited for clarity: From a cavernous movie set at Twickenham, to the cozier studio at Abbey Road, the Beatles goof around, fiddle with equipment, try out new tunes, tinker with old ones, argue, smoke. George quits the band. The others persuade him to come back. They reconcile, and smoke. Yoko Ono dresses in black. She dresses in white. She is not the demoness one expects to see, after decades of misogynist vilification. Sitting quietly next to John, she is a calming presence, like a weighted blanket. Only occasionally does she screech. After days of tension, Billy Preston, a friend since the Munich days, arrives. As he sits at the keyboard, easing into the music, he is the deus ex machina, the newly anointed Fifth Beatle. The original, grandiose plan - create fourteen songs for an album, stage a concert in an ancient Libyan amphitheater, make a TV show or a documentary movie — gets scuttled. They write and record a few songs that appear on the album Let it Be, and some that show up on Abbey Road. They smoke. They make an impromptu appearance on the rooftop of the studio. After forty-two minutes, a pair of chin-strapped bobbies pull the plug, due to “More than thirty complaints!” from the public. John thanks the Savile Road audience, adding “I hope we passed the audition.” It is the Beatles’ final concert.
It is spellbinding.
In 1969 I was thirteen. I couldn’t have imagined myself at sixty-five, sitting next to my husband of forty-two years, watching the breakup of the Beatles as it happened. At the conclusion of Get Back, they are still together. In our minds, they will always be together. They lit one match after another, those four boys in their twenties. Their music burns brightly, as it always will. Who knew that Paul’s melancholy comment upon George and (maybe) John leaving the group foretold unfathomable loss. “And then there were two.”
But before that? Paul played a few chords, sang a couple of words, as George yawned and Ringo looked at the floor. Then they snapped to attention. Ringo clapped out a rhythm. George noodled on his guitar. In just over two minutes, “Get Back” was a song.
Magic.
