An Exercise in Cutting

The Beatles: Get Back, dir. Peter Jackson, from film by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Disney+), 7 h 8 min

This three-part TV film—Peter Jackson’s movie made out of footage shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg for the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions in 1969—has been greeted as all but a Beatles reunion and poured over as if it were a cross between the Talmud and a codex to the group’s next 50 years. In fact, it's an exercise in cutting. Either because Jackson didn’t trust the audience, the music, or the 60 hours of film he had to work with, except for a disturbing hidden-camera recording of John and Paul trying to come to terms with what the future might be, and at moments a thrilling six-part split screen version of the final rooftop show, almost nothing taking place in rehearsals or in the recording sessions—verbal back and forth, or all the diving into old songs, working out new ones—is allowed to play out at its true length, in real time. Everything is chopped up, to the point that while nothing is ever boring, nothing is realized, and the emotional foundation of what is at once a great tragedy, a small triumph, and a turning point, or ending point, in modern history, is lost.

At one point, John brings up Elvis’s “My Baby Left Me,” with Paul on drums, Slim Harpo’s “High-Heel Sneakers,” and Elvis’s “Milkcow Blues Boogie”—with Jackson giving seconds for each. You want to hear more. You want to hear it all. You want to hear the songs break down, come to a sudden end, find their purchase on the story—whatever happened. And no. The movie presents itself as the story of a quest—to find the music for a TV show, a new album, a show with an audience (at a Roman amphitheater in Libya, a hill, or somewhere)—but it’s all process.  You hear Paul read the entirety of a newspaper attack on the new, “bizarre” Beatles, but not a song is ever treated in the same way.

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And all the press about how the movie shows that, no, Yoko didn’t break up the Beatles? Whether anyone ever really claimed that or not—not that it’s unknown for a new spouse to try to separate his or her own new spouse from his or her old friends—the question of whether the Beatles broke up at least partly because of Yoko is something else. “If it’s Yoko or the Beatles,” Paul says at one point to Ringo and George, simply stating a fact about the couple in the room, attached to each other as if each is the other’s parasitic twin, “it’s Yoko.” For that matter, there’s Amanda Hess in the New York Times going into raptures about the charm and fascination of watching Yoko’s impassive face in every scene of music-making in the film—if you think bringing a human-size replica of the Sphinx into the room is going to be anyone else’s idea of a good time. And then hearing John lumber into “Don’t Let Me Down” again and again, and again, and again, telling you in his heroin-thickened voice what a great fuck Yoko is—how did that turn out to be a great record?

There’s John parodying Martin Luther King’s “I had a dream this afternoon,” then not a parody: King, he says, was “like a poet, he would have been president—‘I had a dream,’ like Tennyson.” Was there more of this?

You see Paul doing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” in his Elvis voice—he makes you realize how good a song it is. You want to hear the Beatles play it. You want every moment that’s left out.

You could not make a soundtrack album out of this film.

With everyone in the studio, you get Yoko shrieking over “Twist and Shout” picked up by Linda Eastman’s six-year-old daughter Heather who holds a mic and shrieks right back—she’s better.

Near the end, you begin to lose any sense of “the Beatles.” It’s just four or five people in a room. And then they’re up on the roof playing their last show. There are cops coming up to shut it down because of noise complaints. It’s like a 1950s prom crisis movie where the police or the principal are about to shut down the rock & roll dance party when they find themselves tapping their feet. Except here you can’t help but suspect the cops were hired to play just this role.

There is one signal moment that, as editing, is also filmmaking, isolating a moment that brings everything else into relief, yet allowing that situation to hold its shape in time. After George walks out on a Friday, in his words having “left” the band, and John doesn’t show up for the session on Monday, Paul looks over at Ringo. He’s been the most inviting and heartbreaking presence all through the film, rarely speaking (though at one point when the film they’re supposed to be making seems farther away than ever, he drops one thought: “Let’s make a silent movie”), at any time breaking into his quick-time slapstick one-second jitter dance. “…And then there were two,” Paul says—and the gong goes off. History comes crashing down like a mountain. Fifty-two years collapse into you like a curse.

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