Ten Reasons Why “Get Back” is Bad, You Cowards

1. You think you’re getting the “real” thing, but you are not. People criticized Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary for treating the archive like a canvas to correct, and this hyper-mediated “real” is just as manipulated, partial, and subtly shaped and scripted. It’s just that this one is so long that we’ve decided it’s TRUTH, that now we’ve seen revealed what really happened. In fact, Jackson has simply produced his own fictions, literally mashing audio onto different visuals, censoring expletives, and cutting up and remixing scenes to produce the apparent coherence we desire. If we weren’t so desperate to believe in the illusion of access, we’d realize that this thing of using machine learning to artificially enhance the footage is some real big brother shit.

2. As we congratulate ourselves on finally knowing what really happened, all the actually important stuff is happening offscreen (John doing heroin, Allen Klein is preparing to break up the Beatles, Magic Alex’s genius creations, the meetings at Ringo’s house, etc). And Peter Jackson isn’t the only one carefully editing the tapes to make his heroes look like heroes; the Beatles themselves are ALWAYS performing for the camera, all the more so when they pretend that they aren’t (and now they and the estates are vetting what is allowed to come out). You think you’re getting hidden camera access; you’re actually watching Hard Day’s Night II. Let it Be was always a post-breakup cash grab, a failed experiment that the Beatles basically walked away from so they could make the vastly superior Abbey Road instead. But because it was released after Abbey Road, and because the original movie made it seem like we were seeing the breakup of the Beatles, their last gasp of rooftop glory, these sessions have always felt like the final word. This misconception continues to be propagated by Peter Jackson’s careful omissions, even though, with Abbey Road on the horizon, ALL OF THIS is prologue. The real stuff happens later. It’s just that this is the stuff there’s footage of.

3. It absolves the racist misogynist Beatles of racist misogyny against Yoko, even though we all know that was exactly what happened. “Oh, wow, it turns out she didn’t actually break up the Beatles, she just sits there quietly and supportively!” LISTEN TO YOURSELF, of course she didn’t break up the Beatles, but apparently you always thought she did, didn’t you? Wow. Meanwhile, everyone understands that the other Beatles really did treat her like shit, something this documentary makes a real point of not showing, along with the 87 interviews the other Beatles did where they talked shit about her constantly, or the interviews from years later where they admit they were assholes to her.

4. It’s a bad documentary. The opening montage is dumb (“The Dictionary defines ‘Beatles’ as…”) and Peter Jackson learned filmmaking from CIA manuals on the ego-destroying effects of extended sensory stimulation, which is why the thing is eight hours long: if you make a movie long enough, people’s brains ooze out their ears and they start saying it’s good.

5. The Beatles were studio rats and the documentary totally misses their collective genius at creating hyper-textured studio-only pop music. They were seasoned performers and all, and charismatic and funny, but they were way off their game by 1969 and the Let it Be album is middling-to-poor late Beatles product because of it. The entire idea of “getting back to basics” was misguided, a kind of juvenile nostalgia that actually prevented the band from evolving forward. It’s why, instead of exploring new musical territory, we mostly see endless versions of the Beatles doing old songs in stupid funny voices, and they aren’t really that funny. “I’ve farted.” Grow the fuck up, Ringo.

6. No one is ready to talk about how the Beatles are using Billy Preston to paper over their imperial appropriation of Black music, especially in the face of the late-sixties’ rising tide of global revolution and Black Militancy. We can’t be racist, they shriek; we have a Black friend in the band who is, uh, totally an equal partner. “We are all big fans of Martin Luther King,” the band utters on queue as he enters. “Also, the song ‘Blackbird’ was always about the civil rights struggle, no, honestly.”

7. The assassination of Michael Lindsay-Hogg by the coward Peter Jackson. The real auteur here, the directorial visionary, is made out to be a grotesque laughingstock when Peter Jackson basically just uses all his tape, puts his name on it, and now Peter Jackson is the big genius who “gets” the Beatles? Fuck you. They SHOULD have gone to Libya like he wanted, imagine how hard that would have ruled.

8. It was the wrong historical moment to “get back” to the Beatles. Do you know who likes the Beatles? Pete Buttigieg, probably. Why, with fascism on the horizon, did Capital want to refocus our attention on four hyper-lionized boomers? Why must the tradition of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living? Pure coincidence that, instead of facing the fascist reality of their time, the Beatles shy away from taking a stand against Enoch Powell and instead write a song that is uncomfortably transphobic if it’s about anything at all. Also, you know who these creeps are all friends with and nearly ask to join the band? Eric “I think we should send them all back,” Clapton. The National Review named “Taxman” the second greatest conservative rock song of all time, and “Revolution” was number seven.

9. You woke that poor woman out of her nap. Also, it’s a stupid place to have a concert. If you’re going to play a concert, at least come down to the street to play, so people can hear. People would also like to see them.

10. This isn’t the original Paul, this is the one they replaced him with after he died. Wake up sheeple.