![]() Because while the Beatles are Beatling around on their soundstage, the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg is making or trying to make what will eventually become the unloved documentary Let It Be, to be released in 1970 after the band has broken up. Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, released in three episodes on Disney+, is a film about the Beatles, but it’s also a film about a film. So they’re scuffing through songs bantering giggling eating sandwiches drinking tea drinking wine drinking something orange drinking something tomato-colored looking heavily drugged (Lennon) looking beadily alert (also Lennon) ignoring one another indulging one another eyeballing one another having earnest, shrouded, passive-aggressive circular Liverpudlian conversations regarding the future (or not) of their band. ![]() Or are these, in fact, laboratory conditions for the dissolution of a creative unit? Kill or cure, maybe. McCartney, it seems, had a notion that a process like this would get them back to basics, put the estranged Beatles back in touch with one another. Or get some songs together for a live show. ![]() Marooned in this quasi-industrial environment, the Beatles are trying-insane proposition-to write an album. Everybody’s watching, everybody’s listening: nosy cameras, nudging mics, cables and crew members all over the place. Planes of shifting color light up the white screens behind them, viridescent splodges and blooms of moody fuchsia, as if they’re trapped at the end of a rainbow. “I think your beard suits you … man,” George says to Paul. They are of the ’60s and they are above the ’60s. They burble they dawdle they pick up their instruments and put them down again. What is happening to the Beatles? Whose idea was this? What is going on? It’s January 1969, and look at them: stuck on a soundstage in Twickenham Film Studios-the Beatles!-sitting around like a bunch of YouTubers, idly generating content.
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