#91 - So, I Keep Watching Beatles Documentaries

Last year right around this time, I wrote an essay about my edible-assisted marathon of the seven-hour-long Beatles documentary, Get Back. Since then, I have watched many many more Beatles documentaries. It would seem they’re an inexhaustible subject! And hey, I get it, the roots of modern fame, pop culture consumption, and the inherent misogyny of the dismissal of largely-women fanbases are all firmly rooted at their feet!

The approach that these four took varied the story that was being told and didn’t rehash the same information in different ways, which I really appreciated. There is…rampant misogyny throughout, but honestly, it’s just no longer surprising to me how well-documented the overall hatred of women is in any media!

(Though I will say, that doesn’t apply at all to the first doc on this list!!)

Good ‘Ol Freda

Tbh this one I first watched years ago and I absolutely loved it. It focuses on the woman who was a lifelong secretary for The Beatles and actually started fan mags and sent their hair to fan clubs post-barber and I think that’s actually the best one I’ve ever seen because I’m much more fascinated by the adjacent minutia that goes on with Big Celebrities. But also, Freda never sold them out, never raffled off her collection of memorabilia, and kept her memories to herself for years and years.

She never got recognition from the general public, but mostly because she didn’t want or ask for it. But I think it’s so so so wonderful to have a glimpse of the woman who did take the young women who were the original fans seriously because Freda herself was an original fan who found them when they were still playing in The Cavern (& would get rides home from George after the show).

It’s heartwarming and full of lovely little stories and extremely illustrative of the ecosystem that surrounded the fab four back in the day, but also spotlights the work & tenacity & organizational spirit of the woman who deeply understood how to communicate their appeal.

One of my favorite facts from it is that the audience would leave their hair rollers in until the band came out and then immediately shake out their hair. I just find humans adorable when we do things across generations without communicating about it but there’s just something about going to a show that makes girls lose their mind with possibilities of Being Noticed and I think that’s really fun, and a bit silly, but mostly lovely.

How the Beatles Changed the World

Recently though I finally found the type of doc I’ve always been looking for via Freevee (streaming service names get more undignified by the day) in which exclusively male historians and journalists detail the political atmosphere that was present during their meteoric rise to fame.

Anyway, this doc has everything:

✅ Post WWII England’s subjugation of their populace. (Always soooo important to remember that England sucks and doesn’t have citizens, it has literal Subjects of their Monarchy. It’s wild to see QEII lookin’ young young in all of that footage, she wasn’t the nation’s beloved benign grandmum figure quite yet!)

✅ Liverpool dock work surging as they become an international hub.

✅ An explanation of the sudden upward mobility available to students via testing into better schools. (This one test is literally what allowed The Beatles to be formed in the first place, Paul and George would never have gone to the school on ~the other side of the tracks~ and would never have rubbed elbows with slightly-posher-than-them-due-to-tragic-circumstances John.)

✅ A focus on how Baby Boomers literally invented teenage culture because there were just so fucking many of them that they dominated culture en masse. Which like, really really explains today’s culture. We “fixate” on teenagers still in the media and all of that (for other, possibly more sinister reasons beyond “they have money from after-school jobs but don’t pay taxes” explanations) but Boomers are running the show & have been the whole time!!

It, like almost all Beatle docs, is allergic to the idea of having a woman on screen unless that woman was married to a Beatle. Once again, their early fanbase, the women & girls who recognized the genius in their music, are reduced to a few dismissive lines condemning their “hysteria” (a truly loaded word to assign to them) and once again bemoaning that there was no way those girls were there for the artistry, they were there for the hair and no further exploration will be tolerated.

But I had never had the timeline broken down so well before! They were a different type of celebrity, they were working class and got cheeky with reporters, and they were incredibly in sync with each other even though they didn’t have in-ears or feedback monitors during any of their live performances.

Anyway, it’s much less focused on Letting The Beatles Speak For Themselves, which is the overarching theme in seemingly all of the other docs made recently and much more about providing the context. I’ve always found that few docs ever want to spend time on the timeline and surrounding events, they want to get to the interesting fame discussion. But I really enjoyed this one because it’s so different and really did lay out a roadmap that’s been well-traversed by other boy bands since. Though, I do think more of the modern bands/singers should get into doing fictionalized movies starring themselves rather than self-important hollow documentaries!!

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years

This doc was truly wild because I’d certainly never seen their shows colorized before! It modernizes them in an entirely different way. It’s fast, like, an hour long, and they mostly use archival footage (with a lot of Paul interview narration sprinkled in) to tell the story.

If you want to see some charismatic performances and ogle at their ability to keep time despite the volume of the crowd, would recommend!

(The second time I “watched” it I mostly had it as background noise during a house clean and it made for excellent background noise, one of the highest compliments I can give to a documentary!)

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

As a George girl, I had attempted this doc before but never made it all the way through. It’s long but it is also directed by Martin Scorsese so it’s very well done!

The vibe overall is gentle, which makes sense, and I think it was a great one to watch after watching Get Back because it delves much more into Who George Was when all of that was going down. I think it’s also the most effective capture of their grief about John’s assassination across all the documentaries. I do think that the description Olivia Harrison gives about the suddenness, the lack of agency in death, and describing that George was most upset that John was not given time to leave his body is a really touching part of the film.

Honestly, Olivia Harrison gives the best interviews throughout. I think that it’s extremely evident how much love and care and affection she has for George and her dedication to preserving not only his memory but furthering the healing work and spirituality that brought them together is a genuinely lovely part of this tribute documentary. Also, George was really into home renovation and had the money to just continuously rip up and improve his garden and when I talk about wanting financial security that is what I’m talking about!!

George Harrison forever, the parts where they talk about recording All Things Must Pass and his trepidation around putting out My Sweet Lord as the lead single compelled me to listen to that album every day for two weeks straight. The ways we currently communicate the ideas of religious tolerance and the overall influence of the church within society is so vastly different from the “bigger than Jesus” snafu, and George’s exposure to and of Transcendental Meditation is wild to think about.

The Beatles, at the end of all of it, were humans. Flawed, famous, incredibly talented humans. (In How The Beatles Changed The World one of the historians says in a voice packed with deep incredulity that the band had “two of the best vocalists of the 20th century” and like…no? Who?? Which…huh? Like, they have fine voices, but uh…that statement doesn’t stick for me and I can’t stop making fun of the seriousness with which it was said!!)

And they were the blueprint beyond what I had known, and they wrote some very fun songs and allowed their art to grow as they did—unapologetic about maturing and expanding their worldviews.

How the most famous people handle their fame is an ongoing fascination to me because I’m obsessed with the isolationism presented by becoming a celebrity, and the ways that wanting to be famous is both perfectly aligned and oppositional to human nature. We want to be known, remembered & adored, but a stripping of humanity is necessitated to create The Celebrity Self. They are no longer individuals, they’re a brand in-and-of themselves. Modern celebrity is one of the most harrowing forms of (semi-voluntary) dehumanization available, but it’s rapidly changing as platforms like TikTok allow for more niche “micro-influencers” to ammas millions of followers online but remain anonymous to huge slices of the outside world.

But I also appreciate the deep ongoing celebration of the band because it’s rare that we frame mundanity as unique or something to be sought-after. But desirability is dependent on what we cannot have.

Being a human is messy, it involves creation, sharing credit, fights with friends, and certainly a lot of stickiness when it comes to finances. But I love watching humans talk about other humans, I think there’s something really enduring about the legacy because of the joy they provide(d) but there was also an immense amount of suffering, both in the band and with the tragedies that followed. They were the first people to be so noticed, and I think they’re now able to articulate the harrowing nature of those experiences without being cast as “ungrateful”.

So, make art! It doesn’t have to be perfect or fun or interesting or even good. It can always grow into something else later! Talent is great, but talent without effort will languish and there’s just no point in holding back because most of what we experience in the world is relatable. My life has looked incredibly different from any of The Beatles and yet their stories still resonate, y’know?

Anyway, if you watch any of the documentaries I truly hope you enjoy them as much as I did!!