Get Back (2021)

directed by Peter Jackson

Joe P. Squance

John Lennon dreamed of Paul McCartney. It was Sunday, 26 January, 1969.

This was after George Harrison had quit the Beatles and after he’d been lured back in again, under terms which were not captured on the 60 hours of film footage or 150 hours of audio recording. This was after the Beatles had moved from the chilly, dark, cavernous Twickenham film studio into their own Apple recording studio—brightly lit, littered with detritus like a teenager’s bedroom, crowded, small. This was after Peter Sellers came by to visit, playing the character of Peter Sellers Who Comes By to Visit. This was after and before an infinite string of smoked cigarettes. This was after and before the Beatles fractured and rallied. This was before Ringo announced that he’d farted to an unflappable George Martin. This was after Paul McCartney plucked “Get Back” out of invisible air like reaching into a thought and pinching out one concrete syllable.

John [to Paul]: Hey… Did you dream about me last night?

Paul: I don’t remember.¹

The conventional thinking on Let it Be, Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original 1970 documentary about the making of the last released Beatles album—the raw materials of which were upcycled by Peter Jackson to make his sprawling, immersive reply, Get Back—is that it is a movie about the Beatles breaking up, sour and dispiriting. And sour and dispiriting it probably is. (I bought a bootleg VHS copy of Let it Be while a student at Ohio University, at Schoolkid’s Records, which was later raided by the FBI for selling bootlegs; I perhaps watched it once, like everybody else who’s seen it. It is currently deteriorating somewhere in my basement.) The conventional thinking on Get Back is that it upends the old conventional thinking by showing late-stage Beatles in their natural element: red-eyed, quippy, speaking to each other in their own coded language, working intently and seriously while also joyously fucking around. Happy. Functional. Unified, ish.

But it’s possible that both conventions can have their own wisdom—that is, that the Get Back movie, and the Let it Be sessions, are documents of the Beatles happily creating something beautiful together and also splitting irreparably apart. Once George comes back to the family and the Beatles move home, the sessions are a joy to watch. The Beatles would barely survive them.

John: Very strong dream. We both dreamt about it… Amazing.

*

I have a dream about my brother and I wonder if he’s dreamed it too. This is a dream so hazy it’s like looking through bathwater. 

It is November 1991, the day before Thanksgiving. The sky is breath on steel. It’s not cold enough to snow and not wet enough to rain. (It’s my dream so I am making up the details.) We are driving in his car; I can look between my feet and see the road beneath us. Riding nowhere. He is home from his first semester of college and there’s not that much to talk about.

He’s wearing some kind of cologne and that’s the first thing I notice—that he smells different than I remember. He’s wearing a sweater I’ve never seen. He’s trying hard to be nice and I wonder for the first time if he was happier when he was away from us, if he would rather be gone. There’s nothing to cite here, no precedent to establish. Only the feeling of riding in a car in the afternoon in November and being alone in your own head.

I feel the space between us stretching out, as if we both need to be reminded of how we know each other. Did you dream about me last night? is a question I might have liked to ask him. But he has a song he wants me to hear instead, and he pops the cassette into the cassette player, and it is Paul McCartney and Wings. It is “Let Me Roll It.” The song unspools around us and the distance between us shrinks and the road rolls out behind us and stretches out ahead of us and tomorrow is Thanksgiving and our stepdad is still alive and the sky all around is gray and white and blue and whenever I hear this song it’s like watching a dream through bathwater.

*

Paul McCartney dreamed of his mother, Mary McCartney, date unknown.

“This was a very difficult period,” he has noted.² “John was with Yoko full time, and our relationship was beginning to crumble: John and I were going through a very tense period.” It’s fascinating to me that even when Paul dreams about his mother he is really dreaming about John. 

“One night during this tense time I had a dream I saw my mum, who’d been dead ten years or so. And it was so great to see her because that’s the wonderful thing about dreams: you actually are reunited with that person for a second; there they are and you appear to both be physically together again.”

John [to Paul]: Hey… Did you dream about me last night?

Paul: I don’t remember.

John: Very strong dream. We both dreamt about it… Amazing. Different dreams, you know. I thought you must have been there.

“In the dream she said, ‘It’ll be all right.’ I’m not sure if she used the words ‘Let it be’ but that was the gist of her advice, it was ‘Don’t worry too much, it will turn out okay.’ It was such a sweet dream I woke up thinking, Oh, it was really great to visit with her again. I felt very blessed to have that dream. So that got me writing the song ‘Let it Be.’”

John: I thought you must have been there. I mean, I was touching you.

It feels like tragedy that John had to dream of Paul to talk to him, to touch him. To be present with Paul. And when John sings about Yoko, “I’m in love for the first time / Don’t you know it’s gonna last / It’s a love that lasts forever / It’s a love that has no past,”³ it sounds less like a cynical dig at Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, and more like a lie John has to tell himself about Paul to make things less complicated. 

Paul: It’s like, after “Get Back”—“We’re on our way home.”

John: Yeah.

Paul: So there’s a story. And there’s another one—“Don’t Let Me Down.” [sings] “Oh! Darlin’ I’ll never let you down…”

John: Yeah. It’s like you and me are lovers.

Paul: Yeah.⁴

“Lovers” is a charged word, but it seems clear that they’re both writing songs about moving away from each other and how scary it felt to them both. And the reason it’s scary—and the reason it will hurt—is because there is love between them. If there’s a single moment in the entirety of the 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio that captures the true and final end of the Beatles, maybe it’s this one: when John asks Paul, “Did you dream about me last night?” and Paul says no.

*

I used to dream about my stepdad. This was after everything and before everything else. What better way is there to explain it without the 150 hours of documentation?

The dreams were simple: I’d be out walking and there he’d be, sitting at a table with my mom in an open plaza, dining al fresco, waiting for an appetizer; sitting on a stone wall, waiting for a ride; walking towards me on the sidewalk, headed somewhere for important business. We’d say hi, make chit-chat, and be on our way. They were mundane and wonderful.

All these dreams came with the implicit backstory that he’d been sick and had recovered—in contrast to what had happened in real life. It’s always been interesting to me that whenever I dreamt about him, I also dreamt about his illness, as if my brain was incapable of separating one from the other. The dreams got farther apart and eventually I stopped having them, which is a shame because I always woke up feeling blessed. How nice it had been to be physically together again.

If you want to trace the schisms in my family back to a single event, and sometimes I do want to do that, you could probably draw a line from whatever justified or unjustified bullshit has transpired—or is transpiring, or will transpire—between two or sometimes three interchangeable parties back to the night of July 20, 2006, when my stepdad smiled through his agony and then breathed his last breath. He’d always been the one who held everything together. I think we sensed, or outright knew, that when he was gone, we’d be in trouble. And maybe it’s inevitable that Pangea will split and drift, but understanding that can’t stop you from reaching out, sinking your fingers into the dirt, and keeping the breakaway as close as possible for as long as possible. Or from feeling lousy as you watch it slowly float away.

Get Back, then, is like watching the continents drift. And of the four Beatles, Paul is the one with his fingers deepest in the dirt, holding Pangea together for as long as he has the strength to do it. The most profound moments, for me, are the ones where the camera holds on his face and you can see in his eyes that he knows he’s losing his grip—or worse, the hurt as he realizes some of the others would just prefer that he let them go. That they would rather be gone.

If you want to trace the schisms between the Beatles to a single event, and the Beatles seem to want to do that, you can draw a line, as they do, between these moments of fracture and the death, in August of 1967, of their manager Brian Epstein. 

George: Ever since Mr. Epstein passed away…

John: Who passed away?

George: … it’s never been the same.

Paul: We’ve been very negative since Mr. Epstein passed away.

Paul: There really is no one there now to say, ‘Do that.’ Whereas there always used to be… You know, your daddy goes away at a certain point in your life. You stand on your own feet. I mean that’s all we’ve been faced with—Daddy’s gone away now, you know, and we’re on our own at the holiday camp.⁵

This idea—that the Beatles are a family in disarray because they’ve lost their father—is so up front in their discussions with each other and plays such a central role in the mythos of the group that the title of Rolling Stone’s original review of the Let it Be film, by Jonathan Cott and David Dalton, is “Daddy Has Gone Away Now: Let it Be.” Paul (who they note has dutifully grown a beard to play the role of daddy) “comes across as desperately trying to pull the whole thing together, like the father of a family that has become divided.”⁶

Never did I imagine that I would watch Get Back and see part of my own experience reflected back at me. But of course I would—of course I had to. The story is simple and universal. As the concept that instigated the entire “Get Back” project continues to erode and crumble away, Michael Lindsay-Hogg observes, almost to no one, “I don’t know what story I’m telling anymore. At the moment, we’ve got a movie about smokers, nosepickers, and nail-biters.”⁷ What he can’t yet see, and maybe what he won’t be able to see for many, many years, is that the story he’s telling us—and witnessing in real time—is that people who love each other can sometimes grow apart. And it’s the love that makes it painful. And if you zoom in close enough on any of us, we’re all smokers, nosepickers, and nail-biters, and we’re all either holding on tight or we’re all about to let go.

*

Look, it isn’t all gloom and misery. That’s the whole revelation of Get Back: when the boys move home to the Apple studio, they find, amazingly, that they’re still a family. This is when things really lock into place. John in particular looks somehow healthier, as if he’s had a shower and a meal and a good night’s rest and maybe a shot of methadone. They all seem to have shampooed. They all seem cleansed. The work—and everything—improves.

George Martin: And the fact that you’re working so well together: you’re looking at each other, you’re seeing each other, you’re… just happening [clicks fingers].⁸

They seem happiest when making fun of others, like Magic Alex and his stupid prototype for a combination guitar and bass with a swiveling neck, or Michael Housego and his surprisingly accurate gossip column about the Beatles and the implications of their interpersonal squabbles, or poor Jimmy Nicol, forgotten by history, who replaced Ringo for eight shows in 1964—he fucked up a half bar intro once and they still bust his balls about it, in absentia, five years later. Like brothers do. 

But there’s also a real sense of relief in the atmosphere, and the relief fosters unity. As John and Ringo walk to the control room to listen to a playback, they wrap their arms around each other like two little boys, and you can believe for a second that they are two little boys, with a boy’s awareness of the world around them, untroubled by the complications of adult lives and adult deaths and the snarls of egos and drugs and insecurities and fears, and that daddy’s still around, that stability is a thing that is real and not just a child’s naïve illusion, and that nothing’s changed at all and never will, and that nobody’s hurt the other because they’re afraid to be abandoned and alone and because they know just how to do it. It’s quick and if you’re not looking for it you might miss it. But it’s there and it’s beautiful.

*

John [to Paul]: Hey… Did you dream about me last night?

Paul: I don’t remember.

“The dream is over / What can I say?”⁹

The continents are always moving, shifting slightly towards each other or slightly away. This is a fact I just made up and therefore can’t be disputed.

My brother has a favorite line from Get Back. It’s when Glyn Johns, from the control room of the Apple studio, is asking if Ringo has a damper he can use to muffle the ring on his floor tom, to which John replies, with a twinkle in his eye, “The only damper around here is you, Glyn Johns.”¹⁰ My brother finds that line hilarious. He’ll text it to me and I’ll snicker. He won’t come home for Christmas, but at least we have that.

There is an ever-expanding list of topics that are no longer safe for us to discuss, topics that make my brother feel like a stranger to me—and me to him, I’m sure. These are topics that we have both silently agreed to avoid because breathing them in is toxic and corrosive. But maybe, when we’re three beers in and we’ve started to remember how we know each other, and maybe it feels like we’re on our way back home, he’ll float one of these topics, hold a scrap of paper to the wind just to see if I’ll chase. When he does, all I hear him asking is, “Did you dream about me last night?” And I know that all he wants to hear me say is yes—yes, I was there and yes, we dreamed the same dream and yes, I felt you touch me, yes—but I wasn’t there and I know it, and it’s clear that we are not connected on that wavelength, and it’s a bummer to hear it spoken out loud, and so all I can say back to him is “I don’t remember.” 

*

I don’t dream about my stepdad. And I no longer expect anything in particular from my brother or any other member of my family. We all take what we can get from the group and fill in the blanks with our Yokos and Lindas and Pattys and Maureens. We have a Mal we can go to for favors. We have a Dick James who sent us those nice rocks glasses for Christmas. We have a George Martin who will solve our problems if we ask him to. And we all have a little Heather skittering around the studio, with her bob and her bangs, telling Uncle John about her spotted kittens or taking a crack at Uncle Ringo’s snare drum when he’s pretending not to look, and we pull our joy from that. It holds together well enough. It’s maybe not as durable a family as the Stones but it’s probably more authentic than whatever’s left of the Who. And if any of it hurts it’s because of the love.

The continents drift. We are visited in our dreams. We visit someone we love in theirs. We touch each other in dreams and tell ourselves it was real. Every once in a while, we touch each other for real and wonder if it was only in a dream. In this manner, we carry on. This is what it means to be a family.

¹ The Beatles, Get Back (Callaway Arts & Entertainment and Apple Corps Limited, 2021), 162.
² Barry Miles, Many Years from Now (Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1997), 538.
³ The Beatles with Billy Preston, “Don’t Let Me Down,” Apple Records, 1969.
⁴ The Beatles, Get Back, 139
⁵ The Beatles, Get Back, 53
⁶ Jonathan Cott and David Dalton, “Daddy Has Gone Away Now: Let it Be,” Rolling Stone, July 9, 1970. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/daddy-has-gone-away-now-let-it-be-169042/
⁷ Peter Jackson, Get Back (Apple Corps Limited and WingNut Films, 2021), Part 2: Days 8-16, 2:08:13.
⁸ The Beatles, Get Back, 139.
⁹ John Lennon, “God,” John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Apple Records, 1970.
¹⁰ Peter Jackson, Get Back, Part 2, 1:22:53.

Joe P. Squance is a writer and teacher in Oxford, Ohio. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2019, Atticus Review, Cease Cows, Diagram, Everyday Fiction, Fiction Southeast, Monkeybicycle, X-Ray Lit, and elsewhere, and he has written essays for Entropy, Runner’s World, and Salon. He teaches ELA at a small Montessori high school in Oxford, where he lives with his wife, their young daughter, and an Aussie mix in red merle, and can currently be found chasing paper, getting nowhere.