We'll all act naturally then
About midway through Get Back, Peter Jackson's seven-plus-hour re-edit of a month's worth of footage of the Beatles rehearsing in January 1969, there's a sequence where Paul McCartney is telling the rest of the group about watching some film he has of their time in India with the Maharishi. "Just incredible," he says. "You just sort of see us, what we're doing. It's unbelievable." Jackson cuts some of this footage into his documentary: We see people hanging out at the compound at Rishikesh, filming each other, strumming guitars, eating communal meals. John Lennon strides across a patio in a green kurta, carrying a tape recorder. "I've got all the soundtracks too," Lennon says, and mentions some footage of his own, including what he shot when he went up into the heavens with the guru in a helicopter.
"We weren't very truthful there," McCartney says, and it's as though Jackson wants us to wonder how truthful they are being now, under even more contrived circumstances, making a documentary about making a television show about making an album that is to be performed as a concert. Jackson himself is making a documentary about the making of that documentary — Michael Lindsay-Hogg's Let It Be (1970) — so it would figure that he would be attuned to the layers of representation and the different modes of recording that are perpetually in play. He includes lots of shots not only of Lindsay-Hogg and his camera equipment and crew (which are mostly hidden in Let it Be), but also of photographers at work, the audio equipment, closeups of the instruments and amps, endless fiddling with microphones and the way that sitting in front of one for long stretches invariably reduces people to fits of silliness.
It becomes clear that Jackson's Get Back is in part about the documentation of documentation. It mostly consists of people talking about what they are trying to do as if that conversation itself could be the end product. But it's also about what it's like to know you are always being documented, how one's subjectivity rebels against or assimilates the process of being continually objectified. Not only do we see several instances of Yoko Ono reading Beatles fan magazines — perhaps her own wry acknowledgment of the cameras — but also the Beatles reading about "the Beatles" in newspapers, including a protracted sequence where they set an ostensibly false report of their squabbling in the studio to music in that same studio. They still seem annoyed that they are figures of public speculation, that journalists print fan fiction about them, that even with all the scrutiny of living in the spotlight, it all doesn't capture or reflect who "they really are," even as it has come to make up a larger portion of what their lives are about.
Each installment of Jackson's documentary opens with an apologetic note about the film's having been assembled from "over 60 hours of film footage and more than 150 hours of audio recordings," which meant that "numerous editorial choices had to be made." It's a bizarre disclaimer, as though there were any entertainment products that don't entail editorial choices, or as if the audience had a reasonable expectation to somehow get the direct, unfiltered truth in this case, given how well-known the Beatles' story is. This is followed by a statement that "at all times, the filmmakers have attempted to present an accurate portrait of the events depicted and the people involved," which seems to raise questions that have already been answered by the statement.
There is no single accurate portrait of the events or the people. It can't be settled once and for all. It's not coincidental that the songs recorded during those weeks have been compiled and remixed and reissued in at least six different versions, and there is still dispute about which, if any, can be considered definitive. The film footage too has now also appeared in multiple versions, and we can only wait for the next re-edit. (As Will Davies wrote on Twitter, "In 2021, a director called Peter Jackson took 60 hours of Beatles footage and reduced it to a film of just 8 hours. The remaining 52 hours have never been seen — until now…”)
The original project as the Beatles conceived it — to get back to their roots somehow by filming all their rehearsals for a documentary — gets at the paradoxical trap they must have come to terms with by that point. After living at the crux of so many layers of mediation and remediation for so long, it must have seemed that the best way to try to retain or achieve some understanding of "who you really are" is to accept that documentation is always in process, always occurring, and that there is no necessarily "realer self" to be found beyond the documentation. You can stay yourself by always being in the process of being documented rather than being alienated by the camera once and for all, and being forced to consume yourself as an object. In grappling with that, they made an album that wasn't and couldn't be finished, given how much infinite recursion was incurred by pointing all the recording devices at each other. The process had become the product, so the product can't stand apart on its own. All the post-hoc the efforts to get to the real thing will continue to fall short; the implication of process as product is perpetual rehearsal.
Still talking about their time with the Maharishi, in a bit of conversation that Lindsay-Hogg didn't include in Let It Be, McCartney begins saying how he thinks that they "probably should have sort of just ..." — and then Lennon completes his thought: "Been ourselves." George Harrison then responds with some bitterness:
That is the biggest joke: to be yourselves. Because that was the purpose of going there, to try and find who "yourself" really is. And if you were really yourself, you wouldn't be any of who we are now.
There could be no "getting back" to themselves that they could unilaterally implement; they had become inseparable from how they had been documented and would continue to be documented forever. But they could at least try to suspend the process, direct some aspect of a more intimate documentation as though that would give an illusion of control or forestall the objectification. Being "yourself" doesn't then appear as an end product, as something that self-conscious "acting" spoils, but is instead something enabled by performance, maybe a spontaneous performance, maybe on a rooftop — but always for the cameras, of course.