BENNETT INVENTORY : That Moment

Get Back -- John and Paul's private conversation

Every November I get a bit of a Beatle craving; it's the month I wholly discovered and embraced the band back in 1995 when The Beatles Anthology aired on ABC, and so every year for the past three decades my biological clock never fails to alert me in my hour of darkness. Though in the months and seasons that followed that initial discovery I explored and championed each of their individual songs and albums and movies and phases so it very much is a year round celebration for me - as it maybe should be with the things that bring us joy. But for most of my life now I've revisited the Anthology around this time of year, and certainly enough times to recite the entire 12 hour documentary by heart. So I, like any Beatlemaniac, am always ready to cautiously accept some "new material" - and what Disney and Peter Jackson unveiled is the most exciting and inspiring Beatle-related thing since the band broke up.

Paul Thomas Anderson's immediate reaction to Get Back was that he wished it were longer, and that was my leading thought too; for the duration of its 470 runtime I had trouble believing that what I was seeing was even real. I'd seen the Let it Be documentary many years ago on a muddy VHS rental, and as fascinating and telling as that was, it somehow felt compromised - and until 2021 I had no idea just compromised it was. Candid film of artists practicing their craft is like drugs to me, but watching these four particular artists being creative in nearly real time is like a dream - and one of the more bizarre satisfactions of this miniseries is how the events and behaviors and personalities play out exactly like you'd want them to - as though it were a densely scripted biopic. And no segment feels that way more than the "secret" conversation between John and Paul.

Supposedly recorded without their knowledge, the founding fathers of The Fab Four engage in a stern but polite argument regarding: George's recent departure from the group, Paul's tendency to be controlling, and the ultimate future of The Beatles. This is the kinda stuff we've only ever read about, and anything we've ever read was from biographers or witnesses or from these two respective musicians (who could only ever have a subjective point of view), and what they say here on tape and how they say it is such a straightforward string of exposition that it really does feel like the cliché TV movie. But it's not - it's John Lennon and Paul McCartney doing the whole He Said, He Said bit that's become as fabled as the music they made together, and it's superbly preserved along with every other momentous moment in this movie. Now I want them to give us the rest of it...

- Paul