The Banality of Genius

Thoughts on Get Back -- the new Beatles documentary.

I discovered the Beatles when I was fifteen or so. I was as oblivious as most kids that age, but when I heard “Come Together” for the first time, I felt my soul resonate in a way that left me with no doubt that I was in the presence of something beyond talent, groove, and cleverness. These guys could channel magic.

Amusingly (or tragically, I suppose), my sister, who is four years younger, also loved the Beatles, but being eager to distinguish herself from her older sibling, she didn’t want to just copy my taste. So she accumulated a surprisingly large collection of the Beatles worst songs. Those guys also channeled whatever is the opposite of magic. The Beatles could channel mundanity like nobody’s business.

Like most everyone else I know, I recently borrowed a friend’s Disney+ login details and sat through all eight hours of the new Beatles documentary put together by Peter Jackson. It was like a dream. A dream where your feet grow heavy and time slows to a crawl. I’m not saying it was boring. But if it had been about anyone but these four guys, that’s exactly what I’d be saying.

But because it was Paul, John, George, and Ringo we’re hanging out with, the tedious boredom I felt was punctuated by recurring realizations, such as:

• “Holy shit, John Lennon was only 28 and he was already tired of being famous.”

• “Ringo may be the most chill person alive!”

• “Yoko is one of the least chill people alive.”

• “George looks like a 14 year-old who desperately wants to be a pirate.”

• “Paul is kind of a ball-buster, but genius is smeared all over him. Like Picasso, even his doodles can be timeless works of staggering genius!”

In the seemingly endless hours of footage of them bickering with mangers and each other over where to shoot the TV special they’ve agreed to do, Ringo sits staring into the middle distance like a retriever by the window, just hanging around til someone throws a stick. John is passive-aggressive and witty. George’s simmering resentment is building to a slow boil. But Paul. Paul is off to the side, half listening to the conversation and half zoning out on one instrument or another, chipping away at a chord progression or lyric that’s come to him while he was in the shower, waiting for the taxi, sitting on the toilet, or whatever other pedestrian activity he (and everyone else) engages in daily. But here’s the thing: When Paul zones out, “Let It Be,” “Hey Jude,” and, yes, “Get Back” might flutter down from the sky and land on him like miraculous snowflakes.

Of course, we know all about the pools of wonder these snowflakes melted and gathered into. We’ve been drinking from them for half a century or more. For me, the greatest revelation in this documentary is how strangely normal these guys were — normal in their insecurities, annoyances, generosities, pettiness, kindness … even in their creative process.

They just liked writing music. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem to matter to them whether the songs are good or not. They don’t seem to even know whether they’re good or not. They seem as happy to be pounding a clunker like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” as they are when they’re harmonizing over Mother Mary on “Let it Be.”

There’s a moment where George is working on what was to become “Something,” one of the most celebrated (and covered) songs of all time. He’s having trouble with the lyric. He’s stuck at:

“Something in the way she moves,

Attracts me da da da da da da.”

Of course, the millions of people watching fifty years later are all shouting “Like no other lover, George” It’s obvious! But George is back there in the past, and he can’t see it yet. It’s like watching Mother Mary complaining of nausea because she’s pregnant with Baby Jesus (or Paul McCartney, as the case may be).

John says something like, “Ah, don’t worry George. Just stick something in there for now. It’ll come to you later. You know, ‘Attracts me like another cumquat.’”

Meanwhile Paul is over in the corner with half a glass of warm white wine, laboring over the birth of “Get Back.”

“Jojo left his home in…”

“Jojo left his home in…”

“Hey John, is Tucson in Arizona?”

“Not sure. I think so.”

“Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona…”

This is how it happens. Too many of us spend our lives sitting around waiting for a bolt of inspiration to blast us with a palpable sense of magical illumination. But Paul understood that now is the moment to create, to decide, to finally take the step we’ve been imagining for years. This documentary shows what a mistake it is to wait for the moment that never arrives. It never will because it doesn’t exist. That magical light we’re waiting for only shines backwards, illuminating moments that felt normal at the time — normal as half a glass of wine you forgot to drink because your mind was elsewhere.

Every creative birth is a bloody mess. Only later, sometimes much later, we may realize that what flowed through us into the world is charged with a touch of salvation. Don’t wait. Too soon, far too soon, it’ll be impossible to get back to where you once belonged.