Interest in music documentaries has exploded recently as a result of their dominance on streaming. However, the extent to which The Beatles have shaped world culture is a subject that’s too enormous to condense into a single project. Many filmmakers have analyzed a certain segment of The Beatles’ history; Martin Scorsese examined the enigmatic persona of “the quiet Beatle” in his HBO project George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Ron Howard explored the final stretch of “Beatlemania” in The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years, and Peter Jackson crafted an exhaustive study of the band’s final recording session with the eight-hour The Beatles: Get Back. Fragments of the past have emerged, as earlier this year saw the restoration of the forgotten documentary Let It Be, available for the first time on streaming.
The Beatles have been mythologized to the point that a majority of the audience checking out a new Disney+ documentary are already familiar with the major events within their career trajectory. John Lennon has been hailed as an almost messianic figure, and George Harrison’s post-Beatles work in both cinema and philosophy has earned more attention. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have never left the public eye, and were active in helping to promote Disney’s exploration of their catalog. The duo were particularly present during the release of “Now and Then,” the “lost” final song featuring the original four members that was restored through machine-learning-assisted audio restoration last year.
Beatles ‘64 doesn’t present anything extraordinarily new about the band, as it covers what may have been the most highly publicized era of their career. Wading into the larger influence that The Beatles had on politics and traditional family values may have been a more dicey subject for a Disney+ documentary released over the Thanksgiving holiday, but Beatles ‘64 is aimed at celebrating a more “innocent” era. Songs like “She Loves You,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” or “I Want To Hold Your Hand” were all groundbreaking, but they lack the formal complexity that made “A Day in the Life” or “Dear Prudence” such fascinations for music scholars.
Beatles ‘64 is fan service, as the new footage collected is mostly the band’s more playful moments. The Beatles’ rise to prominence in England was fairly rapid, but the four young men were already established celebrities by the point that the “Beatlemania” era began. The fact that the band’s first three-week tour came mere months after JFK was assassinated is something Beatles ‘64 is keen to note. The debate over the “Americanization” of The Beatles is worth having, but there’s nothing in Beatles ‘64 that points to any cynical intentions.
Any interviews with McCartney and Starr are bound to be entertaining, as the duo has shown a consistent sense of insight when discussing the erratic misadventures that dominated the 1964 tour. The concept that such influential figures were given free reign to toy with incessant press feels foreign in comparison to the ways in which modern artists are subservient to digital tabloids. Beatles ‘64 is more interested in the collective appeal of The Beatles, and doesn’t cover their distinctive voices. This may have been the result of a more homogenous era in their songwriting, but Disney’s interest in adding The Beatles to their catalog of marquee characters suggests that there’s trepidation in examining the bitter feuds that dominated the Let It Be era.
It may be inevitable that The Beatles will eventually be placed on the Disney+ banner alongside Mickey Mouse, Iron Man, and Darth Vader. However, the insight Beatles ‘64 has on fandom is heartwarming. Images of screaming teenagers fawning over Lennon and McCartney have been circulated ever since A Hard Day’s Night, but Beatles ‘64 includes interviews with the likes of David Lynch and Smokey Robinson. Hearing the creators of complex, challenging works talk about the exhilaration they felt upon the release of “All My Loving” or “From Me To You” suggests that there’s no shame in the enjoyment of pop entertainment.
Although there’s much about Beatles ‘64 that’s vibrant and modern, the most antiquated concept the documentary fixates on is that of a monoculture. It’s not a coincidence that Disney has sought out properties like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe that unite viewers from multiple generations and backgrounds. Beatles ‘64 doesn’t strip away the nuances of The Beatles, but it does offer some insight into why the band’s music was more resonant than rivals like The Rolling Stones or The Kinks. The Beatles were representatives of music itself.