OK, so I’m a couple of weeks late writing about the restored A Hard Day’s Night. C’mon people, the movie’s 50 years old, no matter when I wrote about it would be late, so gimme a break.
But my daughter is an aspiring singer/songwriter, and I love me some absurdist British comedy, so this is a natural fit with me and I couldn’t let its glorious restoration pass by unremarked. Plus, it is quite striking how innocent, sincere, uncalculating, necessary, and humane the rebellion embodied by the Beatles is/was, especially compared to the alternately cynical and dangerous rebellion presented by today’s rock stars.
There is a surplus of things to say about this landmark—it didn’t just influence the subsequent Beatles films, or other movies starring pop acts, it influenced the entire realm of music videos as a whole genre and fundamentally defined a brand of British comedy. Not to mention, as Roger Ebert famously noted, minted a whole new film grammar of its own. So, an impressive resume for one little low-budget movie made well outside Hollywood.
And before I go any farther with this, I should acknowledge that I fully understand this is a fictional movie full of staged incidents created by an experienced comedian. That being said, the fictional, staged rebellion presented by the film and the fictional, staged outrage it provokes does serve as a proxy for the real rebellion and real outrage the Beatles provoked. For every screaming teenage girl losing her cool in their presence, there were tongue-clucking moralizers worried about the fall of British culture and the degradation of youth.
The Beatles really did upset some people. Their offenses included: nonstandard haircuts, irreverent attitudes, and performing jangly, vaguely sexual music. Horrors.
And it says something profound about 1960s England that any of this was considered provocative by anyone. I was born a couple of decades too late and in the wrong country to experience any of this firsthand, but seeing what the Beatles did and how much the world convulsed in response gives me a sense of just how repressed/repressive a place the UK must have been.
And in turn that says something about just how necessary this rebellion was. Put simply: if your world is threatened by someone’s haircut, your world needs to change. Simple as that.
Fifteen years later and a very different rock’n’roll rebellion came along (this one I was around to witness). The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle is also a fictional comedy full of staged incident built around a provocative pop act, and even manages to be more ridiculous than Hard Days Night (believe it or not), but this time the proxy outrage shown onscreen is only a pale shadow of the real fear and loathing the Sex Pistols unleashed in their wake in the real world.
If you thought the Beatles were menacing, the Sex Pistols must have seemed like inhuman monsters from another dimension. They wore rags, they sneered, their music was atonal and hostile. That their bassist was swallowed up in a miasma of drugs and death only confirmed people’s worst suspicions.
But the thing is, you can only crack the egg once. The Sex Pistols lived in the world the Beatles created. The easy, low-hanging fruit of rebellion had come and gone. While it was still possible to scandalize people with a haircut, the punks had to work up ever more extreme haircuts to do it. And so, half jokingly, the greatest outrage depicted in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle is the suggestion that the Sex Pistols was actually a contrived marketing stunt. The audience was expected to gasp in horror at the revelation that Johnny Rotten took music lessons.
But the shock and outrage were never the point of rock ‘n’ roll rebellion—they were a sign that the cure was working. When you scandalize a society that would be scandalized by a haircut, then you’ve got a sign you’re doing something right. The problem is, once you’ve fixed that repressed/repressive society so it’s no longer so skittish and prudish, you’re just not going to get the same reactions out of your antics anymore. The Beatles just look tame by today’s standards—quaint, non-threatening, even a tad—dare I say it?–square.
The Beatles advocated love, celebrated youth, and defended the right to be yourself—and these things just happened to be shocking to the buttoned-down stiff-upper-lip Brittania of the early 1960s.
By the time of the Sex Pistols, there were still things to fight for, and punk grew out of a genuine economic and social dislocation, giving voice to the disenfranchised and angry. But it was also born at a time when only more extreme acts would generate the kind of outrage that the genteel Beatles could gin up in their sleep. Each generation of pop acts would be born into a world left blasé by the previous generation’s bands.
It’s meaningfully different to rebel against a repressed and repressive society, like 1964 England, versus trying to push the envelope in an already vulgar and unrestricted world like that of today. The world needed a Beatles back then, but today there are fewer battles left to fight. I’m not saying there are no battles left, but the easy stuff, like haircuts, have already been taken, and the hard fights may require more than just musicians to solve them. To the extent there is valid social change to advocate, that fight is mostly fought by marginalized acts whose politics tend to keep them out of the mainstream. Just witness how far today’s pop stars have to go to generate any sense of outrage any more, and how short lived it is when they do.
(hey, by the way, I’ll send a free DVD of American Slapstick Volume 2 to the first commenter who correctly identifies the origin of this post’s title)