Michael Gerber
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(I just wrote some of this in a comment responding to @Paul, and while the sentiments are ones I’ve expressed before, I expressed them particularly succinctly here, and so wanted to surface them as a post, in hopes they’d elicit some discussion.–MG)

I‘m staying with a friend of mine who is getting over a stroke, and she doesn’t know much about The Beatles. So after she told me her favorite Beatle was George, we took a couple of nights to watch Martin Scorsese’s Living in the Material World. Which reminded me just how much source material we have on John, Paul, George, and Ringo. How much footage. How many recordings. How many paper interviews in the historical record. I cannot think of any human-sized chunk of contemporary history that has more source material. It’s all there, for anyone who wants to delve into it.

Which brings me to why these upcoming Beatle movies give me the heebie-jeebies. Running “The Beatles” like a bunch of IP that can (and must!) be refreshed for each new generation misses something really important: The Beatles were real. Flesh and blood men, who risked all to do real things. J/P/G/R are not the Marvel Cinematic Universe; they are history. They were people who did things and didn’t do other things; had opinions; made mistakes. Their real selves and real lives, which were obsessively recorded for commercial reasons, we largely know; they aren’t something to be remixed or retconned for money. The data shouldn’t be purposely corrupted because we’re bored.

Since I am now old(ish), I spend most of every day thinking/worrying about things like this. Our culture’s turning away from history — both the study of, and the manufacture of via scholarship — in favor of religion and mythology (which now encompasses everything from pop culture to advertising to conspiracy theories) — seems to be leading us into a very, very bloody and short-sighted era. One that AI and nuclear technology may make our last. The US government is actively suppressing history it doesn’t like in ways usually reserved for totalitarian regimes; and universities are being strongarmed in every possible manner. But this is only possible due to the cultural weakening of history over the last generation. When I matriculated at Yale in 1987, History was the single most popular major; this didn’t mean Yale produced 1000 historians every year, most grads went into law and business and politics. But it meant that those lawyers and businessmen and politicians had at least a glancing knowledge of, and presumably respect for, history.

Today, the most popular major in New Haven is computer science. Because (need I say this?) that is where the money is, both upon graduation and for the Alumni Fund.

I’m sorry to say that my generation has treated history mostly as a cudgel with which to advance this or that political agenda, probably due to the blight of relativism that emerged in the Seventies and was very strong by the Nineties. If there is no sense of the real, of shared reality — if history is all bias and point of view — then history really is no more important than the never-ending battle between Magneto and the X-Men. And we can see exactly where this notion is leading the world.

Feeding The Beatles — the real people, the real story, the actual provable reality — into the myth-making machine is a symptom of a very misguided age, one that, so far, has simply not shown itself intellectually prepared or courageous enough to guide our species. That’s really what history is for, a set of agreed-upon stories that help us navigate the present and future with wisdom. What is short-sighted, greedy, small? What should be avoided? History tells us, and that’s why oligarchs and others determined to act in short-sighted, greedy, unwise ways despise it so. Dumb and grubby is really the opposite of who The Beatles were, and what they stood for. The Sixties were a hair-raising time, full of conflict and species-wide near-misses, and it took all the wisdom we could muster to get through them. In addition to creating amazing music, The Beatles were consistently on the right side of the major issues of their day, and spoke more wisely and clearly than anyone had a right to expect them to.

The real guys were really extraordinary; for that reason alone, we should resist the corporate urge to remix them, as if who they were in their time isn’t interesting enough for the young folks, or something young people won’t relate to. We know the real John Paul George and Ringo, and they were absolutely great. That should be enough to keep them as au courant as they need to be.

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