As long as The Four Lads From Liverpool LLC Inc. © ™ remains a commercial entity expected to release new product every year, and the amount of unreleased material in the vaults is approaching zero, it’s easy to dismiss David Tedeschi & Martin Scorsese’s Beatles ’64 as a cynical attempt to squeeze an entire feature-length movie out of a few scraps of unused footage.
But judged on how well it argues its thesis, it does the job: typical American teenagers were lost and disenchanted in the mid-60s, and it just so happens that The Beatles were the right thing at the right time. The film builds empathy for some of these kids in a series of new interviews with them as adults, recollecting what the band meant to them.
Parents and other authority figures didn’t know what to make of their teenage daughters suddenly screaming and crying incoherently, and to an extent, neither do we today. Even Gen X fans like me — brought into the fold by the 1995 Anthology TV documentary series, and fervent enough to have all the albums, in stereo and mono — often think the mythology is overblown. The evidence is there on film: yes, at least some teenagers really did have episodes that in medieval times might have been deemed possession.
Beatles ’64 does help us understand what it might have felt like for 1960s American teens to not have anything to call their own — not only fashion, hair styles, celebrity sex symbols, and music, but an actual generational identity. These days, a new generation is declared seemingly every few years, to the point where we’ve run out of Roman letters and rolled over into the Greek alphabet. But the nascent generation emerging circa 1964 really did seem to be different, with an especially large amount of suppressed energy. A cultural bomb was primed to go off — and The Beatles appeared on national television at exactly the right moment to ride the shockwave.
Whenever I read about or watch documentaries about 60s music, I’m always struck at how much the establishment openly hated young people. Like D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back did for Bob Dylan, this doc reminds us of the breathtaking condescension and outright contempt The Beatles (and their fans) faced from the media. Today, any outrageous or merely unconventional new musical act is met with a shrug at most. Madonna publishing a pornographic art book, or Lady Gaga wearing a gown of raw beef might raise a few eyebrows for one short news cycle, but in 1964 America, The Beatles were talked about like a disease.
But some perspective: The Beatles were a great band of four fascinating personalities, that hugely innovated on their inspirations, never stopped growing and evolving, and broke up before it all got stale. But still, they were just a band, and there were (and are) bigger problems in the US than discontented teens. The kids that lost their minds over The Beatles in 1964 were lucky that their primary concerns were not oppression by racism or poverty.