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truly one of the most underrated hilarious story involving the three😭

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this is genuinely so crazy

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planning doc for a lennison fic series idea.

if you're interested in someday reading this, interact w this post so i can get motivation... reblogs/comments feed me so <3

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I love talking about how nice Ringo is but also if we're being real his ability to appear sweet and calm and aw-shucks despite being so thoroughly known is proof that he has incredibly good media instincts

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the thing about yoko ono is like. is she a good person? oh absolutely not. but we're all beatles fans so I think you can deal with a woman being a little evil when every single one of your pet white men is like the devil incarnate but we're all collectively calling them our pookies

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We would be warm below the storm

In our little hideaway beneath the waves✨✨✨

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More beatles art for presentation for the final college project. They're a lot of fun to draw.

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I’m not sure “manipulative” is the correct term. Art is literally for the purpose of making you feel something, and especially music. Maybe “manufactured” is the correct term, or “disingenuous”.

That's a solid note. I think disingenuous and manufactured are also correct, but I do stand by manipulative because the nature of manipulative art is literally that it manipulates your emotions without earning them. There's a difference between feeling something because your emotions are being manipulated and feeling something because your emotions have been seen, captured, and understood by a piece of art.

It's the difference between killing the dog at the end of your story so people will cry and have big feelings and think you wrote something amazing, and killing the dog at the end of your story because you are genuinely allowing yourself to delve into the emotional experience of love and loss and share this with your audience. The former is disingenuous and manufactured, but I'd say it's also manipulative to instill an emotional response in people that is ultimately hollow so they'll care, or think they care, about your story. It's not manipulative in a malicious or calculating way, but for me the term still applies.

That being said, there's definitely a place for manipulative art. Anyway, thank you for sharing your perspective! It's a really interesting and valid note.

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What do you mean when you say a lot of The Beatles music is “manipulative”? As in they wrote it for their audience, young girls?

Thank you for asking!! When I think of manipulative art, I think of something that tugs on your heartstrings and engenders a very base, primal emotional response without contributing anything new or interesting in terms of ideas or emotional honesty. It's an intensely emotional work that the author did not invest themselves into; they request your involvement, your emotional experience, without giving their own. A phrase that slightly pretentious people like to use is “did you earn that emotional payoff?” It sounds obnoxious, but it's an important question. If you're seeking to engender an emotional response without earning it through genuine, compelling emotional honesty about the human condition, you're kind of just being manipulative.

I find a lot of Beatles songs to be lyrically manipulative in the sense that they spark a primal emotional response without having any sincerity or emotional honesty. “Please feel sad/romantic/happy when you listen to this” is about all they're bringing to the table (even if, musically, they're very good.)

On that note, manipulative writing is a VERY common thing for new writers – think when you were 14 and poured purple prose and ridiculous trauma parades into your stories to try to force the reader to feel something – and most people grow out of this artistic sensibility eventually. The Beatles, though, have a fairly immature sensibility throughout the majority of their body of work. Yes, their work was for young people, but young people have a very complex and unique experience of the world, and you can write to it without being manipulative.

I might also put the extremely liberal use of sound devices in this category, if I'm being brutally honest. Sound devices, used intentionally, can be a powerful way to place ideas in the reader's mind and give them a greater depth of experience. In Ser Nudo, Pablo Neruda uses a pattern of rising and falling “soft sounds” to mimic waves crashing against a shore in a perpetual rhythm and create an idea in the reader’s mind of both lovemaking and the ebb and flow of a new romance. I don't speak Spanish and I can still hear the ocean in that poem. Alternatively, The Beatles use sound devices to sound cute. I know comparing them to one of the greatest poets in human history is fundamentally unfair, but when people try to say Paul McCartney is the greatest writer since Shakespeare, this is what I think of.

I hesitate to name specific songs because I don't want to shame anyone for their favorite Beatles song, but since I'm sure it's no one's favorite, I'll point to Now and Then as a spectacularly empty and manipulative song. You get that little pain in your chest when you listen to it, and yet it offers you absolutely nothing. It's technically excellent and artistically barren. (Though I will say that if shameless, artistically barren cash grabs with lowest-common-denominator artistic sensibilities bother you, the Beatles in general probably aren't for you.)

All this being said, I do want to mention that being artistically barren can actually be kind of a strength. Yesterday isn't the most covered song of all time because it's offering such powerful insight into the human condition, it's because it's fundamentally empty and therefore anything can be poured into it. It can fit any experience or any moment that you choose. Paul is a musician in the truest sense, and that means he tells his stories with melody, not with his words. And Yesterday is, lyrically, almost entirely soulless. And that's why so many people have poured their soul into it.

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and the thing is beatles haters with respectable music tastes I can respect you know like if you tell me your favorite artists and I'm seeing jazz, blues, rap, edm, I'm like okay fair. you start going on about how they're old white man music and your favorites are mother mother and panic! at the disco or some shit i do actually want to make fun of you really really bad

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we all need to start giving a fuck about ringo starr. fascinating man

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one more time to kill the pain

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How much of Paul’s calcified feelings about the break up have to do with John’s death? Both with regard to their personal relationship and Paul’s public reputation. Then again you’d think maybe he’d have reflected and have some clarity on he and George’s relationship in regards to the break up since they did actually have time to build back their relationship? Just thinking about him saying in the lyrics the break up made him almost believe in original sin. Lol.

Ooh that is such a fascinating question, thank you for sending it to me!!

Also, I have to say how much I love “calcified feelings” as a description of his sentiments around the breakup. Basically a two-word summary of what I was trying to say in this post.

I definitely think you’re onto something there. Given that their time in each other’s lives was so much shorter than it should have been, it must be brutal for Paul to look back at the the years when he and John were at odds and think about the wasted time. There’s also the abandonment trauma he incurred when his mother passed, and how every death since then would have to feel like another abandonment. I don’t think he actually resents John and George for dying, but I’m sure those feelings of anger and rejection are still there, because any time a trauma from childhood is triggered there’s a piece of you that’s just a little kid again. 

And then there’s also his public image. If we look at Get Back in particular, it is pretty interesting just how thin his characterization of John is, especially compared to the relatively complex portrayal of George. He seems a lot more fixated on the residual frustration and confusion he feels about the breakdown in his relationship with George – or, rather, he seems much more willing to show this part of his grief to us – and I do think that’s specifically because of the nature of John’s death and how Paul was treated in the immediate aftermath. Putting the rest under the cut because it’s gotten a bit long. 

To be honest, the first couple times I watched Get Back I almost felt like John had been left out. If you pay close attention, he definitely does have a distinct storyline (focused on Paul, as all their storylines are), but his presence is surprisingly small. I know some of that might have to do with Yoko’s influence – I do wonder if his increasingly serious heroin use was ignored at her request, but who knows – but given that Paul has been pretty happy to endorse Get Back, I think we can also take this as a reflection of what he feels or what he's willing to feel publicly.

Their relationship is basically cast as “We loved each other so, so much, and everyone was so in awe, right up until he pulled away from me.” There’s not much insight or complexity beyond just that. 

That’s not to say that John doesn’t get plenty of screen time – it’s actually a little remarkable how many scenes are composed almost entirely of reaction shots of John and Paul, with an occasional George or Ringo (if you don’t know, a reaction shot is a closeup of someone’s face where we can see their emotion/expression, intended to be taken as their response to what is currently happening in the narrative). 

The scenes are composed such as to imply that John and Paul spent a not inconsiderable amount of time gazing into each other's eyes, smiling and looking utterly enamored, while George watched them gaze at each other with either jealousy or exasperation, depending on your persuasion. (Ringo doesn’t get a lot of attention in Paul’s version of the story, which I think he’s fine with. He’s generally pretty good at flying under the radar.)

Since PJ doesn’t like to provide a lot of context (e.g. a wide shot where we can distinctly see who’s looking at who and with what expressions), we have absolutely no way to know if they were gazing lovingly in each other’s eyes, or smiling in response to a joke, or looking at someone else entirely. And it’s really shady in the reality TV world to build a whole scene out of closeups/reaction shots. Obviously it’s okay to use them here and there, but if it’s starting to take over the whole scene then the scene is probably fabricated. 

Less egregious, but there’s also a lot of overlapped dialogue in GB -- dialogue where you hear a person speaking but you see something or someone else on screen. Again, this is not a bad sign in itself, but if the filmmaker is doing a LOT of it then it’s a sign they’re bringing in dialogue from a different conversation or even a different day to frankenstein (edit together) a scene that never happened. “And then there were two” is a great example of this done convincingly – I think I have a pretty good eye for deceptive editing, and even I thought that one was real. 

None of this is maybe that big of a deal, except that with Get Back, it’s not just scenes that are built out of reaction shots and lapped dialogue but entire plotlines (George/John/Paul triangle) and entire character arcs (George left because he felt cut out of the relationship). You can build just about anything out of contextless scraps of dialogue and meaningful glances, and it won’t look perfect, but it will look pretty much like this. 

To what degree this is a perfect facsimile of how we all build our personal narratives out of scraps of memory, impressions without place or time, and expressions and phrases we lost track of a long time ago is utterly fascinating and I think ultimately impossible to say. We don’t know exactly what our fragmented, emotionally charged recollections mean, but we don’t really need to know to construct a story out of them. Or rather, we need to construct a story whether we know or not.

So this is why I think GB’s portrayal of John is such an important document as an expression of how Paul feels about John now. If it’s not meant to reflect objective reality, then it reflects subjective reality. It reflects John and Paul through the lens of Paul’s recollections, which is also through the lens of everything that has happened to Paul since. 

And he lost John in such a horrific way, with no warning, at a vulnerable point in their relationship when he was probably just starting to feel hopeful again. And then, when he didn’t perform grief correctly, he was punished in a cruel, public way that was almost perfectly designed to cut him to the bone. I get why he now prunes and curates his feelings around John and makes sure to show us something we’d like to see. People joke that he's always bringing John up in conversation, always smiling sadly, always gently touching pictures of his face -- I'm not saying any of that is insincere, I'm just saying it's also not entirely optional.

On a similar note, I’m not sure his recollections of George are quite accurate either. There are a lot of reasons George might have had a sour expression in Jan 1969 -- people often point to the breakdown of his marriage to Pattie, and I’m sure that weighed on him heavily (even if he brought it on himself), but there’s also just the general misery of being in a toxic workplace environment for ten years with steadily diminishing returns. 

This is the downside to all those “Paul is such a tragic figure, I love how bravely sad he is, etc etc” posts. Being a tragic figure means being a proxy by which we can engage with our own grief, in this case grief for John's death, the Beatles breakup, and the end of the hope and change of the 1960s. If he doesn't perform as a tragic figure – if he seems conflicted or bitter or even just over it – he'll be punished by the same people who love and adore his beautiful  martyrdom.

His relationship with John is cast far more simply because the way John died, and the role he's played ever since, means he's not really allowed to explore the complexities of his relationship with John, at least not publicly.

I don’t think it’s a shock to most people that his self-esteem and sense of normalcy were pretty much shredded by the time he left the beatles. It’s no one’s fault, it’s just kinda what happens when you get caught up in the machinery of a system built to satisfy two people with serious, untreated childhood trauma (and, most likely, untreated personality disorders). So it probably shouldn’t be surprising that he didn’t always enjoy being in that situation. 

There’s also potentially his mother’s health. Louise died of cancer 18 months after Get Back was filmed, and while the family seems to have rightfully kept the details of her illness private, it’s very possible she was already showing signs of poor health in Jan 69.

Watching Get Back, though, you would attribute it entirely to repressed anger about the closeness of John and Paul’s connection. Which I think speaks to just how heavily this connection dominates Paul’s recollections, including his recollections of George. (It’s convenient, too, that it dominates the average viewer’s perspective on George – another reason Paul was a perfect entrypoint for this story). 

Details about George’s personal life are no longer relevant to Paul’s story, but the way he was sidelined by John and Paul’s special, deep, powerful, historically important friendship – and whether or not he punished Paul for this – is I think still intensely relevant in Paul’s mind. 

A lot of us know from experience that you can grow up in a completely different home than your siblings, and while the beatles weren’t children and their work environment didn’t represent their home, their experiences of that environment had vanishingly little in common. And that always creates distance. They were all working from incompatible narratives about what had happened to them, Paul and George in particular.

People in Paul’s position often feel like a martyr and see everyone else as ungrateful, while those around them remember them as egotistical, unreachable, and degrading. No one is wrong for how they feel, it’s just that these narratives are incompatible. We build certain stories in order to survive our experiences, and then we carry them for a very long time, usually years or decades after they’ve stopped being helpful. It’s probably not a coincidence that the person who remembers this time the least (Ringo) was the most readily forgiven; he didn't have a competing narrative. 

I get why Paul would still be confused and angry that George never seemed to understand the reality of their situation (because, of course, the reality of George’s situation had been very different). Now that George is dead, there’s no chance to go back and answer those questions, except by answering them himself. Which I think is what he’s trying to do here, in one way or another, using the pieces that have remained clearest and most important to him.

I guess in a way that’s the power of this kind of narrative form. Paul has given himself – and us – a thread we can hold onto. It’s up to us whether or not we want it.

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Very psychedelic poster styled George with long hair... but why not (I was relaxing after finishing a complex commission)

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john and yoko!!! from an animation i posted to my tiktok! ❤️💜

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always thinking about the back cover of the beatles sans george album

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I do think being shocked by there being a beatles fandom is maybe the funniest running bit tumblr users have bc it's like. if aliens came down Right Now and looked at human history and had to come up with a new stereotype about One Single Thing humans were a big fan of there's a solid chance it's either the beatles or jesus. or boobs. yeah there's probably a fandom man I think maybe