At the beginning of ‘The Beatles: Get Back’, Peter Jackson’s nearly eight-hour documentary about the making of the ‘Let It Be’ album, the band forms a tight circle in the corner of a movie soundstage. Inexplicably, Yoko Ono is there. She settles down within reach of John Lennon, her stunned face turned to him like a plant growing toward the light. When Paul McCartney starts playing “I’ve Got a Feeling”, Ono is there, sewing a hairy object onto her lap. When the band starts with ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, Ono is sitting there reading a newspaper. Lennon slips behind the piano and Ono is there, her head hovering over his shoulder. Later, when the group squeezes into a recording booth, Ono is there, sandwiched between Lennon and Ringo Starr, wordlessly unwrapping a piece of gum and working it between Lennon’s fingers. When George Harrison walks away and briefly leaves the band, Ono is there, whimpering inaudibly into his microphone.
At first, I found Ono’s ubiquity in the documentary bizarre, even unnerving. The huge set only emphasizes the ridiculousness of its proximity. Why is she there? I begged for my television set. But as the hours passed and Ono continued—painting an easel, chewing a pastry, flipping through a Lennon fan magazine—I found myself awed by her stamina, then entranced by the provocation of her existence and eventually blinded by her performance. My attention kept drifting to her corner of the frame. I saw intimate, long-lost footage of the world’s most famous band preparing for its final performance, and I couldn’t stop watching Yoko Ono doing nothing.
“The Beatles: Get Back” is read by some as an exculpatory document – proof that Ono was not responsible for destroying the Beatles. “She never has an opinion about the things they do,” Jackson, who created the series with more than 60 hours of footage, told “60 Minutes.” “She’s a very good natured presence and she doesn’t interfere in the least.” Ono, also a producer on the series, tweeted an uncommented article claiming she’s just doing “daily tasks” while the band goes to work. In the series, McCartney himself – from January 1969, more than a year before the band’s public disbandment – pokes fun at the idea that the Beatles would end “because Yoko was on an amp”.
Her presence has been described as gentle, quiet and unobtrusive. Indeed, she’s not the set’s most nosy intruder: That’s Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the hapless director of the original documentary ‘Let It Be’, who continues to urge the band to give a concert in an ancient amphitheatre in Libya. or perhaps a hospital for children with comforting minor ailments.
And yet there’s something depressing about Ono’s recast as a quiet, unobtrusive lump of a person. Of course, her appearance in the studio is intrusive. The fact that she’s not there to directly influence the band’s recordings only makes her behavior more ridiculous. To deny this is to deprive her of her power.
From the start, Ono’s presence feels intentional. Her meshy black outfit and wavy hair with a center part give her a tent-like appearance; it’s like she’s setting up camp and carving out space in the band’s environment. An ‘everyday’ task becomes odd if you choose to perform it in front of Paul McCartney’s face as he tries to write ‘Let It Be’. If you repeat this for 21 days, it becomes amazing. The documentary’s rough running time reveals Ono’s provocation in all its intensity. It’s like she’s putting on a marathon performance, and in a way she is.
Jackson has called his series “a documentary about a documentary” and we are constantly reminded that we watch the band produce its image for the camera. Ono was, of course, already an accomplished performance artist when she met Lennon, seven years her junior, at a gallery show in 1966. She was a pioneer of participatory artwork, a collaborator with experimental musicians such as John Cage, and a master of coquettish performance in spaces. where she didn’t belong. In 1971, she would stage an imaginary exhibition of ephemeral works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the catalog she is photographed in front of the museum with a sign that reads “F”, rearranging it as the “Museum of Modern [F]art.”
The idea of Ono damning the band was always a canard that smacked of misogyny and racism. She was cast as the groupie from hell, a sexually dominant “dragon lady” and a witch who hypnotized Lennon into rejecting the boys for a woman. (In 1970, Esquire published an article titled “John Rennon’s Excrusive Gloupie” that promised to reveal “the Yoko Nobody Onos,” with an illustration of Ono looming over Lennon, who appears as a cockroach on her belt.) This slander would form a spiral. to a tireless pop culture meme that haunts generations of women accused of the intrusion of male genius.
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- ‘Spencer’: Kristen Stewart stars as a tormented, rebellious Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s answer to ‘The Crown’.
- ‘To suit’: Set in the 1920s, the film revolves around two African-American women, friends from childhood, who can and do present themselves as white.
- ‘Drive my car’: In this tranquil Japanese masterpiece, a widower travels to Hiroshima to direct an experimental version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”
Ono didn’t break up the Beatles. (If Lennon’s distancing from the band was influenced by his desire to explore other pursuits, including his personal and creative relationship with Ono, then that was his decision.) But she insisted. In the documentary, McCartney politely complains that his songwriting with Lennon is being disrupted by Ono’s ubiquity. For her part, she was vigilant to escape the typical role of the artist’s wife. In a 1997 interview, she commented on the status of women in rock in the 1960s: “My first impression was that they were all wives, sort of in the next room while the guys were talking,” she said. “I was afraid to be something like that.” She would later dedicate her 1973 song, “Potbelly Rocker,” to the “wives of rockers who are nameless.”
In her 1964 text project ‘Grapefruit’, a sort of recipe book for organizing art experiences, she instructs her audience to ‘look not at Rock Hudson, but only at Doris Day’, and in ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ she skillfully leads the eye away from the band and towards itself. Her image is in stark contrast to that of other Beatles partners – fashion-forward white women in chic outfits who occasionally burst in with kisses, nod encouragingly and slip away unobtrusively. Linda Eastman, McCartney’s future wife, lingers for a while, going around and photographing the band. Eastman was a rock portraitist, and one of the most captivating moments in the film shows her in a deep conversation with Ono — as if to prove Ono’s point, it’s a rare on-set interaction with no recovered audio.
Ono just never leaves. She refuses to go to the sidelines, but she also resists expressing stereotypes; she seems neither a devoted naive nor a troublesome busybody. Instead, she seems embroiled in some sort of passive resistance, defying all expectations of women entering the realm of rock genius.
The Barenaked Ladies song “Be My Yoko Ono” likens Ono to a ball and chain (for the record, Ono said of the song, “I liked it”), but as the sessions progress, she takes on a weightless quality . She seems to orbit Lennon, obscuring his bandmates and becoming a physical manifestation of his psychological distance from his old artistic center of gravity. Later on, her performance would increase in intensity. The “Let It Be” sessions were followed by the recording of “Abbey Road”, and according to the studio engineer, when Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a bed to be delivered to the studio; Ono tucked herself in, grabbed a microphone and invited friends over to her bedside. These are many things: grotesquely codependent, terribly rude and iconic. The more Ono’s presence is challenged, the more her performance escalates.
All of this was used to roughly transform Ono into a cultural villain, but it would later establish her as something of a folk hero as well. “It all comes down to YOKO ONO,” drummer Tobi Vail wrote in a 1991 zine associated with her riot band Bikini Kill. “Part of what your friend teaches you is that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles,” she writes. That story “makes you the opposite of his band.” It relegates women to the public and ridicules them for trying to make their own music. In Hole’s 1997 song “20 Years in the Dakota,” Courtney Love summons Ono’s powers against a new generation of nagging fanboys, saying that riot grrrl “will forever be in her debt.” Vail called Ono “the first punk rock girl singer ever.”
In Jackson’s film you can see the seeds of this generational change. One day, Eastman’s young daughter, Heather, a short-haired munchkin, wanders aimlessly through the studio. Then she sees Ono singing. Heather observes her with a scrunch-faced intensity, steps to the microphone and wails.