Time Travel with the Beatles

It's taken me a few days to get around to reporting the second evening of our porch cinema. What's my excuse? The report for installment one came out the next day. Well, but that was Jaws, which is the original high-concept movie, and the atmosphere of that screening was of populist celebration. Watching A Hard Day's Night for the second evening of our porch cinema series required more limber minds, and resulted in a lengthy and sober deconstruction by the attendees.















Jamie's Watermelon popsicles (sic?) kept us sharp enough to meet this challenge!

We had to wrestle with this one a bit, I think. In order to engage it as an audience, we had to try to see it through the eyes of a teenager in 1964. That's not impossible, but it takes some work. It's interesting that people over and over again say that this film is "as fresh today as it ever was." How can that be true? It certainly doesn't feel incompetent or naive, as some dated material does. But "fresh"?

Certainly, the film has a free and dabbling spirit; like anything inventive, it gathers ideas (elements of documentary, styles of the New Wave, and conventions of movie musicals), builds on them, and eventually stands apart from them. And along its way we get numerous moments with a timeless quality; the conversation between Ringo and the boy on the river bank is an obvious example. Yet to extend that impression to the film as a whole and claim that A Hard Day's Night stands outside of time is a bit ludicrous.

You've got John Lennon in the bathtub with a battleship and a U-Boat, singing "Rule Britannia" and the anthem of the Third Reich. You've got an exploding youth culture, literally writhing from the shock of watching objects of total celebrity, and of their own pubescent fantasies, assume a physical presence in front of them, shocking also because it had never happened like this before, to anyone.

And you've got those unfriendly exchanges on the train between the snotty young band and the crusty, entitled old timer, the flip upstarts and the hardened Depression survivor. There is a nastiness in the way the lads tease the man, and a bitterness in the man's eyes. I hope I'm not wrong that intergenerational relations are no longer this strained.

The film is a vessel both for these weakening memories and for etchings that are more universal and timeless, and that may be the key to how it works. You'll find an entry point somewhere in this film- it might be the party scene, or when they jump in the fields along to "Can't Buy Me Love," or when Paul's grandfather shakes Ringo to the bone by criticizing his reading habits- it'll be something touchable, something you can imagine happening in your own life- and then you'll have little choice but to imagine that all the rest of it, all the bygone things you'll never see, are part of your life as well. It can't be considered a timeless movie, but in this way it can deliver you to its own time.

Some people argue that rebellion against the older generation is itself a timeless and ongoing phenomenon. If that's true, its vehicle is certainly no longer rock and roll music, which is now being paired with creme brulee at fancy restaurants. When did rock and roll cease to be fueled by this sentiment?

Consider Rock 'n' Roll High School, a film that came out just 15 years after A Hard Day's Night. The spirit of rebellion is raging through its every moment, perhaps most of all when the Ramones finally take the stage and belt out at least three complete songs, songs which rebel against even the conventions of rock itself. The moment is still alive.



Then there was the sequel, Rock 'n' Roll High School Forever, but not until 1991.



The music here, of course, emulates Motley Crue and Guns 'n' Roses, the kind of long haired "metal" rock that rebelled not so much against old people as it did against sobriety, but at least old people didn't like it. The moment isn't quite dead yet, but this is getting kind of silly.

Then just three years later, we had "Woodstock '94." Now what the hell was going on? Junior hippies? They're actually flattering the older generation by imitation!
















And while these 20-somethings were dancing with twigs in their beards, the younger folk were at home, tuned in to My So Called Life, a show that advertised the wonders of wholesome family life, and how parents may be bumbling, but darn it, they're trying their best. Not only that, Patty's strained relationship with her father (Paul Dooley) always seemed to give the message that baby boomers have a better shot at connecting with their kids than they ever had at connecting with their own parents. That's 30 years, and a long walk, from A Hard Day's Night.



We don't have a date yet for our next screening, but since we're on the subject of the early 90's, I am seriously thinking that the film should be Army of Darkness. What do you think?