Here to Remind You of the Mess You Left When You Went Away
Capsule reviews of "The Beatles: Get Back" and "Jagged"
The Beatles: Get Back
dir. Peter Jackson (2021)
It’s rare that a nearly eight-hour documentary drives public conversation as much as director Peter Jackson’s Get Back has since its sequential launch over the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend. A fortuitous release date on a popular streaming service along with a second long COVID winter and a subject of perennial interest – the Beatles, the most influential and popular artists in any medium or genre since the end of the Second World War – combined to inject Get Back into the national cultural bloodstream. The film’s sheer density provides Beatles obsessives and cultural commentators with enough fodder for decades of debates about the group, its music, and its ultimate demise.
Beyond allowing us to spend the better part of a day with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and company, Get Back gives viewers a ringside seat to starts and stops inherent in the creative process. In perhaps the film’s most memorable moment, for instance, we see the first stirrings of the song “Get Back” as McCartney searches for inspiration and strums away on his bass guitar while waiting for Lennon to arrive at an early recording session. But we also glimpse a number of tracks from Abbey Road in their embryonic stages (including “Something,” “Oh! Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” and the “Golden Slumbers” suite), along with the progenitors of post-Beatles solo efforts like Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” and Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass.”
We also see the ways a change of location and the injection of a fresh perspective can pull people out of their creative doldrums. Unable to make things work musically or personally at the soundstage where they hope to film a television special – Harrison outright quits the band, clearly feeling disrespected by Lennon and McCartney – the Beatles retreat to their new studio in London to finish writing and recording new songs. They also bring keyboardist Billy Preston into the sessions, allowing the band to realize why they enjoyed what they did in the first place – at least long enough to finish their current project and stage their famous rooftop concert.
At the same time, Get Back also provides a good indication of the ways irresolvable interpersonal tensions tend to play out in real life. There are no shouting matches captured on film or audio; it’s not a cauldron of seething resentment, even if resentment does bubble up on occasion. George very matter-of-factly announces his temporary departure from the Beatles, for instance (though we’re not privy to the two private meetings the band had with Harrison to convince him to return). Things just tend to fall apart as band members slowly drift apart, even as some – most notably Paul and the always-on-time Ringo – try to keep them together. Though acrimony between former band mates seeped in over time (see, for example, Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?”), it’s hard to detect in Get Back. We simply see the individual Beatles heading their separate ways.
As to its astronomical length, Get Back won’t win everyone over. It can certainly seem as aimless and interminable as some critics have charged, but in that respect Get Back is as accurate a depiction – and reflection – of the creative process as we’re likely to see any time soon.
Jagged
dir. Alison Klayman (2021)
It’s hard to exaggerate how ubiquitous Alanis Morissette and her breakthrough album Jagged Little Pill were in the years 1995 and 1996. In theory, it was possible to avoid hearing songs like “Ironic” and “Head Over Feet,” but in practice it proved a hopeless exercise. Not that this musical omnipresence was unbearable or overwhelming; Jagged Little Pill happened to be an excellent album, though one that in retrospect marked the curtain call for the great alternative rock efflorescence of the 1990s.
Director Alison Klayman’s new documentary Jagged manages to take viewers back to those heady days, if only for an hour and a half. The film doesn’t quite dwell enough on the making of the Jagged Little Pill album and the subsequent tour as much as it could, sprawling out at times in ways that don’t necessarily serve the larger film or do justice to the album itself. Still, these digressions merely sand some edges off what’s otherwise the most enjoyable nostalgia trip I’ve personally experienced in quite some time. Jagged Little Pill remains a musical touchstone for those of us who grew up or came of age in the halcyon decade of the 1990s, and Jagged is a worthwhile testament to that time and place.
It should come as no surprise that the documentary focuses strongly on “You Oughta Know,” Jagged Little Pill’s lead single and the most scathing “fuck you” of the post-war era in any medium. Much of the song’s feral intensity arises from its caustic, cutting lyrics; an extraordinarily jilted Morissette savages her former lover and his new squeeze, asking “Does she know how you told me/You'd hold me until you died?/'Til you died, but you're still alive” and hoping that “every time I scratch my nails down someone else's back/I hope you feel it/Well, can you feel it?” But it’s Morissette’s snarling, venomous delivery that truly elevates “You Oughta Know” into a classic track, one filled with righteous anger and contempt that can’t be replicated by anyone else.
Unfortunately, however, Jagged gives comparatively short shrift to the rest of the album. “Ironic” and “Hand In My Pocket” receive decent but insufficient amounts of attention, while the documentary mostly skates over other hits like “You Learn” and “Head Over Feet.” It does aim to rebut charges from a quarter century ago that the album and Morissette herself were somehow “angry,” the obvious rage of “You Oughta Know” notwithstanding. But the film’s case doesn’t quite hold up as well as it insists: Jagged Little Pill is indeed a fairly angry album, though not in the way critics incorrectly asserted in the mid-1990s. Songs like “Forgiven” and “Right Through You” definitely throw sharp elbows against the Catholic Church and the music industry, and there’s certainly a seething resentment of parental expectations of perfection on the aptly titled “Perfect.” Each and every track on Jagged Little Pill may not be filled with fury and resentment, but the album does contain its fair share of evidently well-earned vitriol.
Sexism no doubt played a role in criticism of Morissette’s alleged anger, as Jagged contends. But more interesting are the clear suggestions the film makes that sexism prevented critics from taking her and Jagged Little Pill seriously. These voices always seemed to discover a catch that rendered Morissette and her music inauthentic, such as her early career as a teen pop star in Canada - a past the made her evolution into an angst-ridden, twenty-something alternative rock queen less than credible to a number of critics.
Though the film argues that Morissette had a lengthy and productive career in the years that followed Jagged Little Pill, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she exploded onto the popular music scene like a supernova – and burned out just as quickly. That seems due in no small part to the grueling and legendarily debauched tour she embarked upon in support of the album, a odyssey recounted by, among others, future Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins. Morissette’s subsequent work has certainly been creditable, but her ongoing notoriety and lasting legacy rests almost entirely with her first major album.
That’s not a knock against Morissette; it’s hard for anyone in music to sustain high levels of creativity and popularity over time. Artists like the Rolling Stones, Prince, and Taylor Swift are rare – and lucky – in their ability to maintain both their creative prowess and popularity over years and decades.1 Still, Morissette had impeccable timing: Jagged Little Pill came out just as the early 1990s alternative rock tide began to recede, slowly giving way to the vapid pop, execrable nu-metal, and self-absorbed hip-hop that laid waste to popular music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Any later and the album may not have caught fire.
Despite its flaws and shortcomings as a documentary, Jagged effectively captures a moment in time that remains well within living memory but feels increasingly distant in an era of algorithms, social media, and streaming services. It’s worth taking the trip back in time, if only for nostalgia’s sake – or so younger viewers can catch a glimpse of what life was like before we all became terminally online.
Ten years separated the releases of the Stones’ Beggars Banquet in 1968 and their release of Some Girls; Prince’s self-titled second album appeared in 1979 while the landmark Sign O’ The Times came out in 1987; Taylor Swift released her breakthrough album Fearless in 2008 while evermore, her most recent album of new material, came out in 2020. Over these time periods, all three artists released eight albums. By way of comparison, Morissette released seven albums over a twenty-five year period starting with Jagged Little Pill in 1995.