The sixties—the time when the mass media indeed emerged from behind their neutral mask of means of transmission to become, in themselves, core elements of modern consciousness—gave us artists whose work turned the mirror back on the media: Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard, and also the Beatles, who, in their first film, “A Hard Day’s Night” (which I discuss in this clip), from 1964, center their action on a television appearance and mock its codes and conventions even as they fulfill them, beyond their producers’ wildest dreams. Their anarchic and joyful free-spiritedness was both the cause of their celebrity and the product they were promoting; their cultural revolution was the first to be carried out in an echo chamber the size of the world.
“A Hard Day’s Night” opened here in the summer of 1964. I was six and was already a Beatlemaniac, already owned some 45s of their songs. The first I bought, the previous year, was “Boys” (David Levin, my friend across the apartment-complex courtyard, had a teen-age sister whose taste quickly filtered down to us). No one took us to see “A Hard Day’s Night,” though, try though we might. We first saw the Beatles on screen in “Help!,” the following year, as soon as it opened (at a theatre in walking distance of us). Who knew, at six, from cultural revolution? What we knew was that they existed in a seeming third dimension: we liked lots of songs from lots of bands (I still have my original 45 of “Satisfaction,” for instance), but the Stones, James Brown and (yes) Bob Dylan were just their sound and their songs. The Beatles were a media phenomenon, the high-relief emblem of a rising new world that left our parents bewildered and bemused (and the cause of a few forced haircuts). And in the summer of 1965, when the Beatles came to play nearby Shea Stadium (where, in the spring of 1964, I had seen the second baseball game the Mets ever played there), I camped out at the window all day in the childish expectation of seeing them pass by—something I’d never have done for any of the other rockers I loved. And, as with Warhol and as with Godard, the burden of celebrity took its toll on the wizards who sought to wield it, and found that, at moments of crisis, it wielded them.
It remains to be seen what toll the new media world has taken on us, who have been lifelong in its thrall. (I’m reminded of the apocryphal story of the former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who, when asked about the importance of the French Revolution, said, “It’s too soon to tell.”)
