How the Beatles Created Self-Conscious Stardom

The Beatles sit in front of hairdressers on set.
Photograph from AP

As I watched “A Hard Day’s Night” again, what struck me was the screaming of girls, which is the implied sound beneath the opening mad dash to the title tune and becomes piercingly real every time the Beatles face the public: when their train arrives at London, and they run to a taxi; when they arrive at the studio for a press conference; and, at great length and vehemence, during their performance before an audience in a television studio. Those are the shrieks heard ’round the world. The Beatles did two world-historical things: they turned rock music into the near-universal core popular music, and they created a new mode of male sexual allure, of masculinity—and they did those two things together. “A Hard Day’s Night” shows how they did it; it was also one of the ways in which they did it.

Start at the top. The word “longhair” formerly meant an intellectual—say, an orchestra conductor or the cloistered encyclopedists of Howard Hawks’s “Ball of Fire,” whose effete style distanced them from the virile masculine virtues of the day. Whether the private lives of bohemians were artistically freer than the public norm was beside the point; they stood for the stereotype of asexual stuffiness. The Beatles changed the stereotype: they eroticized their consciously soft and loose masculinity.

Though the Beatles come off in the film as flamboyantly physical—more sensuously present than the stiff middle-class specimens whom they encounter on the train, in an ad agency, on the street, backstage at the TV station—their physicality is self-deprecating and unthreatening. In the nightclub scene, their dancing is both spazzy and cool, alluring without aggression, uninhibited but fun, as when Ringo dances to “Don’t Bother Me” with a young woman while also playfully mock-boxing with Paul, or when Ringo starts pogo-ing to “All My Loving” with a tall and lean young man dancing alongside him. The opening shot of the film, showing John, George, and Ringo dashing toward the camera at top speed on a sidewalk as they flee a crowd of fans in hot pursuit, features the instantly self-deflating gag (which looks completely unplanned and accidental) of George tripping and falling to the pavement, to the hilarity of his bandmates.

Elvis was a walk on the wild side; the Beatles were a romp in the park. For them, sex was comedy. The Beatles were mockers, whose antics borrowed from the Marx Brothers, as when Ringo does the Groucho crouch, waggling his cigarette with a flourish, as he glides down the train corridor and approaches a young woman’s compartment. But, unlike the Marxes, the Beatles’ absurdist anarchy was essentially constructive: they didn’t leave a wreck; they didn’t tear down the institutions of the arrogant and the presumptuous. They became new and bigger institutions.

The songs draw on many traditions but belong to none and transcend them all. The harmonies are sunlit, the voices are perky and harmonized, not raw and dissonant with reckless emotion. The music smiles from a slight height, inflecting the sincerity into self-consciousness; it has an edge, but a flexible one, with no element of danger. The songs, with their sense of balance and energetic poise, represented an instant classicism—and the director Richard Lester’s presentation of the music onscreen redoubled that effect. He reconfigures the loopy extravagance of Frank Tashlin’s comedies and the aesthetic audacity of the French New Wave into a new tradition. The two essential visual tropes in “A Hard Day’s Night” are the ones that had become instantly popular with the early French New Wave classics: the handheld camera and the absurdist interpolation.

For Lester—and, more important, for the Beatles—the handheld camera implied the authenticity of documentary, the amiable intimacy of home movies, and the tremulous warmth of a person at the command instead of the cold precision of a cinematic machine. The handheld footage converges with the Beatles’ collectively exuberant persona and overrides the self-regarding cynicism that’s implicit in the movie throughout. The movie, after all, is about the band’s efforts to perform on a TV show; the plot is only the loose skein of complications that get in the way, and the broadcast that they do, with professional enthusiasm, is the movie’s frenzied and exultant dénouement.

Essentially, the media—the movies, TV, and the recording studio itself—are the instruments that the Beatles play along with their guitars and drums, and the entire movie is a feedback loop of self-conscious media players who create celebrity along with music. Lester’s way with music is essentially that of advertising on the wing, and the narrative playfulness, the intermittent frame-breaking, the cartoonish interpolations—such as the wondrous appearance of musical instruments in the band’s hands during the card game in the baggage car (while the song “I Should Have Known Better” plays on the soundtrack, and the Beatles start to play along)—help to create a sort of joyous mask for the brazen visual advertisements of the records and the Beatles themselves.

Lester’s movie defines the recording—the three-minute single—as the fundamental unit of pop music. “A Hard Day’s Night” features no spontaneous musical performances, but it plasters records onto the soundtrack and features apparent performances that are lip-synched and instrument-synched to records, which canonizes those versions and emphasizes one particular kind of performance, the one in the recording studio—which, notably, is rigorously excluded from the movie.

Rather, Lester places the Beatles within a trinity of cinema, theatre, and television: he brings the band into the TV studio to perform live for an overwrought audience that sees the Beatles at a distance. He films from inside the TV director’s control booth, where the wide shot of the musicians seen from afar and the views of the audience from the window contrast with the close-ups of the TV cameras seen on the director’s small screens. Lester emphasizes the point of view of the Beatles themselves, gazing out both at the exultant throng and at the technicians wandering between the impassive video cameras; he shows the tweaking of knobs and the pressing of buttons that make the broadcast happen; and, of course, he shows the crowd, mainly of young women, stoked to shrieking frenzy.

But the mechanics of the cinema, like those of the recording studio, remain hidden. Lester pulls back the veil on the televised spectacle, but the movie cameras that catch the action of theatre and television alike, that capture the heatedly intimate close-ups, from the side, of John Lennon, remain off-camera. For all the playfulness, the antic absurdity, the self-deprecating jollity of the movie’s aesthetic as well as of the Beatles themselves, the movie machine remains a mystery. The editing of the film underscores—and separates out—its cartoonish gags with the equivalent of a visual highlighter but doesn’t fill the movie with jolting cuts; the shooting of the movie lends warmth to the tone but doesn’t pull the director or the means of production out in front of the camera (no flash-frames, no slates, no switches from color to black-and-white or resizings of the frame or supertitles).

Lester’s cinema is no radical cinema; it’s the healthy normalization of styles of radical cinema, the conversion of a cinema of youthful inspiration into a new mainstream that created new stars and a new sort of stardom—a softened and self-conscious stardom that doesn’t strike a heroic pose but folds gently into its own soulful self-parody, and that the mystic, mythologizing power of the cinema, with its art of the close-up, reinflates. But this new center didn’t hold for long; movies were fighting a losing battle against television, and the cinema was stretched between the weight of its resurgent simplicity and ever more radical prospects. (The same thing, of course, happened with the music as well.) Lester may have been more of a brilliant consolidator than a visionary originator—but he at least mapped the ground of an aesthetic conflict that’s at the heart of media modernity, and that endures to this day.

P.S. Was there a media icon who, at the time, similarly redefined feminine sexuality? The question is a sincere one; I’m not at all sure of an answer.