“I mean...does he not realize what’s happening?” said my husband of David Michael Hogg, about halfway through our viewing of Peter Jackson’s epic Beatles docuseries, Get Back.

“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “Why would he?”

But we know what’s happening. The Beatles are breaking up.

This moment between my husband and me happened during the segment of the docuseries where George has left, and the remaining Beatles are trying to figure out a path forward. The suits in the room seem to have no idea that the Beatles are even capable of breaking up. There’s an ethereal aura surrounding the whole conversation. Clearly, these guys have argued before. Clearly, a working relationship is always accompanied by some amount of strain. Clearly, this is just another moment in the life of The Beatles. Except, we know it’s a moment that leads to the end.

We know that George will come back. We know he will finish the project, albeit with dreams of a solo career on the horizon. We know they’ll work things out and end up doing a short concert on the roof before the cops end it all. We know it’s the last show they’ll ever perform.

And we know all of the other things. We know they’ll make two albums out of these songs. We know the eventual lyrics of “Get Back.” We know they’ll both ruin and improve all of the songs on Let It Be with the Phil Spector wall of sound. 

We know that each Beatle goes on to have a successful solo career. We know that John and George will be taken from us tragically and far too soon. We know that John and Yoko stay together. We know what happens to each of the songs that are written, rehearsed, and performed in this footage. 

And we know that, eventually, The Beatles break up. 

And that knowledge is what makes this docuseries both fascinating and excruciating to watch.

My parents are Boomers, and my dad is a huge Beatles fan. He has an enviable collection of original Beatles vinyl in near-perfect condition, and he comes from a generation that has deified this band. Growing up, it was hard for my generation not to deify them as well, as the Boomers constantly reminded us that The Beatles started rock and roll, man. There wouldn’t be “boy bands” without The Beatles. There wouldn’t be rock and roll without The Beatles. There wouldn’t be fangirls and fanboys without The Beatles. If you talk to a Boomer, it’s hard to believe there would be anything in this godforsaken world without The Beatles.

Are they overrated? Probably. (My dad and all of his Boomer friends will have my hide for saying that.) But one thing I recognized while watching this docuseries is that these four dudes were just that: Four dudes.

By the time this footage was filmed, these guys were ten years older than they were when they started, but they were still only in their late 20s. In many ways, they are just starting their lives. They’re settling down into serious relationships. George’s wife appears multiple times, as does the eventual Linda McCartney; Yoko is not the only female presence in this story. They’ve (tragically) lost their manager, and a bit of their direction. Through the hours of footage, you can see Paul trying to be a serious musician, John trying to have fun, George trying to find his voice, and Ringo almost militantly trying to do his job. It works well, as evidenced in the albums that result from this work. These guys know how to work together coherently at this point. The moments of songwriting between Paul and John, where they just look at each other and know what they want to do with the song, are fascinating and heartwarming to watch. But they’ve grown up. And they’re just done.

Nowadays, bands break up all the time, even after being together for ten years. To be clear, they broke up all the time in the 1960s and 1970s too, but very few of them were iconic, mostly because being iconic wasn’t a thing yet. The Rolling Stones are referenced many times in the docuseries, and they are still together. That’s an unprecedented feat in the 21st century, really. To think that four dudes who started playing together as teenagers would stay together, making music forever, is a little naive. They were bound to outgrow one another eventually, and go their separate ways. It’s only really a tragedy because we know what happens next.

We know this will never happen again. The Beatles don’t know that. David Michael Hogg doesn’t know that. But we know. That’s why the breakup of The Beatles is a car wreck from which we can’t look away.

In a way, it makes us sadistic. Except I kept having to remind myself during the viewing: They’re just four dudes. They don’t know what’s about to happen. They don’t know they’ll make their final album soon. They don’t know this is their last time playing live together. They don’t know John will be gone in ten-ish years. They’re four young dudes, in the prime of their lives, who have outgrown each other and want to move on.

But the delight in viewing this footage is that beyond George needing a few days to cool off, these four dudes really do enjoy each other’s company. And they really do love making music together. And they really do have fun. There’s no shouting matches. There’s not much tension in the room (except when the suits come in and try to give them direction, which are absolutely the most annoying scenes of the series). And there are so many fur coats.

It’s a reconciliation of sorts, for those of us who thought we knew how it all went down. We blamed George’s ego, or Yoko, or Brian Epstein, or maybe the suits in the room. We thought the creation of these final albums was a miserable experience, at the expense of the greatest rock band of all time. But really it was just the end, for a lot of reasons that make a lot of sense. And even though we know what happens next, and even though it’s tragic, and because of that we know this moment will never happen again, being able to view the full breadth of this experience maybe gives us [a little bit of] peace.

The Beatles are probably overrated. But they also deserve the deification they’ve earned. It’s a weird emotional place to be, watching these moments that we know will never happen again. Do they deserve our forgiveness, for repeated viewings (and listenings) of their final moments, over the years, and for the dissection of every excruciating detail that led to an end we just couldn’t accept? Perhaps. 

But I’d like to think that this is them forgiving us, for ever thinking they were ours to keep and control. They’re just four dudes. This is what they left behind. It’s an almost perfect lesson in ambiguity and the gray area of art, during this current life lesson of ambiguity in the form of a never-ending pandemic.

The love you take is equal to the love you make, maybe. Or something like that.