Abstract
The discussion of the mockumentary comedy’s focus on rock stars begins with an analysis of The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night. It is argued that The Beatles use the mockumentary form to negotiate their fame in a number of different ways. First, they parody highly pressurised aspects of their daily lives and turn them into moments of comic escapism. Second, they use the form to develop comic personas, related to, but separate from, their real selves. The significance of this self-performance is highlighted with reference to the observational documentary What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., in which the band members are seen to be almost constantly acting up for the camera. As such the mockumentary frequently looks more like an observational documentary than the genuine documentary does.
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- 1.
Several different versions of What’s Happening! exist: the original fifty-minute World in Action (1963–1998) television film, broadcast by Granada in February 1964; the American broadcast from November 1964; The Maysles’ seventy-four-minute cut; and two versions re-edited by Apple for television broadcast and DVD release under the title The Beatles : The First U.S. Visit (1994). See Joe McElhaney (2009: 65–67, 175–179) for an overview of the differences between the versions. Due to issues of access, this chapter uses the first American broadcast from 13 November 1964 and the 2004 DVD release as its sources. The majority of the scenes discussed are found in both versions. Where this is not the case, this is made clear in the text. In addition, some of the footage from What’s Happening! has been repurposed for use in various compilation documentaries, most notably The Beatles Anthology (1995) television series and the Ron Howard feature film The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years (2016) where it forms part of the record of the February 1964 US tour.
- 2.
The day-in-the-life focus of the film also retreads a well-worn documentary path, evident in films such as Man with a Movie Camera/Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929) and Berlin: Symphony of a City/Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (1927).
- 3.
This is not a situation unique to The Beatles. In Dont Look Back, Dylan’s car is mobbed on several occasions, most memorably by a young woman who climbs onto the car and has to be removed by a group of passers-by for her own safety.
- 4.
This is another example of the potentially problematic gendering of the mockumentary. Despite A Hard Day’s Night’s playfulness, the film positions The Beatles’ fans (and particularly the girls and women) as their key adversaries which are tolerated only because they are the price paid for their success. The boys on the other hand are frequently portrayed as being helpful to the main characters. That the film sells this image of The Beatles’ female fans back to those same fans is not a little troublesome.
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Wallace, R. (2018). Acting Naturally: Performing The Beatles. In: Mockumentary Comedy. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77848-8_2
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