The Beatles, Help! and the creation of the modern British man
It’s 50 years since the release of the Beatles’s second feature film, Help!. Whatever you may think of the film itself (which got very mixed reviews) this rollicking film of “good, clean insanity” provides a wonderfully unique window on to the social changes that men saw in the 1960s.
As Alex Bilmes recently wrote in Esquire, the Beatles “made it not just OK but insanely desirable to be a stylish, successful, smartarse British man”. The representation of masculinity embodied in Help! is a key stepping stone to more obvious displays of gender fluidity that were to emerge in later decades.
It’s 50 years since the release of the Beatles’s second feature film, Help!. Whatever you may think of the film itself (which got very mixed reviews) this rollicking film of “good, clean insanity” provides a wonderfully unique window on to the social changes that men saw in the 1960s. As Alex Bilmes recently wrote in Esquire, the Beatles “made it not just OK but insanely desirable to be a stylish, successful, smartarse British man”. The representation of masculinity embodied in Help! is a key stepping stone to more obvious displays of gender fluidity that were to emerge in later decades. The music journalist, Ian MacDonald, says the Beatles were critical to popular culture in the 1960s because of their global fame and the media interest in their activities. He argues that they were therefore a prism through which social changes were magnified and reflected.
Their first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) had provided a global audience with the chance to see a mockumentary about a day in the life of the Beatles at the height of Beatlemania. Despite their exuberance, feminised appearance and a number of queer moments (such as Lennon batting his eyelids and saying “give us a kiss” to a bowler hatted gent in a railway carriage), the film had much in common with the new-wave kitchen sink dramas of the early 1960s. It presented the most famous men on the planet as trapped by their day job; work central to their male identity.
By: Martin King
Source: The Conversation
