Battle Of The Thanksgiving Music Docs: "The Last Waltz" vs. "Get Back"
What is your preferred metaphor for a dysfunctional family who somehow still pulls it together one last time?
On the most recent episode of Indiecast, Ian Cohen and I went on a fun tangent about a topic near and dear to my heart: “music doc that can serve as a metaphor for dysfunctional families” Thanksgiving movies. I wrote about this subject in a 2018 column about how The Last Waltz is the best Thanksgiving film ever made. Here was the crux of my argument:
In spite of the resentments, and the betrayals, and the intensifying intoxication — everyone is able to come together and conjure a feeling of community. When they gather around to tell old family stories that have been told and re-told umpteen times — like the one about Jack Ruby, or the one about shoplifting bologna and cigarettes — the brothers pretend to laugh whenever the overbearing brother takes over the conversation. (The upside of being on stage is that you can turn off his microphone.) After a while, the laughs seem less forced. They’re faking it so well that they start to feel actual community and love and understanding. This is what The Last Waltz, and Thanksgiving, is all about.
Ian suggested another famous rock doc that could serve as a similar metaphor for Thanksgiving: the 2004 Metallica movie Some Kind Of Monster. Which made me think of the metaphorical possibilities of probably my favorite rock doc of the past decade, 2013’s History Of The Eagles. Both of those films present a dynamic shared by The Last Waltz: A group of “brothers” that has come to resent and even despise each other must set those feelings aside for the good of the “family.” In terms of Thanksgiving films, however, they don’t quite fit the bill because they don’t actually take place on Thanksgiving. Also, the concert aspect of Waltz is a pretty perfect stand-in for the formality of Thanksgiving dinner and the post (and pre) meal revelry. Like the festivities in the film, things tend to get sloppy, sentimental, and potentially awkward. At some point, your weirdest uncle might put on a purple suit and start kicking the air with dangerous velocity. It’s a goddamn impossible way to live.
Watching The Last Waltz is a holiday tradition for me and many others. But last year, a new rock doc emerged to challenge Waltz’s Thanksgiving supremacy: Peter Jackson’s Get Back.
I know I wasn’t the only one who relished watching this eight-hour behemoth as it rolled out during Thanksgiving 2021. I ended up seeing a lot of it on my phone, as I periodically snuck away to inhale the lost footage from the Beatles’ 1969 Get Back sessions in 20 and 30-minute intervals. I can remember distinctly where I was hiding in my in-laws’ house when I saw Paul McCartney spontaneously write the hook for “Get Back” while noodling aimlessly on his bass, or when Billy Preston made his triumphant entrance to save the day at Savile Row. I treasure those memories as much as any other from all of my Thanksgivings.
The nostalgia of Get Back was twofold — not only did it remind us of how magnetic the Beatles are (as if we needed to be reminded), it also made us (or at least me) think back to the original long-form Beatles doc released during the Thanksgiving season, The Beatles Anthology, back in 1995. That was as much of an event for me in high school as Get Back was in my 40s. Indeed, any season in which you receive multiple hours of fresh Beatles footage is truly one to be thankful for.
I’ve already started re-watching Get Back this week. (I’m on vacation, and I’m realizing that I likely took these pre-Thanksgiving days off in part to watch Get Back.) The holiday release of the film automatically makes it a Thanksgiving movie in my mind, but there are other obvious attributes that make it a top-shelf “music doc that can serve as a metaphor for dysfunctional families” Thanksgiving movie. The way that The Band feted themselves in such lavish fashion in The Last Waltz make their undoing rock’s second most famous break-up. (Even though most of the guys actually didn’t break up, fueling Levon’s bottomless ire post-Waltz for brother Robbie.)
But the Beatles are the original dysfunctional rock family, and the most famous break-up ever. And yet, in Get Back, they … don’t seem to hate each other that much? That was essentially the movie’s raison d’être, to counteract the decades-long narrative spun by the dreary (and also boring and also essential) 1970 doc Let It Be about how miserable these guys were at the end of their historic run together.
And obviously they were miserable, or else they wouldn’t have broken up. But the revelation of Get Back is that along with being miserable they were also still very good at being the Beatles, and they could also still make each other laugh in between the moments of tedium and frustration.
The problem with the Beatles — and in the wake of Get Back this has never been more clear — is that they needed to take a vacation. Here they are, at Twickenham studio the day after New Year’s, back at work on a new album and TV special only six weeks after putting out a mythical double LP that, in the manner of all Beatles records, changed the world forever. It’s a ridiculous, and self-destructive, work ethic! When I watch Get Back I constantly want to scream at the screen: “Take a year off! Make solo records! You don’t have to drive your band into the ground!” But, I guess, the Beatles did have to do that in order to teach future generations of bands what not to do.
For your own Thanksgiving rock doc viewing, I suggest the following schedule: Watch The Last Waltz on Thanksgiving. It really is the ideal “holiday meal” film. There’s revelry, they all get way too fucked up, and it’s really loud because it needs to be. Then, on the day after Thanksgiving, put on Get Back. It’s the perfect film for when you have been trapped with your loved ones for a little too long. John is the father who withholds his approval, and now he has a new girlfriend. Paul is the long-suffering and passive-aggressive wife who is trying to keep up appearances. Ringo is the eldest sibling who always smooths things over. George is the angry youngest sibling who lashes out at his family by acting sullen and inviting his oddball Hare Krishna pals over to the house.
Like the Beatles, you’ll realize by Black Friday that you probably need to take a break from these people. But you can’t, because they’re your people. So, you sit around. You do nothing. You get annoyed. You storm out for a while. You come back. You laugh. You remember the times you’ve shared. You still plan on leaving. But not yet.