Imagine a day in the life of a Beatle

From an era before selfies, Paul McCartney’s cache of photos, even the out of focus ones, prompts Jamie Mulvaney to consider what perspective we need on ourselves.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Two gallery vistor stair at four photo portraits of The Beatles.

Viewing Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm.

National Portrait Gallery.

Imagine a day in the life of a Beatle. It's easy if you try. Or is it?

Last year, the late Matthew Perry allowed us a searing insight into life with a rollicking read about his very high highs and very low lows. Yet more books have been published recently on the toxicity of fame. Britney Spears is the subject of an autobiography and a biography. Another simply borrows the title, Toxic. John Updike wrote that 'fame is the mask that eats the face'. Baz Luhrmann last year documented Elvis Presley's destruction in his typically kaleidoscopic way. And into this media mix a recent exhibition shows a more innocent, intimate moment in the fame prototype of Beatlemania, intriguingly entitled Eyes of the Storm.

Surely with the Beatles predating the selfie-stick and Snapchat, we'd be reliant on paparazzi. But as Sir Paul McCartney can play pretty much every musical instrument, it's not a surprise he knows how to use a camera. And so, it emerged during lockdown that he had kept 1,000 previously unseen photos from 1961-1963.

To relaunch the beautifully remodelled National Portrait Gallery, McCartney displayed a whole cache of photos. One of the criticisms of present-day photography is that it's too easy, that we retain all sorts of out-of-focus photos on our phone. McCartney had preserved all these, and although it's curated and edited, there's many photos that wouldn't normally be seen.

You get the fab four goofing about, and also in quieter moments. There's young George looking shattered in the back of a car, and John concentrating. McCartney forgot that Lennon pulled this particular face, with his finger to his lip. His song 'Help!' emerged a year later. He told Playboy, 'I was fat and depressed, and I was crying out for 'help'.’ They were indeed in the eye of a storm.

We’ve lived with an orthodoxy that we understand ourselves through self-expression – that we ourselves are the ones to define who we are.

And in the middle of the storm, we see the Beatles finding moments of joy. They land in New York for the Ed Sullivan Show, at the top of the charts and the top of their fame. Fans chasing them down Manhattan streets, fans balancing precariously on an airport roof, and one inexplicably holds a monkey. American optimism had been battered by JFK's assassination and the Beatles' arrival was a welcome respite. This joy became even clearer (and more vivid?) as McCartney switched to colour when they reached Miami. But before the colour, the songwriter in conversation with Stanley Tucci singled out seeing a worker he snapped while they were on the train – perhaps a mirror to his own working-class roots and family.

But then there are also the more explicit self-reflections… A series that struck me were McCartney's self-portraits, looking in mirror, out of focus. McCartney said that his first thought was this was the National Portrait Gallery - at least they could be in focus! But then he realised they had a warmth, and a softness to them.

Those of us who are not Beatles, or famous, also often live our lives out of focus, with blind spots, or a little dizzy from the storms around us and within us. Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, before the selfie was invented, wrote about our self-perception in relation to the outside world, and that we are 'self-interpreting animals'.

Since the eighteenth century we’ve lived with an orthodoxy that we understand ourselves through self-expression – that we ourselves are the ones to define who we are and how we relate to the world - even how we relate to ourselves. It’s so much the norm, it might seem confronting to question it, but in an increasingly confusing world, this is an increasingly difficult way to understand ourselves. Whilst many of the Beatles' songs are about perception, King David also wrote in the psalms about our need for an external perspective:

'You have searched me, Lord,

and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.'

What we each need is a perspective on ourselves from the outside that is warm, soft, but also in focus. What if there was a perspective on ourselves free from blind spots, a precision lens that fully sees and fully understands the essence of who we are, and who we might be? Someone who sees the deleted photos, and yet is completely gentle and loving in how they see us? The way we truly understand ourselves is in relation to our Creator. God shows us both what is seen and unseen. Like in these photos, God is not fazed by the contrast of light and darkness, and provides a way out of the storm:

'Search me, God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.'

Explainer

Art

Culture

Identity

2 August 2024

5 min read

Controversial art: can the critic love their neighbour?

What to do when confronted with contentious culture.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Two people run though a darkened art gallery towards a body lying amongst photography paraphanalia

Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code.

Sony Pictures.

In the wake of the controversy over the Olympic opening ceremony, based as it was on a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Christians as to what was being portrayed, you may be perplexed or confused by the different ways Christians respond to controversial art or media portrayals that are perceived to be an attack on core Christian beliefs. If that is you, here are some thoughts as to why it is that Christians react in a range of different ways.

Our responses are always underpinned by depth of relationship with and commitment to Jesus, the one who has turned our lives upside down and filled us with his Spirit. Our sense of what it is that Jesus has done for us and what it is that relationship with Jesus means to us is the determinative factor affecting our response when we perceive the One we love and who loves us to have been maligned or mocked.

For some, we feel a need to stand with or defend Jesus whenever we perceive that he is under attack, and we have seen that instinctive response apparent in reactions to the Olympic opening ceremony. However, instinctive emotive responses run the risk of pre-empting more reasoned or reflective responses. That has certainly been the case here, as what many Christians perceived to have been a parody of the Last Supper was not actually that at all. Instead, the sequence was a portrayal of the feast of Dionysius, so had nothing to do with the Last Supper at all.

Christians, as here, are often too quick to make allegations of blasphemy without actually understanding what is being portrayed. I have, unfortunately, seen many similar examples within my lifetime. In the 1970’s and 80’s films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ resulted in thousands of Christians demonstrating outside cinemas, while Christian organisations, like the National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association headed by Mary Whitehouse, lobbied for those films to be banned.

God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

However, interestingly, the release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, although it dealt with similarly controversial material for Christians, did not result in mass protests. Instead, through seeker events, bible studies, websites and booklets, churches encouraged discussion of the issues raised by the film while clearly contesting the claims made about Christ and the Church.

The protests against such films often did not tally with the content of the films themselves and displayed a lack of understanding of them, their stories and meaning. As Richard Burridge, a former Dean of King’s College London, has said of Life of Brian, “those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were ‘embarrassingly’ ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message”. Life of Brian portrayed the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced that stereotype.

As a result, the Church had to learn again that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites and the like that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised, making use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims. These created a conversation with the wider community that was far more constructive than the kind of knee-jerk reactions we have seen to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Some of these knee-jerk reactions derive from a sense, in the West, that the dominant place Christianity used to have in society has been eroded leading some to think that our values and beliefs are under threat. This reveals an underlying insecurity which it is surprising to find in those who believe that God is all-powerful and in control of human history. God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

Indeed, the reverse is the case, as, in Jesus, God deliberately entered human history to experience human life in all its facets, including real mockery and suffering, to show that such experiences are not defining and can be transcended through love and sacrifice. Such a God does not require those who follow to become defensive themselves when the path of mockery is actually the path to resurrection and renewal.

Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life.

So, what might a more constructive and productive response to controversies entail? Taking time to reflect and to understand what it is we are experiencing would be a much better place to start. The Olympic opening ceremony was a celebration of French culture, which highlighted images from the Louvre in particular. Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is in Italy and does not include a blue Dionysius. With some reflection and investigation, that would quickly have become apparent. Similarly, the scene to which Christians objected in The Last Temptation of Christ was just what it said on the tin, the last temptation Jesus faced. It was a temptation that he rejected, and the film was all the more powerful as a depiction of the incarnation as a result.

Then, we can see that what the Christ who embraced human life through the incarnation calls us to is a charitable hermeneutic (how we interpret), when it comes to receiving, understanding and commenting on the culture around us. Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. Our charitable hermeneutic was summed up for us by St Paul when he wrote of going through life looking for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable”. Sister Wendy Beckett, the cultural commentator who most recently has best exemplified this charitable hermeneutic achieving huge popularity as a result, wrote of “a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.

With the beautiful secret of a charitable hermeneutic, we might, perhaps, look again at the Olympic opening ceremony and appreciate the intent of Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the ceremony, when he said that religious subversion had never been his intention: “We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.”