Putting the Mockers On: The Rutles, The Beatles, Rock Biopics and Parody

Many accounts of film genre reiterate a familiar narrative of growth to “classic” maturity and subsequent parody and/or deconstruction, and the biopic is no exception. However, rock music biopics have reversed this narrative, so that the genre begins in parody and only gets serious later. This is partly because rock and roll music began as parody, mainly by white people imitating African Americans, what is known as blackface minstrelsy, in which music and humour are necessarily (because of racism) mixed. In turn, the 60s rock counterculture took many of its cues from this untimely birth, appropriating African-American marginality in modes that were at once serious (concerns about authenticity) and ironic (mockery of Establishment values). This collision of opposites helps explain both the counterculture’s preference for documentary, especially of live performance, over Hollywood fiction, and its predilection for mockery of both (for example, mockumentary). As the single most influential proto-rock act, whose inventive wit and comic antics, rendered in newsreel, direct cinema, cartoon, and on record, were keys to their commercial and critical success, The Beatles were the perfect subjects for such ironic canonisation. Their filmic career highlights the intersection of documentary and comedy, as well as reality and fiction, via musical performance, a mode which can problematise documentary/comedy, and reality/fiction distinctions. In line with this argument, I have focused on key live performances from the Beatles’ career, and how they are parodied in The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978) henceforth The Rutles, which doubles as the first filmic biography of the Beatles and the first rock mockumentary. The Beatles’ later career saw their public image shift from intentional to unintentional comedy, a shift mapped in the The Rutles, which gradually moves from parody towards satire. It is argued that The Rutles is open to a range of audience identifications and readings: it is at once a text for “true fans”, a playful deconstruction of their investments, but also one with real-world reverberations (some of its predictions came true). In this sense, it is a “media savvy”, peculiarly contemporary text that questions the priority of reality over fiction.