Release the Beatles Jerk-off Cut

It’s their legacy. Photo: Mark and Colleen Hayward/Getty Images

Sam Mendes is making four Beatles biopics, one for each Beatle. Frankly, this sounds dull. Music biopics are becoming the nadir of culture — the new safe hit now that superhero movies are flopping and the awards-bait gambit that everyone loves to hate. And the Beatles are one of the most examined, cross-examined, reappraised, interrogated, and canonized acts of all time. There are documentaries, there are short films, there are tribute episodes of The Simpsons and The Powerpuff Girls, there’s The Rutles, there’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, there are the movies the Beatles actually made. There’s fucking Yesterday. It’s all been covered already, ground into the dirt by boomers like a Minion meme on Facebook.

Except one thing. That time they all jerked off together.

Paul McCartney has told the story many times. When he and John Lennon were lads in Liverpool, they’d regularly hang out with other Liverpudlian lads and have a group j/o sesh in the dark. “We used to have wanking sessions when we were young at Nigel Whalley’s house in Woolton,” McCartney said in his official biography. “We’d stay overnight and we’d all sit in armchairs and we’d put all the lights out and being teenage pubescent boys, we’d all wank. What we used to do, someone would say, ‘Brigitte Bardot.’ ‘Oooh!’ That would keep everyone on par, then somebody, probably John, would say, ‘Winston Churchill.’ ‘Oh, no!’ and it would completely ruin everyone’s concentration.”

However, frequent Beatle collaborator Victor Spinetti said the fap four kept the habit up even during their years of megafame, occupying down time while filming their movies with “wanking games.” It seems possible. Film sets are notoriously boring, and stars come up with all sorts of hobbies to keep themselves busy. Joan Crawford knit, and the Beatles did this.

So depending on whose version you believe, the “Beat the Meatles” event could be in two to four of these Beatles movies. It should be in at least one for several reasons:

➽ Queerbaiting is so hot right now.

➽ As time goes on, the weird edges of stories tend to get sanded off. At this point, John Lennon is either a peacenik saint or a wife-beating villain in the eyes of most. All hero or all villain. But don’t forget! He was also horny.

➽ The sensuality of the Beatles has gotten a little lost as their music essentially becomes children’s music. Or at least the stuff parents and kids can both listen to. But they honed their craft in German strip clubs. They wife-swapped. And they cranked it to Winston Churchill, apparently.

➽ You could soundtrack it to “All Together Now.”

➽ John actually wrote a sketch about this for the revue Oh! Calcutta! So you know he’d be down.

➽ Ringo is left-handed but plays a right-handed drum kit. Which hand does the southpaw paw his south with, is what I wanna know.

➽ Don’t you want to see the “Are sex scenes in films necessary?” discourse on Twitter go absolutely insane?

➽ Lacanian film theorists believe cinema is inherently scopophilic, which maybe explains why there are so many iconic onanistic scenes in film — Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Dreamers, Saltburn, Gus Van Sant’s version of Psycho.

➽ These movies seem pretty masturbatory already. Might as well go whole hog, so to speak.