At the intersection of #HairStudies and contemporary Dad Discourse lies Paul McCartney’s beard. Get Back, Peter Jackson’s meticulous and beautiful reimagining of footage from the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions in early 1969, has forever altered the old narrative that the Beatles absolutely hated each other at this moment in time, a narrative that even McCartney and Ringo Starr have publicly said they believed. In its place, across more than eight hours of footage that manages to be both banal and thrilling, Jackson bequeaths viewers with a sense of a band maturing through and past each other who still, despite everything, loved one another deeply. And his team’s restoration of the formerly “chunky, grainy desaturated” film, long moldering in Apple’s vaults, has given viewers another gift: a full appreciation of the beauty and symbolic power of Paul’s beard.The beard appears as subtext for the first episode’s initial twenty or so minutes, until George Harrison tells Paul what we’re all thinking: “I think your beard suits you, man.” Paul grins and says nothing, which is rare, so I think we can assume he’s pretty chuffed.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: George is right. Paul’s beard does really suit him. It perfectly balances out his glossy, glossy hair and big giraffish eyes. He has a penchant for dressing in black during this period, the better, it seems, to offset the beauty of his whole head situation.

To understand the cultural currency of Paul’s Beard, in 1969 and today, we need to look to a general semiotics of Beatle facial hair. The boys were pointedly cleanshaven during their astronomical rise to fame. Paul was the first Beatle to grow a mustache, which was intended to hide the facial injuries resulting from a dangerous spill off a moped in 1966. “It caught on with the guys in the group: if one of us did something like growing his hair long and we liked the idea, we’d all tend to do it. And then it became seen as a kind of revolutionary idea, that young men of our age definitely ought to grow a moustache!” Paul recalled in Anthology. The mustache covered a wound, but it also allowed the Beatles to disassociate themselves from their Fab Four identities and invent a totally new group, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to inaugurate a new sound in rock ’n’ roll.Beatle facial hair is always an act of collective expression; it only acquires meaning within the context of the group. In this way, we might think of one aspect of the cultural currency of Beatle facial hair as akin to that of queer facial hair, particularly the “Castro clone” look that would coalesce among gay men in the 1970s. Despite the dismissiveness inherent in the “clone” appellation, the look that came to dominate male queerness in the decade after the Beatles broke up embraced collective sameness of appearance, a uniform of sorts, to subvert traditional masculinity and coalesce a queer community aesthetic.

While the Sgt. Pepper’s mustache did not signal homosexuality, it did allow the four lads from Liverpool to express a horizontal intimate homosociality among themselves, one in which power was shared equally and songs were written “eyeball to eyeball,” as John said of his collaboration with Paul. This bodily entwining was key in how the Beatles figured their own closeness: John also liked to say that he and Paul wrote songs by “playing into each other’s noses.” Meanwhile, genesis stories about the band’s early days in Hamburg always emphasize the boys’ physical proximity, living in bunkbeds over the club where they played. Entwined literally and figuratively in each other’s lives since they were teenagers, the Beatles offered, in their songs, films, and public personae, an idealized version of male friendship that deliberately marketed to and cultivate an embodied reaction from fans. 

Paul’s Get Back beard marks another epoch in Beatle self-fashioning, its symbolic status highlighted by the circumstances that lead George to remark on the beard in the first place. George’s praise occurs while he, Paul, and Ringo are flipping through their own fan magazine, mocking the articles but also, clearly, interested in themselves as public personae. A photograph of a beardless, dreamy, simulacrum Paul in the fan mag inspires George to compliment his real friend’s new look. Jackson is deeply interested in these moments when the Beatles, the most famous people in the world, do a thing you imagined but never hoped the most famous people in the world might do, like reading their own press and making fun of their own old songs. The film even opens with John saying “Who’s that little old man?” about George’s (mostly hairless) Hare Krishna friend, a reference to A Hard Day’s Night that constitutes a private joke about the ongoing public performance of their lives.

And the ongoing public performance of Beatleness was of course always a public airing of hair—shaking it, mocking it, cutting it, not cutting it. Amidst this group of men who care a lot about their hair in a way that embraces (white) femininity* is the Beatle who was and always will be known as “the cute one”—the Beatle who was once described in an SNL sketch as “the one who looks like a broad.” We know from Sianne Ngai that cuteness is an aesthetic category aligned with powerlessness, and, concomitantly, femininity. It is also, in Ngai’s words, a “commodity aesthetic, with close ties to the pleasures of domesticity and easy consumption.” Paul’s cuteness was intrinsic to selling the Beatles, for turning a band into a cultural and capitalist phenomenon. Paul is cute in the photo from the fan magazine, the print object selling the Beatles to the world, but that was then; George acknowledges that bearded Paul is now something different. 

Exerpts from From Jill Spivey Cadell’s article “On Paul McCartney’s Beard.