ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Help! (Richard Lester, 1965) and looks at how the ‘downside’ of Beatlemania is given fuller rein. It shows how, by again utilising the prism of pop art practices, Help! explores the increasingly powerful position of youth culture’s primary icons, but now emphasises the concomitant constraints Beatlemania had imposed on their daily lives. The Fab Four’s ostensible freedoms are predicated through scenes foregrounding both international travel and the burgeoning centrality of ‘Swinging London’ to youth culture and its pleasures. Against this, their restrictions are allusively presented through genre parody, with the foreign cults that block The Beatles’ attempts at creative expression offering a metaphorical displacement of the group’s over-enthusiastic fanbase. This playful strategy is shown, nonetheless, to have important ideological and economic corollaries. Firstly, in spoofing British espionage narrative tropes such as James Bond, Help! also inherits such films’ reactionary depictions of race and gender, an unfortunate regression from their debut film’s inclusive fan portrayal. Secondly, as it begins to co-opt the iconography of Empire, Help! illustrates the nexus of a new and concerted British invasion, with its indigenous youth culture pointedly repackaged for global commercial consumption.
