‘Glass Onion’, the third track on the Beatles’ 1968 double LP (commonly called ‘The White Album’) is a puckish exercise in self-mythology. “I told you about Strawberry Fields / you know the place where nothing is real,” hisses John Lennon at the start of the song, “well here’s another place you can go, where everything flows.” The lyrics combine confounding, red-herring references to Beatle tunes ranging from ‘I am the Walrus’ to ‘Lady Madonna’, while its refrain, “looking through a glass onion,” suggests a kaleidoscopic epiphany that, ultimately, isn’t there. It’s Lennon’s jab at the fans who obsessively search for hidden meaning in their music. Conversely, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson’s murder-mystery thriller, has a couple of oblique references to the Fab Four, including the titular bop played over the closing credits, but looking through it reveals the entire constellation of the BCU (Beatles Cinematic Universe).
The reign of John, Paul, George and Ringo was as much an on-screen phenomenon as an on-record one. After. And the Beatles’ evolution as artists and personalities was captured across four feature films: ; ; ; and one documentary (), released during the band’s lifetime. And that didn’t stop when they broke up: the supernova of their pop-cultural moment scattered the Beatles throughout cinema, birthing biopics, rock docs, jukebox musicals, cameo appearances, vanity projects, spoofs and everything in between.
