Bad Vibrations: ‘The Beach Boys’ Documentary Is Mike Love Propaganda

The Beach Boys’ immortal “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” relates a fantasy of grown-up happiness imagined by a pair of young lovers, a wholesome daydream of an unsupervised, unmediated union; the word “you” doesn’t appear anywhere in the lyrics, “I” is used only once, and everything else is pure “we,” as if dictated in unison despite the intricately overlapping vocal parts. The song assumes a kid’s vantage on adulthood, naive enough to see cohabitation as an endless sleepover rather than a delicate yet rewarding program of negotiations and compromises. This is the sound of the past projecting its idealized innocence onto the future, a curious converse of the final scene in the new Disney+ documentary The Beach Boys. Directors Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny gather the members of the seminal pop group for a stagey mini-reunion on the sort of Cali shore they used to sing about, and while we can’t hear what they say to one another, we can see their mouths moving. They do not appear offended by each other’s presence. The scansion would be perfect: Wouldn’t it be nice if we were younger, back when we could all still get along?

This tableau of camaraderie tacks a happy ending onto a rosy recounting of the greatest American band’s turbulent history, summarized here as a rise-and-fall-and-rise-again as they evolve from surfing wunderkinds to orchestral boundary-pushers to a kitsch novelty act and finally to deans emeritus on their 50th anniversary reunion tour. The customary mix of talking-head interviews and archival footage looks like any other nostalgia doc, and suggests a straightforward, boilerplate enumerating of key bullet points. What would appear to be a basic synopsis of a well-covered music-world saga, however, betrays a more pernicious slant in its subtler omissions, emphases, and selective framings. While the telling of this story deliberately minimizes the internecine tensions that would prove the Beach Boys’ undoing, its arrangement nonetheless channels and relitigates conflicts that left some members with evidently simmering, if unstated, resentments. To put it bluntly, this is Mike Love propaganda. 

“To put it bluntly, this is Mike Love propaganda.” 

Devotees know the narrative as well as the lyrics to “God Only Knows”: the Wilson brothers Dennis, Carl, and Brian formed a quasi-family band with cousin Love and their pal Al Jardine, their honeyed sonic jangle and sandy SoCal good looks captured the youth zeitgeist of the early ‘60s, they creatively leapt forward with intricate compositions that earned the envy of the Beatles, a heyday brought to an end with the psychological crack-up of bandleader Brian. As he receded into agoraphobia worsened by the malign influence of therapist Eugene Landy, a zombie touring company of the Beach Boys shambled on under the direction of Love, who would cast himself as a traitor in the eyes of fans by bringing a lawsuit against Brian in 1992 for credit on songs he claimed he’d co-written. (He did not help his reputation by exemplifying his cheery, insipid songcraft on the deeply terrible “Kokomo” for the original soundtrack of the film Cocktail around this same time.) Ever the avoider of confrontation, Brian has claimed on numerous occasions that everyone’s copacetic, but their later years have been marred by frequent infighting and ugly legal battles.

This tragic arc gives additional meaning to the music, its fragility and sensitivity made all the more poignant by the knowledge of how thoroughly the idyll of its making would be broken. In The Beach Boys, this downward turn gets about twenty seconds, hand-waved away with a soundbite from Love muttering that he had no other choice after the true villain, the Wilsons’ tyrannical and abusive father Murry, sold the rights to the group’s catalogue without their consent. The extent of the harm inflicted by Murry is not overstated, and yet he makes for a handier antagonist in the film’s reassessment of Brian and Love’s respective roles, both in the creative process and in the band’s success. 

The narration identifies the initial seed of the Beach Boys in the four-part harmonies they sang as youngsters from the back seat of the family car, the first instance of the film’s insistent foregrounding of collective effort between equal collaborators. The lion’s share of the run time concerns itself with the upbeat albums about babes and boards, jewels of construction belied by the fluffy lyrics and corny matching outfits. This register of ditty being closer to Love’s forte, he’s able to position himself as every bit the brains of the outfit as Brian, the essential merry yin to his melancholic yang. (In the recurring parallels drawn between the Beach Boys and their friendly rivals the Beatles, Love’s supposed to be the Paul to Brian’s John.) Down to the final moments, such supplemental commentators as Janelle Monae and Lindsey Buckingham — who knows from intra-band beefing! — express admiration for the smoothness of synthesis, the immaculate mixing that resulted in a gorgeous combination greater than the sum of its parts.

This revanchist effort to elevate the other members of the band wouldn’t be all that objectionable if not for its flip side of moderate character assassination against Brian, smeared here as an egotist high on his own supply whose so-called “genius” which was only ever a market construct anyway) actually held back everyone else’s brilliance. It’s true that Brian has been overly mythologized by romantic-minded worshippers, the belief that he was driven mad by the unbearable weight of his massive talent grabbily dramatic if off-base. But the doc’s armchair diagnoses confuse the chicken for the egg: Love profiles Brian as a homebody unlaced by his fondness for drugs, missing the point that Brian only took the acid trips as a respite from the extreme anxiety and burgeoning schizophrenia that filled him with fear for the world. His clarity of vision that demanded dozens of takes in the studio is recast as deluded bossiness, his eventual need to pursue his muses on his own a betrayal of their team. All the while, Love strategically distances himself from the darker parts of the Beach Boys’ journey, taking care to mention that he never hung out with Charlie Manson or befriended Phil Spector.

This slant is never more glaring than in the glancing treatment of Pet Sounds, the crowning achievement of this group in particular and Western music in general during the second half of the twentieth century. The expected testimonials from high-profile luminaries repeating hyperbole like that one never come, the transcendent vulnerability and immaculate orchestration apparently discounted as matters of opinion. (Most tellingly, the oft-repeated line about follow-up “Good Vibrations” as Brian’s “pocket symphony for God” goes unspoken. Perhaps some people are sick of hearing it.) The main things we learn about one of the greatest albums ever made are 1. that it’s a real downer, and 2. that it was financially unsuccessful, nowhere near the depth of analysis or height of appreciation enjoyed by the sunnier early works. Love and Jardine both crinkle their noses at the experimentation that took full wing with the unfinished Smile, which included a song about vegetables, for crying out loud. But this incurious skepticism of Brian’s weirder impulses, blamed as yet another factor in their decline, creates revealing hypocrisies as the timeline reaches their squaresville self-parody phase. Did they fall off because Brian’s uncommercial self-indulgence ventured where none could follow, or because tastes were changing and they were stuck in a hidebound mode? 

During the documentary’s premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre in LA last month, where Love, Jardine, and a few shorter-tenured members were on hand for questions, Brian made a rare public appearance as a secret special guest — his first since being declared mentally infirm by a court of law and placed under a conservatorship in February. Brian, maybe cognizant of where he is and what’s going on but definitely aware that he’s surrounded by applauding people, summons a feeble half-grin before returning to his default expression of haunted vacancy. To call this trotting-out “elder abuse” would be glib and possibly inaccurate, but that display put the fundamental imbalance at play in the film right in front of our faces, showing that Love has the capacity to speak for himself and Brian does not. The chummy get-together closing out the film takes on a ghastly and exploitative quality in the hint that, between the lines, there’s an abler man taking advantage of a vulnerable one for the sake of grinding his axes to a finer point. If history books really are written by the victors, then it would appear that in life, the winner is the last one with the presence of mind to hold power of attorney. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.