The image of a mob of teenage girls in hysterics at the sight of their idol is one with a rich lineage that can be traced back through the decades. From BTS to One Direction to The Beatles, the sight of fervent, screaming crowds of (mostly) young women has been exploited for news stories and pop documentaries alike.
In depictions and interpretations of these images, there’s often a trace of underlying misogyny, describing these girls as animalistic, with their desire and adoration framed as illness (see: Beatlemania, Bieber Fever, One Direction Infection, etc.). The complexities of their interest and fandom are frequently disregarded, their interest reduced to some primal, unthinking impulse.
But I have always seen myself in these girls. In Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, archival news footage shows fans proclaiming that Ringo Starr has “a sexy nose” and George Harrison “sexy eyelashes” — declarations of love funny and bizarre in a way so reminiscent of the fan communities I was a part of as a teen. I know those girls. I am those girls.
In the 1978 comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand, director Robert Zemeckis understands that the legions of teenage girl fans can often be more interesting than the boys onstage.
Zemeckis’s first feature follows six New Jersey high schoolers, four of them girls, in February 1964 as they pull any number of stunts in order to see the Beatles live on the Ed Sullivan Show. Though the Beatles lie at the center of the film, Zemeckis cleverly hides them from our view. They appear at the start of the film in archival footage, but from then on are relegated to the background, seen only from behind or heard at a distance. Instead, the women take center stage.
Despite their common objective, from the moment they appear on-screen it’s made clear that each girl is guided by her own unique motivation. Aspiring photographer Grace (Theresa Saldana) plans to snap pictures of the Beatles and land her work on the front page of the newspaper. Pam (Nancy Allen), soon to be married, is pulled along reluctantly by her friends, worrying about what her Beatles-hating fiance will think. Avid fan Rosie (Wendie Jo Sperber) is motivated purely by her intense love for the band, Paul McCartney in particular. Unlike her friends, Janis (Susan Kendall Newman) despises the Beatles, and accompanies the others in the hopes of spreading her message that the group threatens artistic integrity.
In this way, Zemeckis plunges into the seemingly single-minded, homogeneous mob and instead finds a world of difference between each young woman. As a microcosm of the crowds that chant outside the Beatles’ hotel, the girls make clear that their adoration — or lack thereof — can’t be collapsed into one explanation. What lands each of them in the midst of Beatlemania is specific to each character, their reasons intertwined with their own lives.
The caricature of the obsessive, hysterical fangirl is most clearly represented in Rosie, whose introduction shows her shrieking at the sight of a cardboard Paul McCartney and who kisses the hotel carpet the Beatles walked upon. She is the most animated and eccentric character in the film, but she’s also the character that feels most familiar to me and the one I have the most affection for.
With her fervent and unwavering commitment to seeing her idols, it would be easy to turn Rosie into a character to be laughed at. But her comedic moments never feel to be at her expense. Rather, Rosie commands her scenes, the characters and world moving around and in reaction to her, with Sperber brilliantly dipping between ferocity, ecstasy and resigned defeat.
After Rosie meets another obsessive fan in Richard (Eddie Deezen), who sells Beatles memorabilia out of his hotel room, he attempts to impress her by insisting he knows everything there is to know about the band. As he recites Beatles’ facts, we see Rosie, her back to Richard, casually flipping through a magazine and mouthing the answers to herself, in sync with him. She is disinterested in his need to prove his “genius,” with no need to do the same for herself, and silently amused at the absurdity of them both having access to a back catalogue of meaningless Beatles trivia.
What I think a lot of portrayals of teenage girls get wrong is this belief that there’s an utter lack of self-awareness among these young women. I see in Rosie the friends that I made as a fan of One Direction, who were funny and intelligent and quick to poke fun at themselves as well as the boys they idolized.
It’s not that they don’t recognize that they might appear ridiculous. In fact, that can often be part of the fun. But what’s gained in refusing to ever appear foolish? Is there not some kernel of brilliance in discovering that giving yourself over to that overwhelming excitement of being a fan can sometimes be worth more than ruminating on what others might think?
After Rosie is removed from the floor of the Beatles’ hotel room and escorted onto an elevator, an older woman beside her complains of the rabid behavior of fans outside and within the hotel. Rather than shrink in shame or embarrassment, Rosie’s face contorts in disgust that anyone could have such an opinion. She kicks the bellhop out of the elevator, toppling him and the woman, and sends the elevator back to the Beatles’ floor. Rosie is unwilling to subdue her love for the band, allowing her affection to burst forth uninhibited.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand is just as eager as Rosie to succumb to the Beatles’ spell, an attitude made plain through Pam’s character arc. Initially reluctant to join her friends in their quest and consumed with anxiety over her looming wedding, Pam accidentally lands herself in the Beatles’ empty hotel room where she undergoes a euphoric transformation.
Upon realizing where she is, Pam collapses to her knees and slides across the floor towards the band’s instruments. She pulls off her engagement ring and shoves it into her shoe, the evidence of her impending marriage hidden from view so she can immerse herself in this moment. As she settles her eyes upon Paul’s bass, the camera adopts her gaze, panning irresistibly slowly up the instrument’s neck, savoring every second, the camera as reverent as Pam.
When she is inevitably discovered and her eventful evening made public, a member of the press questions Pam about what it was like to be inside the Beatles’ hotel room. Pam pauses before replying that it was “the most wonderful feeling” she’s ever had, looking more relaxed and sure of herself than she has the whole film. It’s only when she spots her disapproving fiance, Eddie (James Houghton), in the crowd that her face drops and she breaks down.
Eddie yanks Pam away from the crowd, scolding her and insisting that she’ll have to learn to be more responsible once they’re married. Pam appears miles away as Eddie envisions their future together and begins to refer to her by his last name. When the pair pass in front of the Ed Sullivan Theater, Pam identifies her escape. “I can’t marry you,” she tells Eddie. “I just realized that there are more things in life for me besides marriage.” Indignant, he prompts her “like what?” to which Pam answers “like the Beatles.”
For Pam and for the film, what the Beatles represent has less to do with the four boys onstage than the hordes of girls watching them. To stick with Eddie would likely mean a constant fear of his judgment over her perceived transgressions.
In joining the Ed Sullivan crowd, Pam instead gives herself up to that unexplainable, unbridled joy of being a fan. Among those girls, there is no concern for how they might be perceived —they scream and cry and faint and make no attempts to temper themselves.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand is envious of these girls who have found a space where they can completely let go. In its final scenes, the film is not so concerned with showing us the Beatles’ performance — the event the entire narrative has been building toward. Instead, we see Rosie faint, Pam pull her dress between her legs in ecstasy and Janis watch excitedly, her crusade against the Beatles ended after having been converted by the crowd around her.
In the end, I Wanna Hold Your Hand just wants to be a girl in the crowd.
