Peter Jackson has fulfilled my dream as a nearly lifelong fan of The Beatles, and I’m furious at the man for doing it.

Jackson has whetted my appetite, but it’s an insatiable hunger that neither he, nor anyone else, can ever begin to satisfy.

Little wonder, then, that I harbor a certain antagonism for the director despite my gratitude for the gift he has bestowed on all fans, the committed and the casual, of this most famous, and best, of all rock groups.

I am, to be clear, indulging in hyperbole by claiming to be angry at Jackson.

Disappointed, sure.

But that’s not Jackson’s fault.

And my regrets in no way diminish what he has accomplished with his nearly eight-hour documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back,” which debuted over three consecutive days starting on Thanksgiving.

It was a revelation.

Watching it was one of those experiences that so drastically revamps your thoughts about something familiar that, in the minutes and the hours of afterglow you can’t be quite certain that your subconscious hasn’t presented you with a particularly vivid dream.

“Get Back” is also a milestone in the history of a band to which millions of words, and thousands of images, have already been devoted.

I’m not sure I’ve ever sat for so long looking at a television and been so utterly unaware of the time passing, of how the quality of the light streaming through the windows had changed since I sat down.

To write that I was engrossed in this documentary fails to convey the level of absorption.

I have in the intervening days listened to several of my favorite Beatles-related podcasts, all of them hosted by people whose knowledge of the group is so encyclopedic that my own, by comparison, is that of the second-grader against the amassed wisdom of a tenured professor.

And even these experts, who I expected would quibble with Jackson on the sorts of pedantic details that interest only the most insular of snobs, were, in some cases, moved to tears by what they had watched.

Jackson assembled his documentary from 50-some hours of film, and something like 150 hours of audio recordings, all made during January 1969 while The Beatles were working on the project titled “Get Back.”

The initial plan — egregiously optimistic, as it turned out — was to record John, Paul, George and Ringo as they worked on songs for a new album and also prepared for a TV special and their first live public performance since August 1966. That’s when The Beatles, fatigued by the demands of touring, and feeling stifled by the inability to even hear themselves play against the cacophony made by thousands of hysterical fans, stopped performing concerts.

They gave up the stage for the recording studio.

At the London studio owned by their record company, EMI, The Beatles, with the able assistance of producer George Martin, assembled the densely layered songs that made up 1967’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Magical Mystery Tour” and, the following year, the two-LP “The Beatles” — far better known as the White Album.

But the January 1969 sessions, which started at Twickenham Studios and then moved to The Beatles’ own Apple Corp. studio, were different.

The idea, aptly expressed in the title of Paul McCartney’s song, “Get Back,” was that the group would eschew the studio trickery that enlivened such tunes as Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” for the more basic approach they used to record earlier albums.

Which is to have the four musicians in one room, playing together.

This is precisely what Jackson gives us.

For hours, in glorious, rich color, with high-fidelity audio.

“The Beatles: Get Back” is not a glimpse into the creative process. We don’t get brief looks behind the curtain.

There is no curtain.

The experience is immersive, almost bewilderingly so.

We are invited into the studio, so close to these artists that it seems we ought to be able to smell the tea and the cigarette smoke (an entire field’s worth of tobacco goes up in ashes in this documentary; it’s a wonder that lung cancer didn’t get them all), to feel the reverberations of Ringo’s kick drum.

Among the magical aspects of music is that someone must create its melodies by employing the relatively modest palette of 12 notes.

(I don’t mean to shortchange the lyrics, of course — John, Paul and George certainly didn’t.)

And it seems to me that all music fans must at some point ponder how certain of their favorite songs came to be. This yearning surely must be greater for The Beatles than for any other group.

It was, then, riveting to watch, for instance, as McCartney introduced not only to his bandmates, but in effect to the world, songs such as “Let It Be” and “Get Back.”

These tunes are ingrained in our culture after half a century that it can seem — and in particular for someone like me, born in 1970, the same year The Beatles broke up — that they have always existed.

Except now I have seen what amounts to their births.

I have watched McCartney extract those peerless melodies from his fertile mind, his fingers playing across the frets of his bass or the keys of a grand piano with the carefree casualness unique to true genius.

And yet, even as I marveled at the effortless musicality of each of these men, even as I appreciated even more than before the scale of their talent, paradoxically they seemed so much more human and less like fictional, which is to say mythical, characters.

This, perhaps more than anything else, is Jackson’s greatest achievement.

By immersing viewers in the humanity (and the humor) of these four men he has, it seems to me, actually embellished their already extravagant legend.

I still marvel at what they created, still feel intense gratitude that their songs exist, available at any time to enrich my life as only the finest works of art can.

But now I have also seen them at work.

And work it surely was, their toil no less because they were assembling songs rather than, say, buildings.

I have shared, in a small way, their joy at their own creations, and I believe anything that makes a person feel closer to the art he loves can only enhance that love.

Which brings me back to my beef with the esteemed Mr. Jackson.

As I watched, and reveled in, “The Beatles: Get Back,” I was unable to banish the thought, hopeless though I knew it to be, of what it would be like to watch The Beatles put together what to me are their greatest songs and albums.

Many of the tunes included in “Get Back” ended up on the 1970 record titled “Let It Be.”

It’s a fine album.

But to my ear it falls short of at least five others — “Rubber Soul” from 1965, the aforementioned “Sgt. Pepper’s” and the White Album, “Abbey Road” from 1969, and the greatest of them all, 1966’s “Revolver.”

Alas, none of those recording sessions, or any others in The Beatles’ career, was documented, aside from an occasional snippet of film or still photographs.

“The Beatles: Get Back” must, then, remain unique.

I am eternally grateful to have had even that singular experience.

But I’ll never stop wondering what it would have been like to watch the creation of a masterpiece.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.