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Jack Barth, Richard Curtis, and Danny Boyle, 2019
no votes for Best Picture but rated #185,
2019 Skandies
#185 doesn’t suggest a great movie either, but I’m one of
those people who will check out all sorts of things if they involve the
Beatles.
There are lots of us, more than half a century after the band broke up,
which is sort of what makes the premise of the film work.
That premise: the world is overwritten by an alternate history in which
the Beatles never existed, and a guy named Jack discovers that he seems
to be the only one left who remembers them.
The Rolling Stones are still around, and Jack finds his David Bowie
records still safely on his shelf, but a Google search for the Beatles
comes up empty.
(Amusingly, the disappearance of the Beatles does have one ripple
effect: Oasis is gone too.)
Jack is a struggling singer-songwriter, and suddenly he has a couple
hundred songs in his head that could conceivably make him a
superstar.
This premise just wouldn’t work the same way if the missing
band were the Rolling Stones: not only were the Beatles the most
successful musical act of the twentieth century, but as that century
recedes into history, it looks like they are becoming canonical the way
Shakespeare has become canonical.
That is, as recently as when my parents’ generation was in high
school, introducing students to the English literary canon was the
primary purpose of English classes; however, priorities have shifted
and nowadays it is the rare class indeed that features Chaucer, Milton,
or even Dickens.
The sole author mentioned by name in the California Common Core
Standards for English Language Arts is Shakespeare.
To a great extent, he is the canon now.
Consequently, I would bet that Shakespeare’s least commonly
performed plays—the Henry VI
series, Troilus and Cressida,
King John—are probably better
known today than the most popular plays of Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker,
George Chapman, or other contemporaries of his.
By the same token, I suspect that in centuries to come, should humanity
survive, more people will be familiar with
Beatles songs such as
and
than with a lot of #1 hits by other artists of the same period, just
because the full Beatles catalogue will be preserved while other
musicians are forgotten.
Another thing that makes the premise work is just how contingent
artistic canons are.
Change anything at all at any point in history—raise
the temperature by a tenth of a degree, add one extra car to the
freeway during rush hour—and the tiny disruption
means that, instantly,
fertilize eggs, and no one conceived from that point onward is the
same as in our reality—they’re replaced by siblings
who in our world were never born.
And then people start to make different arbitrary
choices—search for a new apartment on October 2nd
instead of October 3rd, head out to the deck during the party
instead of into the kitchen—and have different chance
encounters, wind up with different partners, eventually create new
children entirely.
How does this change the world?
In some ways, not much.
The 1999.1231 issue of Time named Albert
Einstein as the Person of the Century, but had Einstein never lived,
surely someone else would have figured out relativity, and probably
not too far from when Einstein did.
I think history is less deterministic than
seem to, but while I do think that the course of human events could
easily have veered in wildly different directions—the
obliteration of human civilization via nuclear holocaust during the
Cold War strikes me as a pure coin flip, for
instance—there do seem to be factors that herd the
potential timelines together, even as completely different sets of
people live and die.
Rerun history with new casts of characters but keep the same
geography, Jared Diamond has written, and the plant resources and
animal power available in different parts of the world due to the
alignment of the continents mean that in the vast majority of scenarios
you’ll see Europeans and Asians colonizing Africa and the
Americas rather than the other way around.
There are probably timelines in which humanity gets an early jump
on averting the breakdown of the climate, but enough greed is baked
into human nature that it’s hard to envision us summoning the
collective willpower to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
But even in the timelines closest to ours, replace the population and
the musical canon is completely different.
Some other string of notes is as universally recognized as the opening
to Beethoven’s Fifth.
I think about this a lot.
For instance: my favorite musician is Moriah Pereira, a.k.a.
Poppy.
As of this writing, she has ten songs in my
top twenty-three.
Poppy was born in 1995.
Every time I hear one of these ten songs, I can’t help but think
that if, one evening my junior year in college, I had ordered my
burrito with pinto beans instead of black beans, this song I love would
never have come to be—because no one born in or after 1994
would exist in the pinto bean world.
But on the flip side, maybe in the pinto bean world there’s a
musician named Tulip who has all twenty-three songs in the uppermost
reaches of my chart, and stuck here in the black bean world, I’ll
never hear any of them.
The Beatles did have very nearly that kind of stranglehold on my chart
my senior year of high school.
But that was a long time ago, and nowadays I would find erasing Poppy
more of a blow than erasing the Beatles.
This raises the question of whether this Jack guy really could become
a superstar in 2019 by unleashing Beatles songs upon a world that had
never heard them—or, rather, solo acoustic versions of
Beatles songs.
Initially, it looks like the film is going to take the intriguing
position that the answer is no—that you don’t get
famous by playing “Let It Be” at
a coffee shop.
And, yeah—a lot of Beatles songs would be unknown if
they were by someone else.
If Paul McCartney had never been born and the Five Bells had written
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”
themselves, I doubt they get fifty million streams with it.
(Counterpoint: McCartney gave Peter and Gordon
a song he’d written when he was sixteen and they hit #1 with
it.)
On the flip side, the movie offers up the interesting wrinkle that when
Jack tries to slip one of his own songs—nothing special,
but
inoffensive—in among the Beatles tunes, the
industry figures deem it so far below his standard as to be
unreleasable.
But I would argue that there are countless songs by all sorts of
random people, some of which were never even recorded, that would
have fit right in and become beloved were they to have appeared on a
Beatles album.
Or here’s a thought experiment: say that instead of
“Let It Be”, Jack plays
“Now and Then” at the coffee
shop—a song with a Beatles pedigree, which I would place
in the top half of their catalogue, but which lacks the history of
their ’60s output.
Would Jack expect that to make him a star?
Because the history is crucial.
The narrative of the Beatles is crucial.
Jack may have the songs in his head, but he doesn’t look like
21-year-old Paul McCartney and he doesn’t have the wit of
23-year-old John Lennon.
He doesn’t have three bandmates with matching haircuts that
spark such a frenzy among an entire generation of teenage girls that
a glimpse of him makes them scream and sob.
He doesn’t leverage that massive popularity to expose the world
to experimental music the likes of which only a tiny fraction of the
audience would have ever gone near otherwise.
He doesn’t push the envelope of what a popular music studio is
capable of recording.
Above all, Jack can’t do the main thing the Beatles did: reflect
the breathtaking changes of their time.
It’s hard to capture how radically different the world of the
second half of the 1960s felt from that of the first half, but one of
the best ways is just to play two Beatles songs:
“I Want to Hold Your Hand”, from
1964, and “Tomorrow Never Knows”,
from 1966.
They’re both great in their own way, but they’re two years
and a galaxy apart.
And Yesterday misses this entirely.
Jack doesn’t seem to find anything strange about introducing the
world to the Beatles by playing
“Something” (1969, breakup era)
and following it up with “A Hard Day’s
Night” (1964, moptop era).
The movie doesn’t seem to find it strange either.
And in the streaming era, maybe a lot of the audience didn’t find
it strange.
But to take the Beatles as a few dozen songs on shuffle rather than as
a musical saga, a microcosm of an age of transformation, greatly
diminishes their claim to the canonicity the premise of the film
requires.
This is not a
Pattern 14 movie:
it’s not a deep dive into every aspect of the premise.
To a great extent the premise is just window dressing for a standard,
extremely British romcom.
The one American character of note is an evil agent played by an
unfunny, mustache-twirling Kate McKinnon, but I think there’s
another casting choice that undermines the movie even more, in that,
at least for me, it demonstrated how questionable the premise
was.
So Jack puts out a demo CD, but there are still light-years to go
between that step and stardom—hell, even
my old band put out a demo CD.
His big break comes when, by chance, his music is heard by a big star
who picks him up as an opening act—sort of like Gene
Simmons of KISS taking Van Halen under his wing in 1976.
Of course, putting this plot point into the script required either
landing a big star or making one up.
And who was a big star who might fit the bill?
Maybe that One Direction guy—Harry Styles, was it?
He was trying to break into the movie business, right?
Instead, the movie seemed like it was taking the “make one
up” route, wheeling out some British guy who didn’t look
much like a rock star, but I could see some of the parallels they
might be going for—a messy bowl cut like an uncombed
Justin Bieber, black-rimmed glasses perhaps meant to suggest Rivers
Cuomo.
Except then the movie doesn’t actually go to any length to
establish its fictional pop icon.
Gradually it occurred to me that, wait, is this a real guy we’re
already supposed to know?
Shit, is this one of the other members of
One Direction, now grown up with a solo career?
The only one I knew was Harry, and I knew him mainly because of
the Youtube Comment Reconstruction video from,
ulp, ten years ago now.
So I looked up this other guy, “Ed Sheeran”, and
discovered that, no, he’s not from One
Direction—rather, he’s apparently one of the
most successful musicians of the past decade, with 150 million
records sold and a raft of songs that have topped charts around
the world.
And somehow I made it to the end of 2023 without having heard of
him.
Essentially, I had something very close to a Beatles-sized hole in
my musical knowledge.
So here he was in this movie playing me some of his big hits, much as
Jack plays Beatles hits to a world that’s never heard them
before, and… I got nothing out of them.
To me they sounded like background music echoing through a dying
mall.
I have no clue whatsoever why these songs are squarely in the 21st
century canon while seemingly identical generic pop songs collect a
couple dozen listens on Youtube.
So would someone as unfamiliar with John, Paul, George, and Ringo as
I was with Ed Sheeran really get anything more out of their songs,
especially performed as “guy hired to play at the farmers’
market” versions, than I did out of his?
Ben Elton and Kenneth Branagh, 2018
no votes for Best Picture but rated #170,
2019 Skandies
When I wrote the Yesterday portion of this
article and started rambling about Shakespeare’s place in
the literary canon as taught in modern California high schools, I had
no idea that the next movie on my list would turn out to be about
William Shakespeare himself.
Since there are no opening credits, it took me a while to realize who
was playing Shakespeare under the facial prostheses, but eventually a
shot that showed off his trademark liplessness revealed that it was
Kenneth Branagh—i.e., after playing Henry V,
Benedick, Iago, and Hamlet onscreen, here he was playing their
author.
Specifically, he’s playing Shakespeare during his brief
retirement before his death at age 52; the filmmakers have used the
scant references to Shakespeare in the historical record to construct
a narrative of familial reconciliation, as he returns to his wife
and surviving children in Stratford-upon-Avon after a career spent
away from them in London.
He builds a relationship with his resentful wife Anne, defends his
married daughter Susanna from a charge of adultery, goads his single
daughter Judith to find a husband, belatedly mourns Judith’s twin
brother Hamnet, finds himself in a Virginia Woolf-inspired sequence in
which Judith turns out to be the true author of her brother’s
poems, and does some detective work to solve the mystery of
Hamnet’s death (keeping his skills sharp between appearances as
Hercule Poirot, I guess).
And… I’m not sure how well-judged this project was.
There’s certainly an audience for soap opera, but it’s
probably not a great idea to present soap opera to an audience that you
just reminded of the world’s most celebrated examples of serious
drama.
(It’s also probably also not a great idea to try to attract a
literary audience and then have a blatant comma error in the closing
text.
However, I concede that I am probably the only one who was thrown
out of the movie when I saw tomatoes on Shakespeare’s table.
But come on—Shakespeare wouldn’t eat tomatoes!
They didn’t even arrive in Britain until the 1590s, and they were
thought to be poisonous for a century and a half after that!)
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T. S. Eliot, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Lee Hall, and Tom Hooper,
2019
