The Beatles disintegrated around the time I was born. In that sense, I ‘happened’ well after The Beatles did. Having grown up with the sound of pop acts like Boney M and Abba – they compelled me to wipe the dust off dog-eared LPs to hear stuff like Pat Boone’s Baby Elephant Walk – I was awe-struck after the discovery of a sleeve-less EP with the words Roll ‘n’ Roll Music. The endearing restlessness in the song held me captive. The singer’s guttural voice rose above the strains of instrumentation time and again. The sharp edge in his vocals made statements of passion, the ‘why’ of which I couldn’t have known. It was like reading Gulliver’s Travels during childhood, and thinking of it as Little Tommy Tucker in prose. Lovely book that indeed was. But I hadn't understood the satire then.
When I saw Across The Universe last week, I did not know who the director Julie Taymor was. Not that I know much about her seven days later, but for the fact that she is a genius. After all, how else can you describe a person who had the vision to direct a film that weaves songs from The Beatles to tell a love story in the backdrop of 60s America, England and Vietnam of course? How else do you – sorry, can you – assess a story whose protagonists are Jude (from the track Hey Jude) and Lucy whose name owes itself to John Lennon’s acid-driven Lucy in The Sky With… you-know-what?
What can say about an insight which believes that the counter-revolutionary should be named Max, which expands to Maxwell, from the track Maxwell’s Silver Hammer whose lyrics seem to suggest that something has gone wrong? Max detests the establishment represented by obvious metaphors like the Ivy League institution he attends and also by the members of his family. But his attitude from the very first shot shows that something is coming, a something that will aim at hurting the system which it tries not to belong to. Impracticality and unbridled energy drive the guy. The result is Vietnam.
Then, there are the songs. When Jude leaves for America, he sings All My Loving to make a statement of commitment to his lover (not Lucy, please. That would have screwed the story completely). You could say that one is predictable, and indeed it is. But, Lennon, McCartney and co. surely knew how to hypnotise with effortless simplicity, and the song makes a similar impact when we hear ‘I will pretend I am kissing/The lips I am missing.’ Oh yes, it does.
The best interpretation (among the many brilliant ones, if I may add) is that of Let It Be, one of the most touching cuts ever sung by anybody. Set against the backdrop of the Detroit riots, the eyes moisten when we see a little black boy, reminding of a ball of inflammable cotton lying neglected behind a damaged car, who sings the lines with fear in his heart and tears in his eyes. When we see the boy’s funeral as also the death of a white soldier in distant Vietnam, the message of the twin inevitability hits us hard, really hard. Come Together depicts the energy in New York’s life, while the fun and the frolic in a bowling alley find a musical ally in I’ve Just Seen A Face.
The film has more. Bono does a fun cameo as a Ken Kesey-like guru; Salma Hayek is just a nurse; a guitarist reminds of Jimi Hendrix; Sadie’s character is a take on Janis Joplin; and, all this when the core is essentially a love story. While being visually stunning – the film could have been a sequence of meticulously planned stills – the ambience defines the spirit of the 60s. Of an era, which startled us with its dope and politics and several small and big revolutions and the never-say-die spirit of some who made sure that those years did not leave us even after becoming a phase from long, long ago.
If one may quote thinker Erich Fromm, it makes us think about the difference between the ‘being’ and ‘having’ modes of existence. Living in times that can be best described as appallingly confused, it makes us pray for yesterday once more.
