Guest Questionable: Across the Universe

In this installment of Friends of PA, we introduce you to occasional blogger, always record shop owner, and all-around smart writer dude Bob Proehl.  Mr. Proehl runs No Radio Records up in 'sunny' Ithaca, NY; he's also  soon-to-be-published, as part of Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series on seminal albums -- Bob's writing about the Flying Burrito Brothers' Gilded Palace of Sin (preorder it here!).  Besides knowing more about American music than just about anyone I know, BP's got a pretty solid handle on All Things Cultural and Bright; plus he'll charm the pants off you (not literally.  He's a gentleman!).  Also, while we're at it, one of us (HT) would like to apologize for the time we asked him to distract a soon-to-be-birthday-person by taking them to see The Stepford Wives (the remake).   Sorry about that.  Anyhow, Bob's got a thought or two about the debacle/wonder that was Across the Universe -- yes, that movie.  Join him by the fire, won't you?

A few things in my defense. First off, it was a post-brunch decision. I was full of pulled pork apple cranberry hash and truly believe nothing could do me no harm. Secondly, we were intent on seeing another movie and when that failed, we found ourselves in the middle of a sort of matinee abyss, too late for the two o’clocks and too impatient for the fours.

That said, I really was sort of interested in seeing Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe”. Not that I thought it would be good (I think I used the words “achingly saccarine” in my prediction), just that I thought it might be pretty and full of the relatively amazing color schemes that Taymor has employed in her painting, her set design and her previous films, along with her sense of visual timing, the moving of bodies across the screenspace with clocklike precision.

What we ended up with was something so awful I can’t stop thinking about it. It was so skull-clutching, I actually at several points had to clutch my own skull. At the same time, it was hands-down the best Beatles movie ever made.

Set at a vague point in The Sixties and featuring a cast of characters with names drawn from Beatles songs (Jude, Lucy, JoJo, Sadie, Prudence), the film moves from the docks of Liverpool and the suburbs of Suburbia to the halls of Harvard and finally to a vibrant and artistic New York City utterly at odds with any historical picture of the city in the mid to late sixties. The cast includes analogues of Timothy Leary (Bono!), Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, who I think later becomes an analogue for perhaps Richie Havens? If so, could someone please tell Richie Havens not to see this movie, as it will only make him sad.  (Luckily for Mr. Havens, he does not actually appear in “Across the Universe” but in the far far better “I’m Not There”.)

We also get psychedelia, filmed first in exactly the way you’ve seen psychedelia filmed since before “Laugh In”, with a saturated color palate and needless zooms as the cast, led by a vamping Bono in cowboy hat and walrus mustache (looking oddly like the Edge circa the PopMart Tour) load onto a bus and head to upstate New York. Which I can tell you is the most psychedelic place on earth, hands down. Hell, I’m tripping out right now. Taymor follows this up with one of the film’s better scenes, wherein LSD use is portrayed through big-ass puppets and Eddie Izzard.

Oh, and there’s civil unrest. Although it’s unclear what the unrest is about. A group that might be the SDS or the Weathermen finds itself on the receiving end of Jude’s delivery of “Revolution”. Of course it isn’t politics that motivate Jude’s anti-revolutionary rant; his lady’s been spending too much time trying to bring down the man and not enough time at home.

And a war! Which if I’m remembering correctly was somewhere in Southeast Asia. In a completely over the top scene that I greatly enjoyed, Max shows up at the Army office only to be attacked by a glowering Uncle Sam painting singing “I Want You” as Max and his scrawny buddies are processed, followed by the new troops trudging through a Vietnamese jungle, carrying the Statue of Liberty and moaning “She’s So Heavy”.

This is where Taymor is at her best, when she fully indulges her visual aesthetics at the price of subtlety. This pairing of song and visual is obvious, but it’s so obvious that most directors would never consider using it, and Taymor makes it work purely through her belief that these things should be paired. On the other end, the use of “Ballad of a Thin Man” in Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There” is one of the film’s few missteps, feeling too intuitive and a little forced.

Unfortunately, the film only bubbles over this way a handful of times, spending most of its time bogged down in the utterly uninteresting personal relationship of the porceleine-pretty Lucy and the hopelessly sappy Jude. The war, the hippies and the civil rights movement rage on behind them, but the two float through barely connected, the Beatles songs they banter back and forth highlighting the universality of their emotions by stressing the absolute vacuity of their characters.

And here’s why it’s the best Beatles movie ever.

Seen through a lens of prepackaged and well-marketed nostalgia, the Beatles may well be the greatest band of The Sixties, but they were never really part of it. While other bands joined up with or at least explicitly referenced political movements of the day, the Beatles, wrapped in a cocoon of fame, ego and faux enlightenment, floated blithely above it all, occasionally looking down to assure us that everything was gonna be all right. This assertion from the Beatles lacked the brutal assurance of Lou Reed’s similar statement. The Beatles dismissed the sturm und drang of sixties politics with an anti-revolutionary stance that was at once naïve and firmly rooted in their own financial stability. As long as you had a king-sized bed to lie around in for a week, everything probably would be all right. “Across the Universe” attempts to use “Revolution” as a political statement, but the plot foils the attempt and reduces the song to the anger of a jilted loverboy. The crashing chords of “Helter Skelter” make a fine backdrop to an ill-defined riot, except that it’s a song about a rollercoaster, god damnit! And it has some of the most vapid lyrics ever put down on paper! Christ, “If You’re Going to San Francisco” is a more political song.

Taymor’s film is completely off-base on portraying anything about the sixties. It’s politics are vague at best and its understanding of class and race is terrifying. It treats love as an a priori, an emotion waiting for its object. Jude is Romeo in the first act, primed for love (perhaps as a result of listening to too many Beatles songs, I know that did it for me) and waiting only for Lucy or someone equally aesthetically pleasing to step into the picture. Its characters are pretty ciphers for viewers to (hopefully) insert themselves into and leaving the theater, I felt the exact alienation I feel listening to Beatles songs now. When I was in my early teens, I thought those songs spoke to me, when in fact, they just spoke in such vague terms that I could read myself into them. Fifteen years later, when I search those songs for the emotional content I once found there, I find them cold, lacking. Because the emotional content, in fact, any kind of context at all, was never within the songs, the songs delivered and reflected exactly what you brought to them. If they seemed brilliant or intense, it was because the strength of my own teenage emotions, reflected back at myself through the songs because I lacked the maturity to deal with them directly, was itself brilliant. When I hear a song like “Girl” now, it seems to entirely lack an objective correlative: there’s no girl unless you bring your own. “Across the Universe” works in the same way: there’s love, if you’re in love. There’s anger and rebellion if you brought it to the theater with you. But if you go in wanting something, something that doesn’t simply repeat but augments or alters your own life experience, the movie will leave you as cold as some of the worst moments of “Rubber Soul”, where the emotions present (or represented) feel, for lack of a better term, preFab.

Comments

[jb]

Bob: have you read Geoffrey O'Brien's Beatles chapter in Sonata for Jukebox (New York: Counterpoint, 2004), pp.147-157?