The movie “Yesterday” has gotten a decidedly mixed reception
on my Facebook page, i.e. amongst people of the age to have lived through the
Beatles hey-day, a la Richard Curtis, the film’s script writer. I am not sure
why so many people claim to have loathed it, and I’m even more confused as to
why I didn’t too, since I hate almost everything fictional committed to film. I
am especially wary of movies set in the here and now, movies about rock bands,
and rom coms – romantic comedies – i.e. the very three things that “Yesterday” mashes
up into a hot stew of my possible hatred. And yet, against all odds, I really
liked “Yesterday.” Unlike most movies, this film's premise acknowledges that the
world of film is imaginary right at the very start. And yet ironically, despite the absurdity of the world it depicts, the more normal it seemed to me.
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Rom-coms irk me most of all because they are invariably about people
living on a planet I have never met or been on. So it might be that I liked “Yesterday”
because it told of things I have so much experience in: things like fandom, and
festivals, and the music business. The movie bills itself as a fantasy on those
fronts, but is it really? Have you ever considered what actually occurs when you write
the best album in the world? It so happens I was present when that exact thing befell some people I knew, and it didn’t go so very differently from what
we see in the film. Really not. Even the vile agent/manager character Deborah, played by Kate McKinnon in "Yesterday," though a caricature,
isn’t far off reality.
“Yesterday”’s simple premise – what would the world be like
if the Beatles music had never existed? – is the kind of ridiculous high concept thought
experiment that you could picture someone writing on a napkin at a restaurant
during a drunken revel: watching it then put into action, with all its
attendant nonsense, is an exercise in clever film-making. You wouldn’t want to
put too much pressure on the idea itself, and the love story is silly. But “Yesterday”
suggests that we think about several important ideas about the place of popular
music in our lives. Those who disliked it may have seen it as a movie about the
Beatles, in which case maybe it’s a fail. But actually it’s about something
larger: the collateral damage of fandom, the role music plays in our
imaginations, and finally, whether music itself is a human right or a commodity
– that is, whether it should be sold and if so, how.
The way the movie initially puts this is that music isn’t
just something we want, it’s something that we deserve – that is, we all
deserve to hear the Beatles, and our lives would be poorer without them, and
frankly, I buy that. But just asking
that question requires exploring what it means to sell music, and how people go
about doing that. This process is shown in depth in “Yesterday,” as the lead
character, Jack Malick (Himesh Patel), having mysteriously become the only person on earth who
remembers the Beatles repertoire, records (or rather, re-records) their music
at a friend’s house, gives it away for free at his job, and goes on a local
television show to promote it. There, it’s heard by the detestable Ed Sheeran, who recognizes
it as the genius it is.
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| Is it legal for Ed to be dressed like this in front of Bey? |
From then on, the movie unspools in a rather typical rags to
riches to rags fashion, i.e. money can’t buy you love and so on and so forth. At this point, one's delight in the film may depend on one's love of the Beatles, but another of its smaller pleasures is thinking about old music being disseminated in new
ways, and the weird anachronisms that color that bands repertoire (the USSR,
darning socks, etc. etc.) The movie does a good job of resetting an old music biz story in the new music biz market, complete with YouTube, social media campaigns, and live-streamed concerts.
"Yesterday" has a lot of other fun moments, such as Ed Sheeran getting slapped down for trying to rap, one-off mentions Neutral Milk Hotel and Pussy Riot, and a
truly terrible set at Latitude Festival, to name but a few. But the thing I
liked best about the movie was something that I can’t really say without
spoiling one of its key plot points. Suffice to say that “Yesterday” questions
whether rock ‘n’ roll success is worth having, or if it would be better for
those who love music to maybe play it in private and pursue happiness in other
ways. What it doesn’t mention, but a fact that is always with me, is that in
real life, those who drink from “the poison chalice of money and fame,” as Kate
McKinnon’s character puts it, are courting violence, murder, insanity, and
actual death. “Yesterday” suggests that, minus the music industry, there could
be a world where that specific violence – and certain people’s specific deaths
— didn’t happen. And that, my friends, is a world I would like to live in.
