The music lives again …

Fortunately, even at times when world events seem to point unequivocally to human qualities that are less than admirable – such as ineradicable greed, a craving for power at the cost of others, and so on – one comes across something which functions as a reminder that humans are also, simultaneously, capable of creating something of great beauty. And what does it matter if the creation in question happens to be done (characteristically, as it usually happens with humans) by way of re-interpreting earlier creations by other humans – for instance the songs written by Lennon and McCartney in the middle of the 20th-century? For once the blurb on the cover of a DVD is not misleading: “Within the lyrics of the world’s most famous songs lives a story that has never been told … until now”. This story (and so much more) is told in Julie Taymor’s wonderful 2007 film, Across the Universe.

A student friend invited us last night to view this film with him and, although my inclination was to do some work instead, I decided to accept the invitation in the end – to my great delight. I grew up with the Beatles’ music and when we were informed that this was a film which made use of their songs, I expected to hear the Beatles (“themselves”) singing on the soundtrack. Instead, Across the Universe resurrects these beautiful compositions through the voices of different, mostly young, singers and does so by cleverly weaving the songs, sometimes linked to some of the characters’ names, into the narrative: Hey Jude, is sung at and by the central character, Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (supposedly a Beatles’ celebration of the hallucinatory power of LSD) plays the film out in a kind of apotheosis of the female lead character (Evan Rachel Wood), with quasi-psychedelic images filling the screen.

If Across the Universe has an intertext, it is undoubtedly Milos Forman’s powerful anti-war musical, Hair (the subject of a previous post of mine, in March 2008), whose sweeping music embodies the hope-inspiring ethos of the counter-cultural movements of the late 1960s. Across the Universe is set around the same time as Hair and, apart from also being a musical, shares certain narrative features with the earlier film. For example, as in Hair, it also involves a fairly impecunious young man (Jude) falling in love with a young woman (Lucy) from a wealthy home, and also sees a young man (here, the woman’s brother, Max) being shipped off to the Vietnam War. And, as in the earlier film, it thematises the growing resistance to the war in the US, as manifested in brutally repressed student protests, while further impressing on viewers the tenor of the historical period which comprises the narrative setting, by alluding to the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

The depiction of these harrowing historical events notwithstanding, though, the beautifully crafted and directed film occasions an uplifting cinematic experience, and leaves one craving more when it has ended. The first reason for this (and probably the second and the third, as well as the fourth) is the unforgettable music of the boys from Liverpool (where Jude also, appropriately, hails from). Here the music is celebrated and given a new lease of life: the freshness of the songs, sung by the actors themselves, often without much accompaniment, makes this one of those rare, ambivalent experiences where one hears music that is familiar and strange at the same time.

Evan Rachel Wood – who may be remembered from Catherine Hardwicke’s eye-opener film Thirteen – seems to have no trouble at all fitting into a singing role. She surprises one with her beautiful voice, as the protected girl (Lucy) from a rich family, who falls in love with the Limey (Jude), who came to the US to find the father who left him as a wartime ‘gift’ to his mother in Britain. He finds more than he bargained for.

A piece of cinematic art is always more than merely the telling of a story, though, and Across the Universe is no exception in this respect. Although some scene-sequences are filmed fairly ‘realistically’, Taymor is adventurous in her direction, blending these sequences creatively with highly imaginative ones, such as the montage-sequence that alternates or cuts between scenes of Lucy’s brother, Max, in Vietnam, and of Jude in New York, working on a graphics idea involving strawberries.

Lest anyone ever doubt the power of graphic art to embody significant ideas of life and freedom, and simultaneously evoke others that are diametrically opposed to these values, this film-sequence, where the red juice of the strawberries pinned to a board, cut and sliced by Jude in the course of his search for the right design, intermingle with the bloody images of soldiers dying on Vietnamese soil, would undoubtedly dispel any such misgivings. In the process the red of the strawberries (and their juice) merges with the red blood of the dying troops, but with a crucial difference – the juice that is ‘spilled’ in the course of creating a powerful graphic design (the jaggedly heart-shaped strawberry that features on the DVD-cover and intermittently through the film) serves and promotes life, while the blood spilled on Vietnamese soil on both sides of the conflict serves only ideological purposes.

Much more may be said of this unusual film which, like Forman’s Hair and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret before it, proves that the musical genre can, when creatively appropriated, successfully address something as serious and controversial as war and clashing ideologies. One could dwell on the implications of Taymor’s film reflecting on the link between “higher” learning and the reproduction of ideology through the wonderful cinematography against the background of the beautiful, neo-Gothic Princeton University campus (which my wife and I know well from many a summer evenings wandering across it), for example.

Or one could reflect on the kind of music – here, the Beatles’ – that lends itself to various, divergent creative interpretive elaborations. While in this film it functions as the aesthetic bearer of the narrative, together with its imaginative cinematographic elaborations and embellishments, I recall an evening when the Cardiff Symphony Orchestra gave a symphonic rendition of the Beatles’ music – something that many of the Beatles’ fuddy-duddy detractors would have deemed unthinkable when the group first burst upon the pop music scene. Imagine the symphonic performance of a song like Yesterday, or Michelle, for example, with the strings lifting the melodies far beyond what seemed possible when the mop-tops first sang them to swooning fans – this is what true creativity is about and, as a result, my memorable musical experience in Cardiff resonates with the comparable musical experience of Across the Universe.

Judging by the fact that another recent film – Mamma Mia – features music first composed by a popular band, in this case Abba, and weaving the narrative around the lyrics of the songs (or the other way around, if you like), one wonders if we can expect more of such creative resurrections of music from yesteryear. If so, we are in for a treat, but I believe that Julie Taymor has set the bar sufficiently high with Across the Universe to make it difficult for others to emulate. Her film-narrative concludes with Jude (and others) singing on a New York skyscraper-rooftop: “All we have is love, love … love is all we have …”

In the final analysis, whatever cynics may say, this may indeed be the best chance that members of the human race (as well as other living beings on the planet) have to overcome all those obstacles (such as greed) in the way of building a better world.