THE BEATLES MEET HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL!

Kent Davis Sensenig

The highest compliment I can give Across the Universe (a movie musical/narrative interpretation of the music of the Beatles) is that John Lennon would have loved it! Why do I think so? Because the movie’s makers use mass media (pop music and film) to speak to a mass audience (of teens and twenty-somethings) about the spirit of their age (zeitgeist) in an artsy, subversive, and bohemian way. This is exactly what the Beatles were doing in their day.

The Beatles targeted their peers (and younger) via rock singles and albums, yes, but also movies like "A Hard Day’s Night" and "Help!"; animation like "Yellow Submarine"; rockumentaries like "Let it Be"; and TV events like the Ed Sullivan Show, the "Magical Mystery Tour" special, and the live world-premiere of their sing-a-long single "All You Need is Love" (prefiguring MTV by a generation).

Tapping the newly potent post-war mass media, they reached a global audience. And they used this platform to publicly experiment with new forms of music, spirituality, community, politics, and fashion (actually, the fashion came first), and, of course, mind-blowing drugs . . . as good bohemians have always done (remember Baudelaire?)

The main criticism I might make of the movie is that it recycles (in postmodern/pastiche style) all the same old tropes, myths, and larger-than-life pop culture events/personalities of the now mythic 1960s, as if these were the universal experience of the times. Most young people living in the 1960s were not hippies, believe it or not. In fact, "the Sixties" didn’t really begin until the middle part of the decade—Dylan turning the Beatles on to pot in 1964 was probably the turning point—and they only really petered out sometime in the mid-1970s. (I think we can safely conclude that disco marked the definitive end). And, as they say, "if you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there!" Still, I dug the flick.

As far as the contemporary zeitgeist, I haven’t been a 20-something for some time now—and I’ve only seen parodies of it—but I suspect Across the Universe is hitching a ride on the "High School Musical" bandwagon charming the cool kids these days. I have to admit, the movie’s early football field and bowling alley choreographed numbers (and the later military recruitment scene, with a strong nod to Pink Floyd’s The Wall) were far out, but in a 2000s kind of way. Similarly, the recurrent appearance of massive, evocative puppets reflects the latest trends in artsy progressive activism (think the World Social Forum), not something you would have seen "back in the day."

Taking a longer view, the movie-makers were simply having a lot of fun with the tried-and-true, rock-’em-sock-’em genre of the classic Broadway musical, generating the same kind of vital energy of a "West Side Story" or "A Chorus Line" (or even a good high school production of "Fiddler on the Roof"). Their content is 1960s rock, but their form is 1950s musical.

Going ever farther back in musical history, the movie gives many of the Beatles’ pop songs a Gershwin-style "show tune" setting and spin. This actually rings true to the song-writing of (especially) Paul McCartney, whose dad was a professional musician in a British version of a "big band." Paul knew a good ballad when he saw it ("Yesterday," "Michelle," "Blackbird," "I’ll Follow the Sun") and sought to synthesize Cole Porter’s sweet smoothness with Little Richard’s sexualized shrieks.

And even though I’ve never taken LSD, I also sensed that the movie’s trippy (literally), touchy-feely, Andy Warholesque New York artsy party scene was more indebted to Ecstasy than acid, again in an attempt to resonate with today’s kids. (Of course, the relationship between the two drugs is that of mother and daughter.)

The movie’s handling of Vietnam had a noticeable Iraq vibe to it. (The relationship of these two wars is more like that of irresponsible father to bastard son.) The movie’s juxtaposing of GIs in jungle combat in Vietnam with hippie street protestors back home—with blood flowing in both places, implying some sort of experiential equivalency—would have ticked me off, if I were a Vietnam vet. (My parents were peace church missionaries in Vietnam during the entire decade of America’s misbegotten intervention in Indochina—I was born there—so in some sense they can claim to be "veterans" of Vietnam.) The truth of the matter is there were more than a few hippie-grunts in the ’Nam, so the connection is not so much inaccurate as overblown.

More substantially, images of napalm ripping through the Vietnamese countryside—in the "Strawberry Fields Forever"-turned-anti-war-song montage—filled me anew with a visceral revulsion for the demonic horror of high-tech warfare, then as now. Americans need to see such (Middle Eastern) scenes in their living rooms every night, as they did coming from Vietnam, when journalism was actually less sanitized and "embedded"/in bed with the military machine.

Using the romantic couple at the heart of the plot as symbols, the movie also explores tensions between lives committed to the arts as versus activism. I think this probably resonates with today’s culturally savvy yet politically concerned youth, who desire healthy models for integrating the two callings.

As far as other hippie connections, I grooved on the movie’s imaginative exploration of what a band—and love affair—made up of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix (never so named) might have looked like: "Me and Bobby Magee" meets "Purple Haze"! As two of the greatest rock stylists of that (or any) era—both of whom died from heroin in the same fateful year of 1970 that witnessed the break up of the Beatles and my beloved Simon and Garfunkel—Janis and Jimi did have something in common. I liked the movie’s happy romantic ending for the pair much better than their sad real life outcomes.

U2’s Bono—who would tell you he’s not worthy to even untie Lennon’s sandals—does a cameo turn as Ken Kesey (of the LSD-dosed, Bay Area "Merry Pranksters," not to mention author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest). As the movie alludes to, the Pranksters did actually drive their psychedelic bus "Further" ("Beyond" in the movie) across country to commune with Harvard-professor-turned-philosopher-of-acid Timothy Leary in his upstate New York "retreat" center.

Leary refused to meet with them. He had very strict ideas about the proper spiritual-ritual uses of LSD (every religion has its fundamentalists), whereas the Pranksters used it more California style: "Hey dudes, let’s drop some acid, jam out with the Dead, party with Hell’s Angels, then drive our bus 100 mph down the Pacific Coast Highway." It was like East Coast rap clashes with West Coast rap. (Thankfully, unlike Tupac and Biggy, neither "guru" got gunned down; that was a gentler time.)

A side note of 1960s lore for you: The briefly glimpsed older guy with a cap at the wheel of the "Beyond" bus is meant to be Neal Cassady, the real-life (speed freak) model for "Dean Moriaty," the anti-hero of Jack Kerouac’s beatnik breakthrough On the Road. Cassady (who also makes a cameo appearance in Allen Ginsberg’s beatnik epic Howl) would later party-hardy with hippies like Kesey, too. Neal was found overdosed along some railroad tracks in Mexico circa 1968. Too many hippie stories end like that.

One of the movie’s lamest "retro" scenes is its recreation of the unfortunate incident when members of the "Weather Underground"—radical-hippies-turned-terrorists who split off from the "Students for a Democratic Society"—blew themselves up trying to make a bomb.

But the movie is spot-on in its unfolding depiction of a spontaneous coming together of a free-wheeling bohemian household; the group’s non-judgmental support for one another through the "highs" and lows of experimenting with new identities; and the equally rapid disintegration of the community. Mixing "free" love and mind-bending drugs is really not the best way to sustain a household. This scene was repeated thousands of times throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in idyllic country communes and grungy city pads alike.

One of the most fun parts of the movie is the creative license taken to give new meanings to old Beatles tunes, in grand postmodern style. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" becomes a lament of unrequited lesbian love among high school cheerleaders. This same Asian-American lesbian, Prudence, is coaxed out of the closest, so to speak, to the tune of "Dear Prudence" ("won’t you come out to play?") and joins the movie’s motley hippie household when "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" (an Abbey Road tune). "She’s So Heavy" here refers to drafted GI grunts groaning under the weight of an imperialist Lady Liberty.

Paul’s classic primal scream of "Jude-y, jude-y, jude-y, jude-y" at the climax of "Hey Jude" now depicts an old friend joyously greeting Jude (the main Brit character from Liverpool) at the dock, upon his return to America. (The original "Jude" was John’s then five-year-old son, Julian, whom Paul was trying to cheer up after his parents’ divorce.)

And the title track of Across the Universe—which features John’s mantra "nothing’s gonna change my world"—is overlaid with images of the main character’s world shattering into pieces. All the songs feature such surprising twists out of their original context. Again, I think John would have grooved with this, but purists might find it heretical.

I noticed a disproportionate representation of decidedly off-color, non-hit-single cuts from The White Album. Who can forget those old chestnuts, "Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?" or "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" (an orgasmic parody of the NRA’s fetish for hand-guns), or "Helter Skelter," that apocalyptic, most-heavy-metal of Beatles’ tunes that "inspired" Charles Manson to murder and mayhem? This most eclectic, experimental, (and perhaps a tad bit excessive, as double albums are wont to be) of Beatles’ albums seems to suit the movie-makers’ off-kilter vision well.

The climactic scene revolves around "All You Need is Love," in which Lennon’s trail-off sampling of the Beatles earlier "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah" already captured brilliantly the full cycle/deep structure meaning of Beatles’ music: from "got the girl" excitement to hippie-communal peace and love. The movie gives it yet another layer of meaning, when the "She Loves You" girl (Lucy . . . in the Sky) appears on the far roof and "all’s well that ends well," as another lyrical Brit named Bill once said. (I don’t want to spoil the ending by explaining this further; you’ll have to get the DVD and watch it.)

The grand finale’s rooftop concert, by the way, is drawn straight from real Beatles’ history: On a lark, the Beatles set up shop one day in 1969 on the roof of their record company, Apple, and jammed out for about a half hour for whoever happened to be passing by on the streets below. It turned out to be the last time the Beatles would ever perform together, as they soon fell apart during the tumultuous production of Let it Be.

Please don’t be racist and sexist like the rest of the non-John Beatles, who ignobly blamed the break-up on Yoko Ono. Commonsense knows it was their own pig-headed (male) egos and desire for artistic freedom—mixed in with John’s voracious appetite for drugs—that destroyed the group (the sad tale of many a lesser band). Fame and fortune will (almost inevitably) destroy friendships. Thankfully, that’s no worry of mine, but I’ll get by with "a little help from my friends."

One final note: the lead character "Jude" is a wonderful mixing of John and Paul into one. The actor has the face of Paul (the "cute Beatle") but the working-class-stiff-without-a-father-figure-bohemian-artist-wanna-be that was at the heart of John’s persona (more so than the political activist he eventually strove to be).

Sure, George was a pretty good guitarist and—once Paul and John finally gave him a chance—he wrote some pretty sweet songs ("Here Comes the Sun" being my fave). And Ringo was as good a mascot as a band could hope to find (and kept a steady beat).

But John and Paul were like Mozart and Bach writing songs for the same band. We’ll likely never see the likes of that dynamic duo again. (Give Rubber Soul or Revolver a spin, and you’ll know what I mean.)

You may ask why a missionary kid, Christian ethicist-in-training, and pastor’s husband like myself has a passion for old Beatles music or repackagings of that bygone era. For starters, Mennonites ought to know better than most that music speaks to the "soul" in a way deeper than preaching.

Second, despite its obvious excesses—and the undeniably destructive side of the hippie lifestyle legacy in post-1960s American life—there is something about that era that continues to capture the imagination and somehow resonates with the eschatological energies that suffuse the New Testament. I find Jesus, Paul, James, Peter, and the Evangelists to be vastly superior spiritual guides to the hippies, mind you; I always found George’s simultaneously self-righteous and slippery Eastern moralisms particular insufferable. (I liked his sitar touches, however; they helped pave the way for today’s "world music.")

As a Christian looking forward to the resurrection of our bodies and a redeemed communal-ecological life in the "new earth" of a green-belted, ungated, garden-centered, and tree-lined "New Jersualem," I believe history matters. The Beatles helped shape the world we live in today, as their enduring appeal testifies. Plus they really knew how to craft a pop song.

—Kent Davis Sensenig, Pasadena, California, was born in 1970 and insists this is the last year of the Sixties, making him a flower child of some kind.