Come Together

I saw Across The Universe last night. I have a big enormous heart with an arrow through it for Julie Taymor and her movies. So anything she makes, I am game for. Across The Universe, however, is the story of The Sixties, which I typically don't have a big heart for, let alone an arrow. I'm not 57, and I refuse to ride the coattails of another generation's nostalgia. The trailer's proliferation of sweet-sixties moments were excused by the explosion of crazy imagery at the end, cut on the beat of Hey Jude. Hard to resist, that.

I did have certain late-60s Beatles tracks as an important part of my childhood, however out-of-cultural-context they may have been in the early eighties. As a little kid, I had a murky belief that my cousin Jeb was Paul McCartney (he has a resemblence and introduced Yellow Submarine to our household when I was 8 or 9). When John said that I wasn't going to make it with anyone anyhow carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, I had to figure out who he was talking about. I was 12 or 13 when I found out that Lucy in her diamond sky was a drug reference.

I was seated next to a B.O.-tinged old hippy with a white goatee--what better way to see the show?

The movie will no doubt be torn a new one by critics with my same distaste for movies about coming-of-age forty years after it happened. Those people missed what happened onscreen. The old hippy next to me cried, so did I. I was struck by the beauty of watching someone simply sing a beautiful song. The Beatles wrote some extraordinary songs, and in this movie, they are fresh and heartfelt in narrative context. Add this to Taymor's visionary mise-en-scene and understanding of the thrill of visuals, and it's a feast. When it was all over, the hippy next to me asked me if I liked it and I said yes and he said he liked it too.

A while ago Doretta and I talked about how she had grown up listening to a certain Beatles compilation album (the Red album 1962-66) and I had grown up to a later grouping of songs (the Blue album 1967-70) and as a result she was more into pop and I was more into rock/folk. At the time, I didn't really buy into the idea that one album's worth of music could shape my current tastes so specifically, but I've since changed my mind.

The most exciting thing the film was walking out of the theatre and feeling like a movie can change the way you see the world. It's easy to forget that hauling shot bags or writing production reports or reading another crappy script. But it's true.