Roundtable: Across the Universe (2007) dir. Julie Taymor
Across the Universe transforms thirty-three popular songs by The Beatles into a wacky musical odyssey that explores the highs and lows of youth counterculture movements in 1960s US and Britain. With major characters named Jude, Lucy, and Prudence who all have obvious namesakes from within the Beatles' discography, the lyrics and perspective of the bands' music informs the characters' attitudes and circumstances throughout the film. Though it's unclear whether the Beatles exist in the films' universe, which seems to be an imagined caricature of the 60s, its certain that Taymor believes their music captures the essence of the sixties, as the (mostly white and well-off) characters sorrowfully sing their way through the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement....
At times, this film relies on cinematic narrative expectations, and at others, the film feels like a two-hour long Beatles music video. Some creative risks are taken, such as an LSD-sequence or a highly choreographed interpretation of the military drafting process during the Vietnam War. Though the film is fun when it indulges in its wackiness, I found that it was stuck between following a narrative structure and subverting it, causing it to feel unsatisfying, disjointed and generally underdeveloped.
With this in mind, there's a lot of small characters and storylines that make the film a bit difficult to summarize. Here's a synopsis from Google:
When young British worker Jude (Jim Sturgess) sets sail for the United States in search of his father, he ends up meeting carefree college student Max (Joe Anderson) and his lovely sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), along with a cast of eccentric characters. As Jude and Lucy fall for each other, their relationship is threatened by the social upheaval that accompanies the Vietnam War.
Social Aspects Through Song
The "social aspects" of Across the Universe are conveyed through the films' songs in a way that is incredibly on-the-nose and un-subtle. In fact, nothing about this film is subtle. For instance, when unemployed artist Jude is upset with his booked and busy girlfriend for being too involved in the anti-war movement, he shows up at the nonprofit and starts singing "You say you want a revolution..." In another sequence, Max prepares to be screened for military service, and giant Uncle Sam posters come to life and start singing "I want you."
With such un-nuanced recreations of political events, I am unsure of what exactly this film is trying to say about the 1960s' political and social revolutions from a 2007 vantage point. On the contrary, perhaps the film is attempting to create an "objective" yet campy and fun retelling of 60s history with a focus on the youth, without deliberately trying to "say" anything new at all. With this non-argumentative lens, the film seems blissfully unaware of its own shortcomings, such as the unresolved sexism of its two male leads, or the surface-level characterization of Lucy and the heavily apparent absence of the second-wave feminist movement.
Perhaps the most questionable of this films missteps, though, is its treatment of race through song. The film's secondary cast features a queer Vietnamese female character, Prudence, who randomly disappears from the film a third of the way in. Then there is Jo-Jo. When it is revealed to the characters that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the film cuts to Jo-Jo, a Black man, singing at a bar, only to reveal that his sad song is actually about Sadie, the woman who left him. While social issues of race clearly loom over the characters' heads, the film employs the powers of the Beatles' "All You Need is Love" rhetoric to wash over any nuance pertaining to the topic. This is especially interesting since this rhetoric within actual hippie circles in the 1960s proved to be a clear failure.
Musical Memories and Genre-bending
On the changing force of pop music within the movie musical format, Mira writes: "In assessing what pop songs bring to the musical, we must consider, firstly, that a song's meaning is conveyed not only through melody, rhythm, and lyrics: engaging with an audience's memories, viewpoints, and personal background can be powerful in unleashing meaning as well" (24). In this sense, I think Across the Universe transforms its musical source material and plays with audience's familiarity with its songs in a really fun and effective way.
The film's opening is a really great example of how it blends the audiences' diverging associations of a classic Hollywood musical versus a classic rock music video. These two juxtaposing numbers comprise the opening:
Within this introduction, we are already hit with three different musical styles: the Beatles' contemplative ballads through Jude, a more intense female rock voice, and a more classical "musical theatre" style through Lucy. However, all of the songs sung are by the same artist. In this way, the film often plays around with the melodies, keys, tempos, etc. of the original Beatles' songs in order to suit which character is singing a given song. I think this is a really clever way of making similar-sounding music feel dynamic enough to remain interesting for the span of a two-hour film while also serving practical narrative functions. The songs of the Beatles are also transformed to song like other artists or sub-genres of 60s rock and roll. For example, the character Sadie's songs are reminiscent of rock stars like Stevie Nicks or Janis Joplin, while Jo-Jo's skilled guitar playing is inspired by the likes of Jimi Hendrix. In this way, the film pays homage to several icons of the era, despite only using actual music created by one band of the time.
A Beatles musical makes sense, and naming the characters after Beatles songs is such a fun way of incorporating more of their music into the film. You noted that the film is very dense, as you watched and still don't know the purpose. How effective do you think the music is if the narrative is not supportive or solid?
The interplay between the film's songs and its social aspects, however, raises some intriguing questions. For instance, how do you think the film's lack of subtlety in conveying its socio-political themes through song affects its overall impact on the audience?
