#narratives

The figure of the child collects cultural anxieties like an air filter collects dust. Children’s media has to navigate a foundational challenge: the things kids want can easily go against the things parents want. For children to have grand adventures, they often must get away from their parents. In the books I read as a child, this was usually accomplished in one of two ways: killing the parents or boarding school. (I’m British.) In Pixar films, the child usually comes into conflict with their parents over their lack of independence, initiating the film’s plot, with both parties ultimately learning from the experience and reconciling, offering the child more freedom and love in exchange for their return home. This template—the Finding Nemo model, if you will—is their go-to family story: Brave, Coco, Luca and Turning Red follow it faithfully, and it fits Inside Out and Onward pretty well too.   Elio, however, opts to kill the parents. When we meet our titular eleven-year-old, he has just become Pixar’s first fully orphaned protagonist, sent to live on a military base with his harried Aunt Olga, an Air Force major. His parents’ death has bisected his childhood into a “before” and a “now,” which is failing to become an “after”; grief has left Elio friendless and unable to imagine a future. In a sequence set to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”—perhaps Pixar’s most effective needle drop since “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” in Wall-E—we learn what Elio wants: to be abducted by aliens. This premise is so volatile that the rest of the film struggles to domesticate it. Is Elio suicidal, at least to some degree? Is there a deeper cause for his feeling unloved, his desire for escape, than an alien intelligence’s later pronouncement that he has “low self-esteem”? Olga, unable to cope with Elio’s defiant and erratic behavior, plans to pack him off to a militaristic boarding school. This is an opportune time to note that a week after Elio’s release last June, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that the film’s original director, Adrian Molina, had left the project years into development for unexplained reasons, with insiders claiming that the film was subsequently stripped of its queer themes. (Molina is openly gay.) As such, when I later went to see it—partly to see if there were early signs of an ideological shift at Pixar, partly for reasons of nominative determinism—I expected to see a straightened-out, blandly “relatable” film about a child who had been evacuated of dangerous subtext. What I instead found was someone clearly in the closet. The new Elio had, indeed, changed: he had lost his interests in environmentalism and fashion, and the rumored “pictures suggesting a male crush” in Elio’s bedroom had been replaced by, or covered by, posters of spaceships. But Elio talks like he’s received a lot of off-screen messaging about the kind of, as it were, alienating masculinity he should be aspiring to. When he sends a message to an alien ship, he lies that he’s “shredded,” and he later unconvincingly gives himself a pep talk: “You’re the alpha. You’re the killer.” Yet, when aliens finally do come for Elio, they come for him just as he’s about to be attacked by a group of older boys who have chased him through the woods in the middle of the night. Elio’s desire for a new world, the film seems to intimate, comes partly from a lack of options in this one—not just because of Elio’s loss of his parents but because of his inhospitably gendered environment.

[...] At this point, the film overplays its hand; having immersed itself in Elio and Glordon’s plight, it desperately needs to return both boys to the family, burying the specificity of their suffering and the role of their caregivers in creating it. Grigon wipes clean his years of insults and neglect with one spectacular act of love, saving Glordon’s life and uncertainly agreeing to his request not to become a warrior. “I may not always understand you, but I still love you,” Grigon says, delivering the rhetorical form of a Band-Aid for a bullet wound. Elio, meanwhile, must consider whether to stay with the aliens or to return to Earth with his aunt. The film feels tight with anxiety. Olga’s eyes fill with tears. When he chooses to go back to Earth, at least for now, his former quasi-suicidal despair is reconfigured as giving up too soon: “I didn’t give [Earth] a chance, but now I want to try. With you. We’re family.”

It’s not true - we know he went with Jane - but what interests me is why he’s lying. It becomes a story of how Linda changed his life: through her magic, a property bought for tax reasons becomes a home, a place he loves and appreciates. He does the same thing when talking about his London house in Cavendish Avenue.

He likes telling the story of Linda moving in and being horrified to find a messy bachelor pad with no food in the fridge. It’s one of his anecdotes, told with great fondness. It’s sort of true - 1968 Hot Mess Paul was clearly not house proud - but it neatly deletes the fact that Cavendish Avenue wasn’t always like that. Paul poured a huge amount of care into choosing it, refurbishing it, decorating it. But he did all that in partnership with Jane.

That’s easy to miss, because Paul has edited it out. Describing Many Years from Now, his biography of Paul, Barry Miles says: “Linda had been diagnosed with cancer and through the taping of the questions this fact hung heavily over the proceedings… [What Miles wrote about the Beatles period] was inevitably very much about Jane Asher as well. In some sections, though by no means all, Paul asked for the phrase ‘and Jane’ to be taken out when I was describing some event they had attended together, ‘because it makes the book seem like the Paul and Jane story.’ I could understand why he didn’t want it to seem that way, particularly as Linda was ill, and so I made all the requested changes.”

Why was that so important? Linda was insecure about Jane. I don’t think that’s surprising: Linda was savagely criticised when she and Paul got together, with Jane often held up as the better option, the woman he *should* have married. Plenty of people commented on Linda’s apparent distrust of people who had been friends with Jane. Alistair Taylor, world’s biggest Jane stan, writes that Linda “wanted to remove every last trace of Jane from Paul’s life. She didn’t want to hear her name. She didn’t want to see pictures Paul and Jane had chosen remaining around the place.”

Fast forward to Many Years from Now, where Paul and Miles present a version which frames Jane as the pre-Cavendish girlfriend:

By the time they moved to Cavendish Avenue, Paul and Jane were growing increasingly apart… The relationship hung on, in part, because they were apart so often: if Jane was in a play, Paul would not see much of her unless he attended a performance, and Paul himself was often out of town… They really only saw each other properly on special occasions like holidays - skiing in Klosters in March 1966 just before moving into Cavendish Avenue, and in November on safari together in Kenya - when they would reaffirm their relationship; but the underlying trend was apart.

Paul: During that period with Jane Asher I learned a lot and she introduced me to a lot of things, but I think inevitably when I moved to Cavendish Avenue, I realised that she and I weren’t really going to be the thing we’d always thought we might be.

Got that? Jane barely moved in, they only saw each other on holiday, this is not her space. Except - as with the Scottish farm - that’s not what happened.

In the early 1960s, Paul was living with Jane and her family in Wimpole Street. When he started house hunting, that family home was clearly his model. Like Wimpole Street, Cavendish Avenue is a Regency townhouse. He hired Marina Adams (John Dunbar’s sister) and her husband John to remodel it (John had already remodelled Peter Asher’s room in Wimpole Street). John Adams told Barry Miles: “It was the strangest briefing I’ve ever had. Paul said he wanted to have the smell of cabbage coming up from the basement, which was obviously something he associated with the Asher house.”

That’s from Miles’ memoir In the Sixties, along with a lot more that he tactfully left out of MYFN: “[Paul and Jane] had no furniture of their own, so they had been on a buying spree. Most of it was picked up cheap at Coe’s auction rooms in the Brompton Road (a favourite of the Ashers)… Paul and Jane’s bedroom had a walk-in closet behind the bed, a sunken bath and shower, tiled in blue and white…” From the time, there are newspaper reports of Paul and Jane buying antiques in Chester, with Paul going back to the antique shop with John. Alistair Taylor’s claim that “Jane had decorated Cavendish Avenue” sounds like an anti-Linda overstatement, but she clearly had plenty of input. They’re working on this space together.

And it’s a big part of Paul’s life. On the set of Have I Won the War, John told photojournalist Zdenko Hirschler that “Paul has brought a new house in North London . . . [and] is so busy decorating it that he’s finding little time to do anything else”. Paul also told Maureen Cleave about his new house for her “How a Beatle Lives” series. He’s obviously excited about it: there’s a sense of him building the life he wants.

As well as all the Asher-inspired changes, Paul bought and commissioned lots of art - particularly for his music room, which (like his attic bedroom at Wimpole Street) was at the top of the house. He moved in with the cabaret piano he’d used to write Yesterday, but had it painted in psychedelic colours. And, oh yes: “A waist-high chrome Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture called ‘Solo’ stood beneath a six-foot-high triple portrait of Jane.” (We don’t have to take Miles’s word for this: an interview from December 1966 describes Paul’s music room, including the piano and the portrait.)

There’s such a jump from the barely-moved-in narrative of MYFN to this version, where Paul puts a huge portrait of Jane into his music room, his most personal space. (I love that it was a triple portrait. The binary goes one better.)

If you dig, it’s not hard to find accounts of Jane at Cavendish Avenue - hosting dinner parties with Paul, making lemonade for fans who had dropped in. But these aren’t stories that Paul or Jane want to tell. (Paul’s family don’t, either. Stella McCartney likes remembering her parents’ shared wardrobe, noticing how they wore the same clothes. Even if she knows the space was designed for Paul and Jane’s clothes, she’s hardly going to mention that.)