YESTERDAY: the inversion of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - Andrew Johnson
NOTE: The following article contains spoilers for both Inglourious Basterds and Yesterday.
Yesterday, the new film from director by Danny Boyle, is a movie of hidden depths. While it superficially appears to be a lighthearted romp about a musician who is knocked unconscious and awakens to find he’s the only person who remembers The Beatles, writer Richard Curtis infuses the proceedings with melancholy and pathos. Oddly enough, it reminds me most of the work of Quentin Tarantino. Though their work is tonally dissimilar (Tarantino is famous for his violent tales of crime and revenge, while Curtis is best known for his work on romantic comedies like Notting Hill and Love Actually), both filmmakers share a worldview that prioritizes art as essential to our human story. In this respect, Yesterday feels like the spiritual successor to Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 war film Inglourious Basterds, with YouTube taking the place of machine guns and dynamite.
After all, both Tarantino and Curtis understand the power of art to function as wish-fulfillment. Tarantino opens Basterds, his Second World War tale of personal and historical vengeance, with the heading “Once Upon A Time In Nazi-Occupied France,” foreshadowing that, while he may subvert the fairy tale formula to violent ends, he is explicitly playing in the realm of fantasy. His fantasy is that of alternate history, one in which the sins of the past can be violently corrected – slave owners murdered by a slave in Django Unchained, for example – through righteous bloodshed. Curtis is a far more optimistic storyteller than Tarantino, though he also offers no explanation for the fantastic outside of its own existence. The protagonist of About Time can travel through time because it runs in the family. The erasure of The Beatles in Yesterday is justified as simply “an act of God.” Like Tarantino, Curtis positions himself as the Creator who determines what is and isn’t possible in his universe. How the fantastic occurs is less important than what it reveals about us as human beings. For Tarantino, it often uncovers our capacity for cruelty. For Curtis, it awakens the possibility of joy and fulfillment.
If Basterds and Yesterday share a common theme, it is this: Art matters. For Tarantino, film is so powerful that, when wielded irresponsibly by those in authority, it can be a tool to manipulate the masses. In Basterds, he reckons with Joseph Goebbels’ use of propaganda to stoke anti-Semitic hatred and prop up a dictatorship. Would the Holocaust have happened without art that encouraged it? It’s precisely art’s potential to create unreality that makes it dangerous. Curtis, in contrast, posits that art matters less on a national and cultural level than on an individual one. In Yesterday, musician Jack Malik ultimately discovers that a world without The Beatles (and Coke and cigarettes and Harry Potter, for that matter) is otherwise very similar to a world with them. His friends are still affable and supportive. His parents are as absent-minded and kind as always. His central conflict is an ancient one: a Faustian bargain for his soul. In an economic system that views personal expression as an opportunity for profit, any work of art will do. When a high-powered record executive offers Jack the “poisoned chalice” of fame, he accepts it and passes the work of the Fab Four off as his own, for he has bought into the lie that the best art (and the best version of yourself) is that which has a global impact.
And yet, as Ursula Le Guin once said about the role of the artist: “Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.” Jack discovers that though he may be a fraud, the music is not. The only other two people who remember The Beatles aren’t angry at him for plagiarizing their work; they’re overjoyed at being able to hear them again. The songs’ quirky specificities (which provide more than a few moments of comic relief) may feel inauthentic coming from Jack, but they’re still honest expressions of longing and malaise, and as such they are universal. At every opportunity, Curtis resists the urge to claim Jack’s rise to be fame would be a positive thing if only the songs were original. He understands that fame, whether bestowed by a government or a record label, idolizes the messenger, and in doing so can undermine the message.
The climactic sequence of Inglourious Basterds is also a lie that exposes a truth. It depicts a group of high-powered Nazis, including Hitler himself, gathered for a screening of a Riefenstahl-like propaganda film. As they cheer on the murder of Allied soldiers, the theater’s Jewish owner uses flammable celluloid to burn the building to the ground as undercover Allied agents slaughter Hitler and other top-ranking Nazi officials in their seats. It is a stunning scene, a moment in which the authors of one propaganda film become victims in another. Basterds is, ultimately, a movie about itself, about the power of art to lie, manipulate, and destroy. It is Tarantino at his most reflective, positioning himself as a con artist and acknowledging the artifice of the myth of redemptive violence even as he encourages the audience to revel in it. There is truth in its sadistic fantasy, for it expresses a genuine concern with what our narratives reveal about ourselves.
Yesterday takes a cue from Tarantino and rewrites history, but for more hopeful ends. Just as Tarantino offers the audience catharsis by murdering a financially unsuccessful artist-turned-dictator in Basterds, Curtis provides it by resurrecting one of our most famous musicians sans fame. In the film’s most provocative sequence, Jack finds John Lennon living a quiet life in a house on the beach, surrounded by unsold paintings. “Are you successful?” Jack asks. Lennon responds that happiness is its own success, and that he has spent his long life doing work he enjoys, traveling the world, furthering causes he believes in, and fighting for love. It’s an astonishing moment of beauty that honors Lennon by imagining a better world, and it reminds us that art is personal and has the power to stir the better angels of our nature regardless of the size of its audience. “All you need is love” may be a cliché, but there’s more than a grain of truth in it. (Incidentally, Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood does something similar, resurrecting Sharon Tate and depicting her simple existence as inherently beautiful and worth protecting. His insistence on violence—particularly cinematic violence—as righteous entertainment is still present, but it feels like a means to a more hopeful vision of the future rather than the end itself. It’s his most mature work in a decade, and his most tender since Jackie Brown. Perhaps a Tarantino movie in which love wins is not entirely out of the question.)
Both Basterds and Yesterday climax with a protagonist’s face on a large screen, projected to a crowd, speaking their respective truths. In the former, the truth brings wrath on evildoers, including those who spread lies and propaganda, as the film reel itself starts a blaze that burns the theater to the ground. In the latter, Jack’s confession of plagiarism at first earns the audience’s ire, but by sacrificing fame and uploading the entirety of The Beatles’ oeuvre online, he defeats his capitalist temptress and gains fans’ respect. Yesterday’s final montage opens with the word “Today…” and shows Jack living his most successful life – one in which he is truly happy. He commits to the woman he loves, tells people the truth, and brings the joy of The Beatles to the next generation. He is no longer a global sensation. This is juxtaposed with a final image of the film’s title over a black-and-white photograph of Beatles fans screaming their approval. It’s both a nostalgic homage to a band whose fame stemmed from its authenticity and a call for viewers to reflect on the possibility of an even better future. As good as the past may seem in hindsight, we should let it be: it has nothing on the present.
Andrew Johnson is a freelance journalist, educator, and the co-founder of the North Carolina Film Critics Association. His writing has appeared in numerous print and online outlets, including The Winston-Salem Journal, Syracuse New Times, The Post & Courier, and Film School Rejects.
