jürgen fauth’s muckworld

A cheerleader confesses her lust for another girl with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” while football players tackle each other in slow motion all around her. Bono is the walrus. A platoon of soldiers schleps Miss Liberty through the jungle to the tune of “She’s So Heavy,” and Eddie Izzard, surrounded by over-sized Blue Meanie puppets, becomes ringmaster Mr. Kite: this is Julie Taymor’s Beatles phantasmagoria, Across the Universe.

In the fashion of a Broadway jukebox musical, Taymor marries a familiar songbook to an even more familiar plot, lifted wholesale from Hair. Jude (Jim Sturgess), Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), Max (Joe Anderson), Sadie (Dana Fuchs), and JoJo (Martin Luther McCoy) hit all the familiar stations of the Sixites: they drop out of college, they drop acid, fall in love, protest the war, hang out in the Village, burn their draft cards but are sent to Vietnam anyway, etc. etc. Whenever a Beatles tune can be shoehorned into the scene, they burst into song.

Some of the covers, many of them slowed down to ballads, are quite lovely, and in some of the more far-out setpieces, Taymor’s visual imagination thrills. But for every inspired moment, there are three flat-out embarrassing ones. The set-ups for the songs are so labored that you can’t ignore how arbitrary the entire project is. Oh my god, what’s wrong with our new friend Prudence? She locked herself in the bathroom and she won’t come out? Let’s sing a song for her! And what exactly is the point of setting “Strawberry Fields Forever” to images of the Vietnam War? Are you really dragging the assassination of Martin Luther King into this just so you can cue “While My Guitar Gently Weeps?”

The attention to Sixties detail and passing nods to cultural touchstones can be enjoyable (you have to be quick to see the striped shirt on Cowboy Neal or the mural on Leary’s house), but everything about Across the Universe feels canned and pre-digested. It’s candy-colored cute-weird without the threat, urgency, or madness of the truly weird-weird. It’s the counterculture domesticated, history defanged, and set to a catchy soundtrack. Yes, Across the Universe is slightly demented, but it’s not nearly demented enough.

Across the Universe. Julie Taymor, 2007. **

• Rotten Tomatoes: 52%
• The trailer:

An anthology of Gandhi’s writings, patched together with short biographical sketches. Takes a little getting into simply because many of the quotes are drawn together from all over the place and often you’re [not sure] that … you’re reading [inside or] outside the … square brackets²³, but what the man has to say is revelatory. We all have this idea of Gandhi; mine is mainly derived form the Attenborough movie (which hit me at a very impressionable age.) To hear him explain himself is a real eye-opener.

In the future, whenever I hear anybody bitch about humanity’s supposed inherent evil, Gandhi will come to mind. Whenever we retaliate and answer terror with terror, Gandhi will come to mind…. He really was one of the preeminent thinkers of the 20th Century, and whenever we repeat mistake after mistake, it’s going to be crucial to remember that we already figured this out. It’s like MLK said: “If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable …. We may ignore him at our own risk.” And non-violence has made great strides since Gandhi (MLK, East Germany, Russia), but those stories aren’t told quite as frequently as that of the supposed “Greatest Generation.” It’s like the man says: “History is a record of an interruption of the course of nature. [Non-Violence], being natural, is not noted in history.”

What’s stunning to me is the strength and courage it took. I can think of nobody more principled than Gandhi, and it’s almost frightening: in order to transform the world, he knew it was essential to transform himself, and his lifelong search for Truth would always begin with himself. What’s easy to overlook is that to him, non-violence was the most powerful tool for change–not the choice of the weak, but the weapon of the most courageous. There’s lots of food for thought here, about what it means to live under an oppressive and illegal government, about freedom, will, power, love, optimism. There are also almost prophetic insights into the future of Pakistan and Palestine, industrialism and urban life. I wish I’d marked this book up so I could pull out some quotes for you, but this is a library book.

Perhaps I’ll buy my own and read it again.