Across the Universe
October 12, 2007
Understand that I’m only half as interested in Across the Universe as I am the critical reactions that will appear on opening day. I’m speaking specifically of critics who would be the same age as the characters if those characters were real and alive. Will these lions of critical thinking be suckered in by such rampant nostalgia? Like so much of the pop culture blowback from the 1960’s, Across the Universe is a Rorschach test upon which an entire generation’s reaction can be interpreted. It’s unfortunate that the movie in question is ultimately as shallow as it is, but even this can be useful.
This is a mythology picture, like so many about that era. Consequently each character is an archetype and not a person. Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a Liverpool boy in search of his father, an American soldier who left Jude’s mother pregnant and alone at war’s end. Jude follows the trail to Princeton University, where he hooks up with ne’er-do-well Max (Joe Anderson) and eventually meets Max’s sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). It’s love. When Max drops out the three of them head to bohemian New York City, and in their different ways step into and come out of the meat grinder that was the late 60’s. All this is set to new renditions of the prominent music of that era, mostly the Beatles.
So, here’s my own Rorschach reading: “the ‘60s,” as we commonly define them, are not an objective reality but a subjective interpretation. What we think of as the history of that decade is really the selective memory of white kids born to World War II’s newly-minted middle class, the Baby Boomers who made up the largest generation in history. They believe, both consciously and subconsciously, that the world erupted at around the same time as they gained awareness of it. But so much of the “revolution” of the ‘60s was those same middle-class white kids simply becoming aware of what the world had been up to all along. When these kids found out they couldn’t simply march or chant or bomb the world into a utopia within the span of their adolescence and 20’s, they gave up. To put it another way, I’ll paraphrase Stephen King: his was a generation that could have changed the world and instead opted for the Home Shopping Network.
Across the Universe is more of the same. “Race” is the first word that kept coming to mind for me throughout, simply because “race” is something this movie completely ignores. There’s passing mention of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. There’s a brief and somewhat nonsensical look at the riots in Detroit. You might catch a Black Panther or two milling around in the background. Of Malcolm X, of the Nation of Islam, of the chaos of integration, church bombings, lynchings or Freedom Riders, there is not a whiff. The only nod to the influence of black music (in a musical!) is a supporting character who looks sorta like a right-handed Jimi Hendrix and, of course, a brief gospel piece. Even the one platoon of soldiers we see in Vietnam is entirely white, which is an inaccuracy so deep it borders on contempt.
So why ignore such an indelible aspect of that decade? My guess is that the issue of race in the 1960’s is so dark and complex that no one walks away looking very good. And as Across the Universe is a musical, it is ultimately interested in making everyone look good, or at least empathetic. Everyone is forgiven their sins because no one really sinned all that much to begin with. We are given iconographic images (Army helicopters over patty fields, a Janis Joplin lookalike with back lighting) because, I guess, director Julie Taymor and writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais assume we already know them. Further, they assume these images all mean the same thing to everyone. Those assumptions tacitly endorses a historical world-view that already claims pop culture primacy, and does so by re-interpreting songs that have done just fine on their own for the past 45 years, thanks.
Do I sound too political? I’d ask you to look again at the historical events reduced to singular bloodless images and ask yourself how I could react in any other way. I urge you also to ask who a movie like this is for. Is it for the (white, middle-class) Baby Boomers themselves, to remind them that some kids got shot at Kent State and the Vietnam War sure sucked the big one? To reaffirm an already over-represented historical view? To give Generations X and Y a Cliff’s Notes education without any of that messy and unattractive context? These are questions worth considering.
If you really want to learn something about the sociological forces that created and resulted from the 60’s, see Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s documentary The Weather Underground instead of this. Or read James Ellroy’s American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand or Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home. Or The Autobiography of Malcolm X or Garth Ennis’s Punisher: Born from the Marvel MAX line. Instead of buying the soundtrack, go buy the actual music, which is in every way superior to the cover versions found here. Each of these experiences (and many more besides) is more informed, illuminating, and entertaining than Across the Universe, partly because they indicate the dangers of the blissful naiveté canonized here. What a superficial, unnecessary waste.
