OPINION: Walrus gumboot

Culture is constantly shifting, which makes any piece of media to last more than the decade it originates in truly special. Nothing in popular entertainment can compare to the radical innovation that the music of The Beatles represents.

What if this brings us to 2019′s “Yesterday,” whose premise asks the audience, “What if the Beatles never existed?” This would be culturally apocalyptic, but in “Yesterday,” you’d be forgiven if you would think it would only be a slight tickle.

Life goes on, albeit without Coca-Cola, Oasis and Harry Potter. One musician with a decent memory, Jack Malick, is the only one who remembers the tunes, and embarks on a career boosted by guaranteed hits. Yet, as his songs become global sensations, he longs for a woman from his home in England, Ellie Appleton. She’s been in love with him for twenty years and worked as his manager during his failures before he turned to plagiarism. Cue the romcom shenanigans.

Of course, the movie might make you think the Beatles would be guaranteed hits, but I would argue otherwise. The world presented still had the same progression of cultural development, just without the Beatles. Coldplay, Childish Gambino, even Ed Sheeran still are named and exist after the wave of vast amnesia.

If “I Want to Hold Your Hand” were to release today as a completely new song, would it find success? Absolutely not. The irony of the Beatles in the modern context is the shift in musical language would mean that the Lennon-McCartney arrangements wouldn’t dent today’s playing field.

The Beatles didn’t even make good music all the time. McCartney’s worse songs leaned back on the old entertaining style of music (which Lennon called “granny music” at one point). Lennon after linking with Ono made some important experimental songs, but his scientific inquiry were sometimes barely listenable. Harrison grumbled on his tracks while Ringo was, well, Ringo. They were lovingly weird and boundary-pushing, would they be possible today?

However, The Beatles were more than a band that made an occasional masterpiece, they fundamentally changed how music was marketed and performed in their touring days, and then proceeded to change how music could be written and recorded during their final years as a collective. Their impact isn’t sole to music; it’s to mass culture as a whole.

They exist as a shifting point in history, the Beatles can’t just be removed without significant parts of world history changing as well. The idea of legitimized popular music as an art form would be nonexistent, superstar entertainers gone in a poof. Would vaudeville shows still be touring the country if cinema never took its cultural spot?

That’s not to say that the Beatles were the only reason why the world is the way it is today, but it’s undeniable that the Beatles, in order for their legacy to bear fruit, could only exist in the context of the Vietnam War. They grabbed hold of a counterculture that still permeates to this day. Drug culture, pacifism and spirituality, the Beatles spread these in a way that hasn’t been seen since.

All of this, and far more that we still find in the ripples of today’s culture, is impossible to imagine without the Beatles. Simply removing them would be a destruction of societal norms, and their reintroduction in a modern context would be far more damaging than what is depicted in ”Yesterday.”

What “Yesterday” leaves the audience with is a fascinating example of lightning being let out of the bottle, an idea perfect as a vehicle for power that doesn’t spark in it’s current form. If the focus isn’t to analyze the cultural impact of the Beatles more than the movie does and focus on the romcom aspects, then there’s at least solid core of a man cheating his way through an industry but becoming more alienated with his past love, creating a flawed protagonist that makes the eventual sacrifice of stardom more powerful.

Instead, what’s left is a movie that refuses to let any harm befall its plagiarist lead, with a doting love interest and superstardom as his rewards. There’s a scare with two individuals who also remember the Beatles arriving at Jack’s show, but they only praise him, leading him to a Marvel-like cameo with an elderly, but alive John Lennon.

His superstardom brings him around the world, but he remains true to the one he loves. He’s signed by a fairly funny parody of bloodsucking recording labels, but the irony is lost when it feels like Malick deserves it, or at least needs it to be an interesting character. It’s cute, but the movie has to continuously pull its punches, never diving into the intricacies of it’s premise or the romance it ends up dedicating the majority of it’s time to. It feels less like a long and winding road but more like a call to run for your life.