Yesterday: the inversion of Inglourious Basterds
The following is excerpted from an article originally published at The Porch.
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.