A Complete Overanalysis
Ryan and I tried to watch Across the Universe again last night at home. We agreed that it's hard not to love a film at the premiere when you have the director and cast watching in the balcony above you and you’re wearing a cute little red vintage dress (I wore this, not Ryan).
Regardless of this, I still can't stop myself from watching the movie because it contains some awesome Beatles covers. If nothing else, this movie was just one big music video. And yes, of course the originals are better - the best. But what's wrong with paying homage? What's wrong with revival?
Creative Zombies Will Always Walk this Earth Forever
I'm not even a very nostalgic person (compared to most people I know). I grew up in an age when pop music was worse than it's ever been - the mid to late 90s were even worse than the 80's. I have no memory of any cartoon storyline. I didn't have very many toys except a Lite Brite and Play-Doh. I should be violently against everything that Across the Universe stands for with its lazy storyline and Beatles remixes.
But the fact is I'm really thankful to Julie Taymore for bringing their music back in an eventful way that we can enjoy at this contextual moment. The Beatles aren't around anymore to go on tour - most of us were not lucky enough to have been born in their time, and even less likely to have seen them in concert. So while I don't think Across the Universe will become a cult classic, artists of all forms will continue to be inspired by the Beatles for generations to come.
The Fountainhead
My love-hate relationship with Across the Universe is such a perfect example of the struggle between "classic" and "progressive" architecture in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. What is right? Should we continue to re-purpose old styles and ideas because we have always loved them and are pretty much guaranteed the love and support of the masses? Or is this a bastardization of our god-given talents?
You Either Get it or You Don't
Classics because it's familiar and comfortable will always be easier to be accepted and loved. But luckily for us - in modern day
It just doesn’t matter whether you're into classic or progressive things - I think the point is to get it and know it and own it.
Labels: Across the Universe, philisophy, The Fountainhead
posted by min_o at
2:01 PM
3 Comments:
Repurposing the old is what it's all about. Take Batman for instance:
Here we have the epitome of stereotypical superhero-dom. Guy in a suit fights crime. Straight-up hero comic. Granted Batman was an odd case because he technically had no super powers, but pretty run-of-the-mill stuff as it stands.
repurpose #1:
The 70's Batman TV show. Live action characters camped up the style, made it accessible to the masses. Kept it in the collective consciousness of our culture.
repurpose #2:
The Dark Knight comics by Frank Miller. Turned the known facts of the Batman world into something more mature and contemporary without really changing the original ideas as we knew them.
Repurpose #3:
Tim Burton's trilogy of movies. Based on elements of the TV show, the original comic and the Dark Knight series. Really expanded the amount of Batman in our culture.
Repurpose #4:
The new Batman movies starring Christian Bale. Representing ideas from all previous Batmen and envisioning them into a more realistic, more possible context.
Each try at the Batman widens the scope of the myth. Each attepmt to retell the story changes all previous attempts and adds information (as well as contests information).
It's not unlike the stories of Jesus. The original telling changes with the times to create an over-all legacy of information, allowing the concept to reach more people.
True, each retelling dilutes the original intent, but who alive now has any concept of how the first jesus stories sat in the mind of primitive man anyway?
It's creative evolution. If a story or a song or a picture must survive generations of critique, it must change with the times. The original is irrelevant. The creators are not important.
What is important is the element of the story that still affects us 100 or 3000 years later.
As it stands, the original caped crusader now represents the lonely isolation of sacrificing personal desires for the good of the community and then questioning the necessity of improving the community based on the actions of a single man's will as opposed to the natural evolution of including the will of all men.
Quite an evolution for a stupid comic, and quite a story for our times.
I apologize for jumping all over the place, but fuck, I could write a thesis on this shit. A guy named George Kubler wrote a book called The Shape of Time that talks about how periods of art are only distinguishable in retrospect. Centuries later someone has to divide the natural evolution of made objects into recognizable groupings. These groupings only define peaks in changes. Between all these peaks are intermediate stages that have no identity on their own.
Man, I'm just gonna stop right now.
Taymor is a very talented artist/director. Never saw the Lion King stage show, but I loved her brutal, gripping version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
It's fascinating a Beatles' musical was the thing last year, forty years after their time, it speaks to what will survive from our era.
It's as much a testament to the strength of the Beatles' creative power as to their timing. They were at a powerful intersection of musical tradition, cultural appropriation, technological innovation, and the birth of the media generation (at the time the youthful counterculture, now ironically the heads of the corporations that control state and culture by share votes). Since then, the public has become far more interested in the medium than the message, perhaps not in the way McLuhan envisioned.
I think "progressive" is pretty difficult to find now, "transgressive" is its more successful younger cousin. "Classic" is constantly being expanded and redefined, which is good if limiting.
i feel like posting your comments! both comments are actually more insightful than the original post. awesome!!!
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