Across the Universe (2007)

directed by Julie Taymor

Susannah Clark

The Beatles hold the distinction of being the most covered hardest-to-cover band. It’s not that it can’t be done well; St. Vincent’s “Dig a Pony” and Stevie’s “We Can Work it Out” immediately come to mind. “Yesterday” is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music—one of them has to be good. But for every Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help From My Friends,” there’s a Sean Connery’s “In My Life.” It takes a certain amount of hubris to cover a song written by the Greatest Band of All Time. To cover 33 would take a messiah complex.

But director Julie Taymor insists that the soundtrack to her film Across the Universe is made up of not covers, but “interpretations.” For the most part, Taymor’s interpretations are literal. The film fords a narrative through the Beatles discography, using lyrics as plot points. There is a Jude and a Lucy and Jo Jo and a dear Prudence who comes in through the bathroom window. 

Parallel to the band, the film begins straightforward and saccharine and gradually sprouts psychedelia, ending on a more political, but still saccharine note. Some of the songs are reimagined completely (“I Want You” is sung by a CGI Uncle Sam shoving a massive finger in the face of drafted army recruits), while others are simply paired down to a bare melody (the film opens with a John/Paul composite sitting on the beach, singing “Girl” a capella). A few tracks, like “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” are further proven to be uncoverable. Taymor pitched the movie knowing that it would be a hard sell: non-Beatle fans might feel isolated by the material, and diehards would scrutinize every minute, quick to yell “blasphemy!”

Raised by Beatlemanics, I’m in the latter category. But I don’t hate this movie. I hate minutes 1:03:21 through 1:12:46. Apoplectically. But I don’t hate this movie.

That I don’t speaks to Julie Taymor’s kaleidoscopic vision. A director, screenwriter, choreographer, and mask aficionado, Taymor is best known for adapting one of the most beloved adaptations of all time: The Lion King on Broadway, which has since been seen by more than 90 million pairs of eyes across the world. Taymor is my parents’ age—the Beatles broke up right as she graduated from high school. As two of the main characters are inspired by her brother and sister, Taymor has called Across the Universe her most “personal” project. If African lions can tell Shakespeare's story, perhaps the Beatles could tell hers.

I’ve written about the Beatles a number of times, and with each first draft comes a minor panic attack (this piece is no exception). The stakes feel higher than ever; what could I ever say about the most written-about band of all time that hasn’t been said before, in words much more eloquent than mine? Teenage girls may have made the Beatles rock stars, but middle-aged men made them canon. White men have written every Beatle book I’ve read, given every Beatles lecture I’ve attended, recorded every Beatles podcast and radio show. Given that the Beatles themselves are white men, there are obviously more pressing gaps in representation. But my love for the band is saturated into my identity, and I am haunted by the ubiquitous image of a young girl shrieking and convulsing in the audience of The Ed Sullivan Show. As a female Beatles fan, I fear that whatever I contribute to the discourse, no matter how well researched and nuanced, will only come across as a giddy diary entry.

In Across the Universe, the girls still scream, but they also sing lead.

”The Beatles understood the kind of yearning that a young teenage girl would have, and that is what made their fans scream in the aisles,” Taymor said in a 2018 interview. “That’s why we have Lucy sing so softly and so vulnerably, If I fell in love you with you… The lyrics actually make more sense in the mouth of a woman than they do in the mouth of a man.”

By giving one muse a face and a backstory and a flawed perspective, Taymor helped Lucys everywhere off their diamond-encrusted pedestals in the sky. It’s the kind of transcendence that could only happen on film—the holy trinity of audio and visual and narrative.

The most moving “interpretation” in the film is “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” sung by a cheerleader pining after her squadmate on a high school football field. Performed gorgeously by T.V. Carpio, the undulating I can’t hides in the song’s bridge take on an entirely different meaning coming from the mouth of a closeted queer woman. The point is not whether I want to listen to this version over the original while doing the dishes. I rewatch Across the Universe every few years to remind myself that the Beatles don’t belong to me—they don’t even belong to the Beatles. That a woman’s vision of this music—all 128 minutes of it—was taken so seriously is remarkable. Taymor’s universe, however cheesy, is defiantly her own. It is lush, chaotic, and unapologetically romantic. For that, I can forgive her for the bad parts of the trip. I can forgive her for minutes 1:03:21 to 1:12:46. (Seriously though, if I have to hear Bono goo goo g'joob one more time, I’m suing Columbia Pictures for emotional distress.)

I must confess that the reason I wanted to write about Across the Universe has nothing to do with Julie Taymor. The reason is more personal than that. Across the Universe was released during my sophomore year of undergraduate school, a time when I often felt lost. When the film finally came to the theater in our nowhereland college town, a group of us packed into a friend’s car for a rare night out of the dorms. The show sold out quickly, but not before me and my best friend, another child of Beatles nuts, got the very last two tickets. It was as if fate—or perhaps the universe—conspired for us to share this immersive experience. Craning our necks in the very front row, we mouthed the words, gave each other knowing looks at every obscure reference, and comisrated as soon as Eddie Izzard came on screen. We walked out of the theater to pouring rain, and instead of taking cover, we ran right into it. We danced, kicking puddles, and belted  “Lucy in the Sky” and “Hold Me Tight” and yeah, yeah, yeah. With unadulterated joy, we screamed.

That is the story I wanted to tell, to adapt from a memory to a paragraph. I was scared it would come across as cheesy, and maybe it did. But you don’t need permission to create, or recreate. You don’t need credentials, or an elevator pitch, or even an audience. All you need is love.

Susannah Clark is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. Her work has been published in Inside Higher Ed, PopMatters, under the gum tree, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize, and has a Notable essay listed in the 2016 Best American Essays anthology.