Yesterday (Danny Boyle, UK/Russia/China, 2019)

Imagine there’s no smoking. It’s easy if you try.

Obviously I could have started this blog with ‘imagine there’s no Beatles,’ as a number of journalists have done in their write-ups about Danny Boyle’s Richard Curtis-scripted Yesterday.

However, I want to start with the smoking because at one point in the film, lead character Jack (Himesh Patel) says that he’s dying for a cigarette only for his best friend Rocky (Joel Fry) to ask what cigarettes are – with Google (which along with Apple of course does exist) then confirming that in the alternative world where Jack has woken up, cigarettes do not indeed exist, alongside the Beatles, Oasis (the band), Coca Cola (the drink) and Harry Potter.

There are several things to pick apart here – beyond the obvious fact that bands like Coldplay (namechecked) would also not exist had the Beatles not existed.

For more specifically, without the tobacco industry, firstly the USA would quite possibly not have enjoyed the global economic dominance that it enjoyed in the twentieth century (and periods around it).

Secondly, slavery was a key component of the American tobacco industry, and so to imagine a world without smoking is, for better or for worse, to imagine an America without slavery.

Furthermore, the Indian tobacco industry is one of the world’s largest, and it historically commenced with the introduction of tobacco to Goa by the Portuguese, before the British then created a tobacco industry during their colonial rule of the country.

I wish simply to suggest, then, that to imagine a world without tobacco is in some senses to imagine a world without slavery and a world without colonialism.

Oh to imagine such a world.

And yet, to imagine such a world is in some senses to deny such a world.

That is, Yesterday asks us in part to imagine that slavery and colonialism never took place – even though Jack Malik’s British-Asian family has found its way to Lowestoft in order to live there, and even though there has, even without the Beatles, still been a history of music that includes many African-American sounds (Stevie Wonder is namechecked, among other indicators, including Ed Sheeran’s rapping).

Indeed, in Boyle’s film it is early confirmed that the Rolling Stones continue to exist, meaning that these arch-appropriators of African-American sounds have indeed continued to be successful, even though the grounds for their success – the African-American music from which they ‘borrowed’ so many licks and beats – ought not to have existed since there was no tobacco trade and thus not slavery in the same fashion.

Jack, bless him, feels bad for appropriating the Beatles’ music, even though John Lennon (Robert Carlyle) appears in the film to confirm that basically he has not written his songs (he is not a frustrated musician, but a happy widower living on a beach, seemingly only a taxi ride from Lowestoft, blissfully unaware of pop music and the media).

And yet, if in effect appropriation has gone on (the Stones are still around), and if in effect the supposed non-existence of a history of slavery and colonialism has still resulted in more or less the same world as we have now – except without the Beatles and without Coke – then the principle of the film is that theft and the occultation of theft through the rewriting of history is absolutely fine.

Let us imagine basically the same world as we have now – except that there was no slavery and no colonialism.

So basically the film is a denial of at least two of the most pernicious moments in western history, including the gigantic theft that led to the very creation and dominance of the west that the film affirms.

More fool Jack, then, for confessing – even if it allows him to get the girl (Lily James). For, in doing so he basically demonstrates that he is a dupe for a set of values (upheld in typical Curtis fashion as implicitly ‘English’) that he has been fed and yet which no one else believes in.

Indeed, Jack’s gesture might have a touch of the Mr Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, USA, 1939) about it, but I am not sure what the panic from record producer Debra Hammer, played by Kate McKinnon, is about.

For while Rocky uploads all of the Beatles songs at the end of the film to the internet for people to download for free, the production and recording rights would still belong to her record company, and so Rocky/Jack will spend their whole life in penury, if not in prison, as a result of their unprovable story and their breach of contract (how to prove the existence of a band that never existed?) – all the while the record company owns rights to the songs, regardless of whether people have downloaded them for free.

Indeed, pretty much every song in the world is already easily available online on a host of websites, and it has not led to the collapse of the music industry – even if bands like Radiohead (whose poster for In Rainbows adorns Jack’s door) have attempted to give away their music.

(Besides, the record label would just get a better set of musicians and singers to sell better versions of the songs to the world, thereby making more money.)

So, Jack/Rocky’s ‘revolutionary’ gesture is in other words just business as usual in the contemporary record industry.

What is perhaps of greater import, though, is that the denial of history is also business as usual in the contemporary world.

Perhaps it is not by accident that Jack first ‘breaks through’ internationally while playing a gig in Moscow as Ed Sheeran’s warm-up – with the sequence of course involving a cover of ‘Back in the USSR.’

For if there is a country that knows about how to manipulate history, then it is surely Russia. And the manipulation does not stop at history; it also includes the present, as the victory of Vladimir Putin in the 2016 American Presidential elections makes clear.

What is more, it is notable that Jack also relies solely on Google for his verification or otherwise of the existence of the Beatles.

Not only does Yesterday thus affirm that it is only by existing on the internet that one can be validated as real, but it also implies – in a celebratory, product-placement fashion – that companies like Google shape our reality, determining what is real or not.

In other words, Yesterday plays out as comedy what is perhaps one of the most tragic aspects of the digital, ‘post-truth’ age: that what we consider to be real is highly manipulable, is indeed manipulated, but here is something to be celebrated as we deny slavery and deny colonialism as we live in a world without history and smoking.

Facetiously one might suggest that Yesterday could just as easily be called ‘Cambridge Analytica Saves The World.’

And yet in this facetious comment lies a sense in which Yesterday plays fast and loose with history as it offers up an extended Google advert, even as Google surely does shape our perceptions of reality thanks to its manipulable algorithms, data mining, listings of people and events, and so on.

If ‘Imagine’ were indeed a song about imagining ‘no countries,’ ‘peace,’ and more, it perhaps is a song about a world that beats to the unified drum of a single military-industrial-entertainment complex. That is, ‘Imagine’ is as much a bitter indictment of world history as it is an attempt to dream that humanity’s bloody, planet-destroying history did not take place.

A denial of a reality in which borders are being continuously reaffirmed on both sides of the Pond. A denial of a reality in which exploitation has created this world of huge injustice… Yesterday is in some senses, then, simply a reimagined version of today: the world is falling apart but no one wants to believe it and everyone just denies it. And so the entropy of the world will just go on happening…

In the face of trying to build of a new tomorrow, Boyle and Curtis instead waste their time dreaming of an alternative yesterday. Where that will get us… no one knows.

Film-Philosophy 2019: Golden Gate

The below is text to accompany the screening of my short essay-film, Golden Gate, which is to be screened (or if you are looking at this after 10 July 2019, which was screened) at the 2019 Film-Philosophy Conference at the University of Brighton, in Brighton, UK.

The film stands alone, but this text functions as a means of elaborating on the ideas that the film covers.

Golden Gate is an essay-film that reworks footage from 43 movies, spanning eight decades, in order to suggest that in cinema – and perhaps in the real world – the Golden Gate Bridge marks, if not the end of humanity, then the end of western patriarchal masculinity.

The film does this by weaving together scenes from these 43 films in such a way that we see how the Golden Gate repeatedly suffers apocalyptic events in movies: nuclear bombs, attacks by monsters from the ancient past, including ‘atomic creatures’ Godzilla and the giant octopus from It Came from Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon, USA, 1955), as well as post-ecological kaiju and mega sharks, earthquakes, sun blazes, meteors and more.

More than this, the Golden Gate is also a place where congregate such posthuman entities as intelligent apes, intelligent octopuses, intelligent sharks, intelligent aliens, including Vulcans, intelligent cars, mutant humans (X-men), hulks, terminators, other intelligent machines and Supermen/Superman.

Perhaps it is obvious that this would be the case. For the Golden Gate is also a space where the desert meets the sea, with the interaction of these two elements creating unpredictable weather conditions, including fog, that connote uncertainty and amorphousness. That is, the Golden Gate Bridge is a space for all manner of unusual becomings, or what Reza Negarestani terms ‘new sentiences’ (Negarestani 2008: 92).

Small wonder, then, that San Francisco lies just next to Silicon Valley, where in the desert a silicon singularity is being beckoned into existence. Small wonder, too, that the Golden Gate marks the edge of the psychic space of the USA and perhaps of modernity itself: it is the limit of the west, and once that limit is reached… humans have few places left to go, except perhaps by evolving into new life forms, by being replaced by new life forms (or life forms that are at least new to us), by taking their own lives, or by disappearing in a flash of nuclear light.

Indeed, that flash of nuclear light heralds not just the end of man and the arrival of creatures from the deep, but perhaps also the very birth of cinema itself as a sentient being that is set to replace the human, be that as a machine apart from humans or as a cyborg symbiogenetically entangled with humans. Small wonder, again, that filmmakers like Chris Marker, Jenni Olson and Sophie Fiennes (who brings with her auti-philosopher Slavoj Žižek) all come to the Golden Gate to explore cinema’s own ability not just to touch humans, but also to think for and with itself.

And final small wonder, too, that in their essay-film about San Francisco, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson also define the city as one defined by The Green Fog (USA, 2017), with the Golden Gate Bridge featuring heavily in this film that makes reference to the new sentience that emerges from havoc-wreaking weather conditions.

It is for this reason, too, that Golden Gate explores how early film theorist Vachel Lindsay, who in his poetry considered San Francisco to be beyond repentance, sees cinema as a prophecy machine, harking into existence these new life forms that cinema allows us to see, being itself such a life form, as is the Golden Gate, too.

One of the speakers from Eric Steel’s documentary about Golden Gate suicides, The Bridge (UK/USA, 2006), suggests that the schizophrenia suffered by one of the jumpers (Lisa Smith) meant that for them life was like having 44 television channels on simultaneously with all of them occupying equal attention.

This recalls Steven Shaviro’s claim that ‘people along the autistic spectrum are not solipsists, and they are not lacking in empathy… Their vision… “makes everything it represents exist on a strictly ‘equal footing’… fully outside any ontological hierarchy”’ (Shaviro 2014: 132).

To see and to treat equally, to achieve ontological democracy and to remove hierarchies, is perhaps to become autistic, to remove hierarchies. Perhaps Superman is thus autistic. Perhaps Spock is thus autistic. Perhaps Tommy Wiseau is thus autistic. Perhaps it is no mistake that the autistic Khan (Shah Rukh Khan) comes to San Francisco in order to live.

And as vision becomes democratised across space, so does it across time, such that past and future are also equal, such that fantasy and reality also become equal. Where truth and fiction become indiscernible, so are we in the realm of cinema, a form, a sentience and an intelligence where fiction and documentary blend. This is a reality that Golden Gate seeks to depict.

By coincidence, there is a 44^thfilm that is worth mentioning for the purposes of explaining Golden Gate, and this is James Franco’s Disaster Artist (USA, 2017), which is a dramatized history of the making of Tommy Wiseau’s ‘bad movie,’ The Room (USA, 2003). For, while The Disaster Artistdoes not feature the Golden Gate Bridge (and in fact is concerned more with Greg Sestero and Tommy Wiseau’s time in Los Angeles than it is with their time in San Francisco), it nonetheless brings to mind the concept of disaster, especially as it relates to cinema.

For, as Jennifer Fay reminds us at the outset of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, disaster is a pejorative from dis(bad) and astro(star), being thus ‘the catastrophe that results from planetary misalignment’ (Fay 2018: 1). It is not just that the Golden Gate suffers disasters in the colloquial sense of the word, then, but that it also is a place where humans encounter the alien, or that which is from the stars (in French, des astres, or désastres).

What is more, it is perhaps also here that humans realise that they are from the stars – and that their state is always to fall.

Indeed, Steel has compared his film to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c1558), in which we see Icarus’ legs emerging from the sea after falling to earth (see Holden 2006).

There are many falls in Golden Gate, including that of the camera and the endless motorcade (from cadere, which means to fall in Latin) that crosses the bridge’s span. This is not just a film about trying to defy but being limited by gravity, even if the film is also about a dream of flight, as Caroline Pressley says of Bridge jumper Gene Sprague, who loosely resembles the disaster artist himself, Tommy Wiseau.

For, part of man’s flight is his flight into cinema – the flight of fantasy in which woman is not an intelligent being with whom he shares a world, but an image from which he is separate, which is like a dumb machine, and which he can control – as per Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (USA, 1958).

The fall of man or mankind, then, is really the fall of masculinity, or the fall of the patriarchal world, which headed west, and which invented cinema in order to try to establish control over the environment, over machines, over animals and over woman. But that control is impossible.

If cinema is part of man’s attempt to control woman, then perhaps this essay-film is an example of non-cinema. Or if cinema really is a new sentience, or a new intelligence, then a non-patriarchal cinema, in which man has fallen, is really the birth of cinema proper, not the fall of man, but the rise of the machines.

Perhaps it is to be critiqued that it takes an ontological democracy of objects and subjects in order for woman finally to be given equal footing to man. Nonetheless, the future human world, which will not be a world defined uniquely by humans, will also be a world not defined by the binary distinctions of gender that traditionally have been in play. The death of man is the birth of the human, beyond merely man (super-man), and where equality is established through difference, without difference being a reason to create hierarchies (man above woman, above world, above objects, above animals, above machines). Not woman as the invented other of man. But woman as woman, woman as superman (beyond man). Humanity on the level.

Man, says experimental filmmaker Peter Rose, could not see far enough. But the Golden Gate provides a view to a kill: the end of man; James Bond saved (again!) by a woman.

And so perhaps, as per the title of Krishna D.K. and Raj Nidimoru’s 2014 Bollywood film, which features as the final images in Golden Gate, it is after the fall of western man, at the end of the west, that man will not try to control woman (as per Vertigo), but where non-western man and woman can fall in love. Where man falls, humanity might have a Happy Ending.¹

Endnote
1. William Brown would like to thank David H Fleming, Matthew Holtmeier, Murray Pomerance, Clive Smith, Chelsea Wessels and Mila Zuo for their help in the creation of this film.

References
Fay, Jennifer (2018) Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Holden, Stephen (2006) ‘That Beautiful But Deadly San Francisco Span,’ The New York Times, 27 October, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/movies/27brid.html. Accessed 1 May 2019.
Negarestani, Reza (2008) Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Melbourne: re:press.
Shaviro, Steven (2014) The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Films featured in Golden Gate
10.5 (John Lafia, USA, 2004)
A View to a Kill (John Glen, UK, 1985)
The Abyss (James Cameron, USA, 1989)
Bicentennial Man (Chris Columbus, USA/Germany, 1999)
Big Hero 6 (Don Hall and Chris Williams, USA, 2014)
The Bridge (Eric Steel, UK/USA, 2006)
Bumblebee (Travis Knight, USA/China, 2018)
The Circle (James Ponsoldt, UAE/USA, 2017)
The Core (Jon Amiel, USA/Germany/Canada/UK, 2003)
Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, USA, 1947)
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, USA/UK/Canada, 2014)
Escape in the Fog (Budd Boetticher, USA, 1945)
Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, USA/Japan, 2014)
Happy Ending (Krishna D.K. and Raj Nidimoru, India, 2014)
Herbie Rides Again (Robert Stevenson, USA, 1974)
How the West Was Won (John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall, USA, 1962)
Hulk (Ang Lee, USA, 2003)
It Came from Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon, USA, 1955)
Land of the Lost (Brad Silberling, USA, 2009)
The Love Bug (Robert Stevenson, USA, 1968)
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, USA, 1941)
The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough (Peter Rose, USA, 1981)
Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (Ace Hannah, USA, 2009)
Meteor Storm (Tibor Takács, USA, 2010)
Monsters vs. Aliens (Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, USA, 2009)
My Name is Khan (Karan Johar, India/USA/UAE, 2010)
On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, USA, 1959)
Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, USA, 2013)
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes, UK/Austria/Netherlands, 2006)
The Rock (Michael Bay, USA, 1996)
The Room (Tommy Wiseau, USA, 2003)
The Royal Road (Jenni Olson, USA, 2015)
San Andreas (Brad Peyton, USA, 2015)
Sans soleil (Chris. Marker, France, 1983)
Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, USA/Germany, 2009)
Star Trek Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams, USA, 2013)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, USA, 1986)
Superman (Richard Donner, USA/UK/Switzerland/Canada/Panama, 1978)
Teknolust (Lynn Hershman-Leeson, USA/Germany/UK, 2002)
Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor, USA, 2015)
The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin, USA, 1974)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1958)
X-Men: The Last Stand (Brett Ratner, Canada/USA/UK, 2006)

Other films
The Disaster Artist(James Franco, USA, 2017)
The Green Fog(Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, USA, 2017)

Texts referenced in Golden Gate
Berger, Arthur Asa (2012) Understanding American Icons: An Introduction to Semiotics, Abingdon: Routledge.
Fleming, David H. (2017) Unbecoming Cinema: Unsettling Encounters with Ethical Event Films, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Irigaray, Luce (1991) Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Gillian Gill), New York: Columbia University Press.
Lindsay, Vachel (1913) ‘The City that Will Not Repent,’ in General William Booth enters into heaven and other poems, Borgo Press.
Lindsay, Vachel (2000 [1915]) The Art of the Motion Picture, New York: Modern Library.
Negarestani, Reza (2008) Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Melbourne: re:press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1997 [1891]) Thus Spake Zarathustra(trans. Anthony Common), London: Wordsworth.
Shaviro, Steven (2014) The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wark, McKenzie (2016) Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, London: Verso.

Painting featured in Golden Gate
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c1558) Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.