For those unfamiliar with the Mandela effect, something of a mass delusion that facilitates a large bulk of the population remembering an event or entity one way, when, in fact it was another, prepare to familiarize yourself with its premise in Danny Boyle’s Yesterday (a long way from the tone of Trainspotting). Except, as opposed to everyone recalling something with a slight deviation (e.g. Looney Toons versus Looney Tunes), everyone forgets a very major component of existence: The Beatles. Related somehow to a major twelve-second power outage across the globe that finds all the world experiencing a kind of partial amnesia in the wake of it. All except aspiring (and failing) singer/songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), who just so happens to get hit by a bus while riding his bike home when the lights go dark on the street.
Awakening to the sight of two missing front teeth and the presence of his longtime best friend and manager, Ellie Appleton (Lily James), the signs of The Beatles’ vanishment are almost immediately apparent, a strong testament to just how much the quartet has shaped and influenced modern culture long after the peak of their fame in the 60s. For an off-handed joke to Ellie using the lyric, “Will you still need me?/Will you still feed me? When I’m sixty-four” alerts him to something strange afoot when Ellie returns, “Why sixty-four?”
As he reingratiates himself back into non-hospital life, the evidence mounts that something truly inexplicable has happened, namely, when Jack sings “Yesterday” to Ellie and some of his other friends, none of them have ever heard it, acting as though Jack is the brilliant mind behind the simple yet powerful lyrics and melody. Utterly shocked, Jack returns home to Google The Beatles, only to find that the insect is what comes up with each iteration of the search. He cannot understand what has happened, only that he must use this sudden mass amnesia to his advantage–while, of course, also wanting the world to be exposed to some of the greatest music ever created. Considering he lives in the Beatleland that is the UK (from a small town called Lowestoft in Suffolk), the collective loss of memory is particularly profound to Jack. Nonetheless, he proceeds to organize his/their “new” list of songs via color-coded Post-Its in the room he inhabits at his parents’ house, recalling every guitar riff, piano melody and lyrical composition without much effort. Because, as James (John Hannah) in Sliding Doors told Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow), “Everybody’s born knowing all the Beatles lyrics instinctively. They’re passed into the fetus subconsciously along with all the amniotic stuff. They should be called The Fetals.”
Soon, he’s taken back to the bars and clubs to play the songs he’s now passing off as his own despite having just told Ellie and his parents that he’s finally giving up on music. Of course, one questions Jack’s bona fide artistry from the outset, for most artists can’t just “give up” because they want to or haven’t made it–they simply have to go on doing it because it’s as crucial to them as air. If nothing else, however, Jack’s great artistic purpose in life is being a conduit between The Beatles and the world that has miraculously forgotten them. Though that’s not the only thing they’ve forgotten. Cigarettes and Coke also don’t exist–leaving one to wonder if it’s only “unwholesome” things that got rubbed out of the collective memory. Including Oasis, a band that, of course, would never have come to be without the influence of The Beatles.
At first believing that he really is a nobody as he can’t instantaneously make people fathom the genius of these songs, Jack tells Ellie it’s been him all along. That he’s never had the star quality to make it. At the very least, however, he is offered some studio recording time, even if the accommodations provided by Gavin’s (Alexander Arnold) train-adjacent apartment aren’t exactly glamorous. Still, it gets the recordings out there, mainly thanks to his diligent passing out of the CDs to customers at the discount warehouse he works at. This leads to a spot on the company’s public access channel, viewed by, of all people, Ed Sheeran, who does a solid sendup of himself in his role as “mentor” to Jack (on a side note, this “part” was originally offered to Chris Martin, who is evidently now “too cool” to parody himself–or maybe already feels satisfied enough with the way he did it on Ricky Gervais’ Extras). Or, more accurately, launching pad to mainstream fame as he offers him a chance to open for him on his tour. It is while singing “Back in the USSR” in Russia that Jack starts to go viral, attracting the interest of Sheeran’s own manager, Debra Hammer (Kate McKinnon). Sheeran, meanwhile, has had the unpleasant realization that he is the Salieri to Jack’s Mozart, at times, suspiciously asking him questions like, “What’s your process?” and “You just thought of that?”
As his success mounts, his dynamic with Ellie becomes more complex and muddled, and he suddenly regrets all the years he could seem to only view her as a sisterly presence. But this complication is put on the backburner when Jack’s marketing team calls a meeting to discuss issues like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band being too “confusing” and how about we just call the record One Man Only since it’s so rare to have a musician who doesn’t work with a million other artists and songwriters to come up with a barely three-minute song? It does certainly call into question how much, if anything, of what The Beatles “got away” with (a.k.a. being unchecked in their creativity) then could be done today, in a climate that thrives on diluting every piece of art into little better than gibberish designed to drone mindlessly in people’s heads until they buy it. Moreover, to Jack’s credit, his reverence for the material means he won’t alter it, as was the case in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married, when Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner), who has traveled back in time to 1960 (in the spirit of Marty McFly), tries to help her boyfriend, Charlie (Nicolas Cage), by giving him the lyrics to a song she “wrote” called “She Loves You.” Charlie, blissfully unaware of its perfection, later offers the suggestion, “What about, ‘She loves you/ooo ooo ooo’?” Some people just never know spun gold when they hear it. Including Sheeran, who convinces Jack to concede to changing the “Hey Jude” to “Hey Dude.”
As the burden of his lie (though, in his defense, who would ever believe his story?) starts to become too much to bear, we come to understand that it doesn’t really matter who sings these songs in the long run (for the iconicness of John, Paul, George and Ringo will only continue to wane out of subsequent generations’ minds), merely that they exist as a beacon of humanity and what it can represent at its zenith. Though one finds it difficult to imagine a world in which John Lennon’s (Robert Carlyle, the spitting image had John survived) freedom fighting ways didn’t coalesce naturally with the music he created. An exchange Jack has with him toward the end of the film speculates that he still would have been something of a philosopher regardless of whether or not he became famous as he states that he’s lived a successful life because he’s lived a happy life.
Yesterday spotlights The Beatles’ pervasiveness being evident in so much of what we see, hear and experience every day (a forthcoming movie called Lucy in the Sky starring Natalie Portman serves as one such example), even on a subconscious level. Something we can often tend to take for granted in not occasionally bowing to the full weight of what The Beatles achieved with their prolific work. This is why it is just as one of the only other people who remembers The Beatles (played by Sarah Lancashire) says, “A world without The Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse.” And the last thing we need at this moment is a world that’s any worse than it is already–Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis do well to remind us of our innermost gratitude for a group of Liverpudlians that ignited the music industry as it shook the world out of its usual coma.
