Across The Universe is a musical feature film that was released in October 2007. It is an original screenplay that uses 33 songs composed by The Beatles to tell its story. Julie Taymor, the film's director, has completely appropriated these works by The Beatles to show her view of the protest about America's participation in the Vietnam War, which is what the film's main debate centres around. This assignment is a personal interpretation of Across The Universe using the principles of Hermeneutics, which will then be tested against the interpretations of other audience members.
The plot of the film:
Set in the 1960s, the story starts out in Liverpool, England, where Jude works in the local shipyard. He is packing up to get on a ship to America, in search of his father, who he has never met. At the same time, Lucy, a young girl in Massachusetts in America, is bidding her boyfriend farewell as he goes to fight in the Vietnam War.
Jude arrives at Princeton University (Across The Universe, 2008) in New Jersey, looking for the professor he believes to be his father. He meets a student there, Max, who points out the janitor, who is really Jude's father.
At a loss for where to go from here, Max invites Jude to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, where he meets Lucy, Max's younger sister. Jude immediately falls in love with her. At dinner, Max announces that he is dropping out of college and moving to New York City (Across The Universe, 2008). Jude and Max then rent a room from a singer, Sadie, in the psychedelic Greenwich Village.
The last main character is introduced when Jojo arrives in New York from violence-striken Detroit. He becomes the guitar player in Sadie's band and lives in the same commune as the rest of the characters.
At this point, Lucy receives the news that her boyfriend has been killed in Vietnam. Having been shocked by attending her first funeral ever (Taymor, 2007), she decides to go and stay with Jude and Max in New York City for a summer before college. She brings with her a letter for Max - drafting him to fight in Vietnam.
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The film becomes grittier and more turbulent here, when Max is shipped off to fight and Lucy joins a radical anti-war movement. Sadie and Jojo have a fallout and Jude's previous idyllic life starts to go very wrong, forcing him and Lucy against all odds to find their own way back to each other (Across The Universe, 2008).
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The dialogical question posed by the film:
The film enters into a dialogue with the audience about the effects of war on its people, specifically on the people who stay home when others go off to fight. It brings this topic up at many points. The first time is when viewers find out that Jude's father was a soldier in World War Two and Jude says that his fatherless childhood could be excused by saying his father was killed in the war (Taymor, 2007). It is then seen again when Lucy is left at home by her boyfriend who goes to fight. When Max is also drafted, the film goes into detail about the effects that this has on Lucy and Jude's relationship. This causes the audience to question which side they would take in the argument against war - whether they would protest it like Lucy or sit and wait it out, like Jude.
The second, and sub-dialogue of the film is, to quote The Beatles, all you need is love. This is most evident in the fact that the film is set in the '60s and the well-known theme of that decade was make love, not war. Jude falls in love with Lucy, Sadie falls in love with Jojo, Prudence, a minor character, falls in love with Sadie, and it is love that wins out in the end of the film. Across The Universe asks the audience just how far love can be expected to carry people along.
The meaning created by different scenes:
In the beginning of the film, Julie Taymor has distinctly portrayed Jude's life in Liverpool as bleak, cold and colourless. Once the audience finds out that he was raised without a father, and Jude meets his father, Wes, in bright and sunny Princeton, they come to realise that perhaps a fatherly presence would have brought more colour into Jude's Liverpool life. At their first meeting, when Wes hear's Jude's British accent, he looks back with fondness at his time there, but as soon as he hears what effect he had on Jude and his mother, his mood becomes more serious. This is further exemplified when Jude explains to his father how life was without him, saying, you could excuse a bastard by saying his father was killed in the war (Taymor, 2007). All the scenes that take place in Liverpool show how difficult life was because of what happened in World War Two.
The next situation in which war is shown to affect the characters is with Lucy and her boyfriend, Daniel. They are pictured happily dancing at a high school prom in the beginning of the movie, but this scene soon turns into a sombre, black funeral because Daniel left Lucy to go and fight in Vietnam and was killed in action. This scene shows what a big affect the war has on Lucy, even though she is not fighting in it. The war kills her first love, and propels her to move to New York City with her brother. This situation also lends itself to the sub-dialogue of the film, about love. Here, love doesn't win out and Lucy is left to fend for herself, alone.
The first scene where the audience is directly shown any war-tinged scenes is when Max answers his draft letter and goes through his army induction. Taymor has used very rhythmic music in a factory setting to create the sense that the young men are being methodically processed and stripped of their individuality (Taymor, 2007), implying that this is what war does to its soldiers. A very effective scene is when the young men who are being drafted are pictured struggling to carry the Statue of Liberty (a metaphor for liberty and American imperialism itself) across the fields of Vietnam (see Fig. 2). They are repeatedly singing the line she's so heavy, showing what a burden fighting a war is on the soldiers. This visual shows the irony of America interfering in Vietnam at all and so opens the way for the American youth to protest their country's participation in that war.
The audience then sees a small amount of Vietnam from Max's perspective (Taymor, 2007). It shows him steadily getting more tense and jittery, to the point where he is injured in a firefight. Taymor has aligned the scenes so that there is no macho bravery or patriotic valour in what the audience sees of the war, simply scenes of one young man slowly going out of his mind. For a while after he comes home, Max is unable to function normally in society, and is still haunted by his time at war.
The film also focuses largely on what effect the Vietnam War had on the people who stayed at home. This war was the first time that the youth of the nation stepped forward and protested their country's own involvement in a war. Previously, it had just been accepted when a country had gone to war, but now the young generation was standing up for what they thought was right. Lucy is the film's primary protester against the war because both her brother and her boyfriend were involved in it (see Fig. 3). In protesting against the war, she finds something concrete to build her world around (Taymor, 2007), but the closer she grows to fighting the cause, the further she grows from Jude. The distancing of the two lovers is gradual, but comes to a head in the scene where Jude sings you say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world (Taymor, 2007) in a somewhat condescending tone to Lucy in the middle of her office. He is fearful of the violence that Lucy is moving towards. Lucy then moves out of their apartment and it is evident that the war has broken up their relationship. The sub-plot here makes the audience question whether love can bring them back together or whether they are completely separated.
While Jude has remained relatively unopinionated about the war so far, Taymor uses a very effective scene to align his feelings with Max's confusion and disillusionment about the war. In this scene, Max and Jude both sing Strawberry Fields Forever and Taymor has projected visuals of Max's surroundings over Jude's face while he is singing and vice versa (see Fig. 4). These quick moving visuals, loud sound effects and dark colours are used to show what Jude is feeling about the war and what Max is experiencing, in it. This is distinctly the loudest scene in the movie.
The final scene ties the movies meanings together nicely. Max has returned from Vietnam, so Jude and Lucy are no longer kept apart by their conflicting views on the subject. After singing the song, All You Need Is Love on a New York rooftop with all his friends around him, Jude glances across the street and sees Lucy watching him from another rooftop, with tears in her eyes. The dialogical question that was asked at the beginning of the film was answered here because love has brought the two main characters back together.
Identification of pre-understanding:
Because Across The Universe is such a unique and stylish film, it draws on a lot of diverse traditions. Prior to any interpretation, the audience and the film are linked by these traditions, myths, beliefs and theories (Arnold & Fischer 1994:56). The most obvious of these is the tradition of The Beatles' music. The film luckily turned out not to be a regurgitation of the fab four's rise to fame, but simply used their songs in the story line.
This leads on to the audience's preconceptions of the musical genre. The prevalent myth about musical films is that they will all be showy compilations of song and dance, filled with glitz and glamour. Yet, the songs are not ostentatious numbers, as they usually are, but intimate looks at the characters emotions instead.
The audience's preconceptions about the director, Julie Taymor, would extend from her previous work, for example, on the art nouveau film, Frida. With Frida, Taymor identified herself as a very stylised director who favours the use of authentic environments and actions to help her tell the story - she doesn't rely on excessive dialogue to get her point across. There is also the pre-existing tradition that Taymor's work will be unique, interesting and a new look at something. Across The Universe definitely supports this preconceived idea.
Finally, pre-understanding of a film involving Beatles music would also involve a pre-understanding of the era from which the music originated - the 1960s. It was a time of great social change and upheaval. It was both gritty and whimsical (Across The Universe, 2008). People were trying to break boundaries at every turn and no one wanted to accept one authority as absolute. This volatile attitude is effectively shown in Across The Universe.
A Fusion of horizons:
Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the process of interpreting a text as the fusion of one's own horizon with the horizon of the text (Fusion of horizons, 2008). The horizon of the interpreter is their pre-understanding of traditions and the horizon of the text, in this case, Across The Universe, is the meaning it creates through the use of specific signs and traditions (Arnold & Fischer 1994:63).
Therefore, a fusion of horizons for the audience of this film would involve them altering their preconceived ideas about it once they have understood the intentions of the director, to form a new and more complete understanding of Across The Universe.
The most obvious of Julie Taymor's intentions in telling the story is that she has chosen specific songs on the merit of how much they will enhance her story line. The audience picks this up after the first couple of songs and they soon look to the music more than the minimal dialogue to know what is going on with the characters. Apart from the use of songs, she tries to use other cinematic devices to tell the story without the characters actually having to say it. An example of this is in the beginning of the film when Jude quietly takes old black and white photos of a couple out of a box and the audience realises that these are photos of his long-lost father, without him actually saying so. These quiet, intimate scenes are likely to be very different to the audience's preconceived ideas of what a musical should be.
Another way in which the audience's and the film's horizons are likely to fuse is over the way The Beatles music is performed. Taymor says that the songs were specifically engineered not to sound like the originals. The Beatles were often influenced by blues and African-American jazz music and Taymor often chose to go back to those roots when she and the film's composer, Eliot Goldenthal, remade the songs. This brings about a whole different genre of music to what the audience might have been expecting and so pushes them to extend their own horizon to either enjoy or hate the new music.
The workings of a hermeneutic circle:
The hermeneutic circle is the process of understanding a text hermeneutically (Hermeneutic Circle, 2008). So to understand Across The Universe using a hermeneutic circle, the audience would have to glean the meaning of the whole film from its individual elements and, at the same time, understand the individual elements by referring to the film as a whole (Arnold & Fischer 1994:63).
According to this theory, neither the whole film nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another. Hence, the idea of a hermeneutic circle (Hermeneutic Circle, 2008).
The previously discussed scenes that contribute meaning to the film also lend themselves to the workings of a hermeneutic circle. For example, in the scenes that take place in England, the audience sees how Liverpool is specifically filmed to show why Jude wants to get away from there (Taymor, 2007); yet it is only once he's experienced a far more exciting life in America during the rest of the film that they realise why he want to get away, and stay away.
Also, the scene in which Max is inducted into the army puts the focus on the draft process and helps the audience to understand it. However, once the rest of the story has unfolded, the audience realises that without the draft, there would be no protesting and therefore no tension or real point to the movie.
It is interesting to note that the film lends itself to a circular method of understanding because it starts out with Jude sitting alone on the beach and then backtracks to tell his story and eventually finds him sitting back on the beach before the movie concludes.
Other views:
Other audience members had a similar pre-understanding that a film of Beatles songs would be a reworking of the band's story, so they also altered their ideas in a fusion of horizons with the film.
One viewer believed that the main theme of the film was the sub-dialogue stated here - all you need is love, because if there was only love, there would be no war to affect the characters badly. Another viewer stated that Across The Universe focused not so much on the effects of war, but more on people's relationships in a time of war. They also believed that the film puts forward the dialogical question about America's relationship with the rest of the world - if America had not been furthering her imperial interests at the time, there would be no reason for protesting and so no story to tell.
This alters the original dialogical question and understanding thereof to make it more about the human emotions of wartime and less about the actual war.
CONCLUSION:
Therefore, Across The Universe definitely requires its traditions to be fused with the pre-understanding of the viewer in order to be understood correctly. There is distinct dialogue between the film and it's viewers. Audience's final ideas about the film differ, but all admit that their final opinions were not the same as what they first thought the film would be like. By identifying their preconceived ideas about the film, recognising the director's intentions and altering their understanding to accommodate all these ideas, the viewer will have interpreted the film hermeneutically.