The Yellow Submarine Revisited

3,158 words

During my misspent youth, back when wooly mammoths still walked the Earth, I caught a replay of the Yellow Submarine movie at an indie theatre. It went into production during the Summer of Love, and the film premiered in 1968. One way of regarding the movie is as a framing story to showcase a dozen Beatles songs. In this way, it was an early pioneer of music videos, long before MTV got started with that in the mid-1980s. The animation was ahead of the curve for the standards of the time. Technology has marched on, and there were ideas to do one of those unnecessary Hollywood remakes. Whiz-bang CGI would be a distraction, and the original stands well on its own.

I had a chance to introduce Yellow Submarine to a youth who – in my wise estimation – needed a break from his usual fare. Some of the stupid entertainment aimed at the Generation Alpha demographic makes the kiddie cartoons that I wasted countless hours of my early life on – Looney Tunes and all that – seem like Wagnerian opera. (According to anonymous little birdies in the Pentagon’s grapevine department, now that waterboarding has been banned, interrogators now force captives to play contemporary juvenile video games.) Not only was the trippendicular movie a walk down Memory Lane, I noticed some interesting sparkles.

The Role of Rock and Pop Music

Let’s get something out of the way up front. I recall from very long ago a plus royaliste que le roi type who dismissed the famous Rock Against Communism band Skrewdriver as “nigger music.” (Luckily for him, Ian Stuart was an ocean away, sparing a painful lesson about running his big yap!) This would be a good time to establish the status of rock and roll, as well as the broader category of popular music. For these, the better parts may be considered legitimate contributions to middlebrow culture.

Where does one draw the line? I’ll have to borrow an item from the “Miller Test” by which obscenity may be legally sorted out from constitutionally protected free expression. That is, junk music “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” To put it another way, the kind of overproduced, autotuned oonce-oonce-oonce noise that will be forgotten in a few years may be consigned to the pit of corporate mass culture. The rest, rising above all that, legitimately falls into middlebrow culture. In an entire decade, disco produced about three songs that stood the test of time. I’m sort of on the fence about the “Sunny D and Rum” song, though. It is rather amusing.

Other than that, despite the origins of rock and roll as a spinoff of rhythm and blues in the late 1940s, it’s been implicitly white ever since, with only a few exceptions. One need only look at the audience of a rock concert to see this! For just one example, the historic Lynyrd Skynyrd concert of 1977, in Oakland of all places, looked like stepping into Dixie Valhalla. It doesn’t get any more white and delightsome than that, now does it? This is the once and future America! Of course, by then, rock had become the forefront of an Anglo-American tradition.

To get more specific here, the music of The Beatles isn’t high culture, or traditional folk culture. Still, in this case at least, I’d say that it sounds quite cute and charming in light of recent sonic sludge. They did have talent, which is more than can be said for quite a few musicians lately. We can remember them for the better parts of their contributions to pop culture, such as it is.

Where do The Beatles fit in? One proudly can claim Shakespeare as part of British culture. On the other hand, one would have to admit that the Teletubbies are too. Obviously the difference is a degree in quality, and the Beatles are somewhere between the extremes. I’ll stipulate that they’re in the better part of this middle ground. As musicians, they didn’t surpass the enchanting classical composer Thomas Tallis, but they did rate higher than the fun and proudly unsophisticated Peter and the Test Tube Babies.

The Beatles, Pro and Con

On the other hand, there are those who’ve had some harsh words for the Fab Four, and there are reasons for this. Joseph Sobran considered them overrated, and stuck to his guns. For another matter, they were way out in left field ideologically. Harsher yet, Yuri Bezmenov wrote the following:

If you remember the history of rock and roll music you know the name of The Beatles. They were trained in India in an ashram in transcendental meditation, and they landed in the United States and they poisoned millions of minds of your children with the strange blend of Oriental mysticism and revolutionary music. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” My KGB supervisors were dying of curiosity, how could it possibly happen that four degenerate monkeys are so rich and famous in United States?

Now that’s a hoot! They certainly had their sophomoric moments and unfortunate political posturing, sometimes spilling over into the music. (Luckily it wasn’t always like that; if nothing were salvageable, I wouldn’t have much to write about here.) This sort of dreadful 1960s mush is still giving Boomers a bad name even now, although not always deservedly. Unfortunately, virtue signaling and silly poses are hardly uncommon with certain rock stars. Still, The Beatles should’ve known better. They spent their earlier years in West Berlin, surrounded by hostile pinkos who would’ve been delighted to swallow up the enclave at any opportunity. That experience should’ve immunized them to radical leftist ideology.

John Lennon in particular was a real piece of work, a promising musician who became an archetypal limousine leftist suffering from narcissism, drug abuse, Yellow Fever, and ultimately ballistic lead poisoning by a deranged fan. His later life was noted for the Yoko Ono business, which arguably contributed to the band’s breakup. He got himself strung out on heroin for years. (Why the hell did he do that? What was so terrible going on in his life that he retreated from reality into a drug-sodden stupor?) Unfortunately, his promising solo career eventually jumped the shark and produced turkeys like Some Time in New York City – for the most part, a forgettable compilation of preachy leftist anthems – and Double Fantasy. Still, despite this downward spiral, Yellow Submarine dates back to happier times.

Once more, on the “pro” side, they did have talent, unlike today’s degenerate monkeys. They produced an extensive catalog and had a wide instrumental range, straddling the line between rock and pop. Not everything was a hit. (“Revolution #9” number nine, number nine, number nine – why? Just WHY? Too many magic sugar cubes went into that one!) So The Beatles are somewhat of a mixed bag. Still, they certainly had lots of catchy tunes which still get airplay. Even my young captive audience recognized some of it – how about that!

Peril 80,000 leagues beneath the sea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6x10hlwuvM

Pepperland, an idyllic underwater paradise, succumbs to a sneak attack by the Blue Meanies. In the opening volley, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band takes a direct hit and becomes encased in a bubble. (They bear an uncanny resemblance to a certain quartet quite notable during the British Invasion of the 1960s rock scene. How odd!) As it develops, they are Pepperland’s protectors, since the Blue Meanies are practically allergic to music and good cheer.

A conquering horde – an imaginative cast of figures – descends on the place, led by a campy chief and his sidekick Max. Their most fearsome Wunderwaffe is a blue glove jetting around and smashing things. Bit by bit, the defenseless town gets turned to stone. The once-colorful Pepperland becomes gray, and its inhabitants are motionless statues. The venerable mayor, the last of a rapidly dwindling string quartet, sends an elderly captain off to summon help. This sole survivor runs to a ziggurat and escapes in – as one might well guess – a yellow submarine parked at the apex. Of course, this begins the first music video comprising the film.

What are we to make of the Blue Meanies? The film’s bad guys are kind of all over the place. They’re “blueish” but also later contemplate escaping to exile in Argentina. I really could take some cheap shots here, but perhaps it wouldn’t go too far out on a limb to say they vaguely represent a kind of soulless modernity. They’re aggressive, unpleasant, and hate anything beautiful, but otherwise are generic bad guys. Thus, they’re not too different from the overbearing Vogons of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams.

The yellow submarine arrives in Liverpool. Overall the city looks quite bleak. (Things would get much worse in coming years thanks to globalization. As Roger Waters would put it later, what happened to the postwar dream?) The captain picks up the morose Ringo Starr. He gathers his mates, which turns out to be a crazy adventure of its own.

They take off in the submarine – capable of flight somehow – and cross dizzying British landscapes, finally splashing down near London Bridge. Submerging back into the Mersey Estuary would’ve been much closer than the Thames, of course, but this doesn’t have to make sense! (They haven’t yet explained how Pepperlanders breathe underwater, or perform on musical instruments designed for air, but run with it here. . .) As it happens, they’re about to take the long way around down below too. . .

Jules Verne with a Couple of Magic Sugar Cubes Added

Now that the Call to Adventure has been accepted, the band is all together now – of course, setting the theme for another music video featuring the yellow submarine following along with some very imaginative fish. They pass into the Sea of Time, good for another video as they traverse a warp bubble. Next up is the Sea of Science, featuring the little-known “Only A Northern Song.” The visuals are, well, something else – flickering oscilloscope lines, a box flashing in alternate frames between green and orange, and is that an anachronistic Barney the Purple Dinosaur? Well, almost. The much-unappreciated Barney gets on board and is ejected moments later. This leads into the Sea of Monsters, and I can’t help thinking of the “summon bigger fish” scene from the much-unappreciated Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace.

It gets remarkably surreal. For one thing, there’s a time when the entire scene is swallowed up by the underwater suck-beast. They come out the other side of the singularity into the Sea of Nothing. There, they encounter Jeremy Hillary Boob Ph.D., who is more or less a polymath Renaissance man from Cloud Cuckoo Land. That is to say, he’s a real nowhere man – cue another music video! Ringo persuades his mates to take the woebegone fellow on board. They emerge from the nothingness into some phantasmoragic Foothills of the Headlands – which happens to be a land of heads. Unfortunately, the yellow submarine zooms off after an impromptu repair, stranding the Fab Four and Jeremy. The good news is that they’re in for an absolutely amazing video!

“Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” is set to an animation in bright and rapidly changing colors, mostly of dancing ladies. (That makes sense, after all, as Deep Purple would have it, Lucy is a dancer.) Overall the video is quite enchanting. It’s hardly a secret that the dreamy song with profoundly surreal lyrics had a subtext about a common psychedelic substance of the time, which apparently is nowhere to be found by now. (Do kids these days prefer bath salts or something?) For anyone back in the early days who watched the movie in enhanced mode, I would suppose that the colors were flying off the screen! Still, the video doesn’t clue in the viewer about the subtext. Therefore, your kid brother can watch it without being tempted to smoke banana peels or get hooked on flesh-eating zombie horse tranquilizer.

Then they get sneezed into the Sea of Holes. That’s just it – a landscape of endless holes. Ringo peels one off, and if you’ll listen closely, you’ll hear the slide racking for Chekhov’s Gun. A Blue Meanie happens to be poking around too, and he nabs Jeremy. By accident, The Beatles find the hole that transports them into the Sea of Green, and then they’re dropped off in Pepperland. Soon after, the yellow submarine returns to the ziggurat.

Putting Things Right Again

The mayor, although turned to stone by a shower of weaponized green apples, is revived quickly with a few bars of music. Occupied Pepperland is in pretty bad shape. The inhabitants are all stoned, and not in the giggly way. Those who are starting to come out of their torpor get another green apple of petrification dropped on them. A crowd menaced by pistol-footed Meanies does manage to overcome paralysis enough to cut and run, only to be pursued by the flying glove.

The Beatles sneak deeper into Pepperland to raid the depot where the captured musical instruments are under guard. Things don’t exactly work as planned! After some misadventures, they infiltrate the town itself and perform “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” amidst the statues. During this video, Pepperland comes alive again. The Blue Meanies find themselves in disarray.

At this point, I should mention a word about the costuming. Many of the ladies are in Victorian clothing, a surprising contrast to the more minimalistic fashions popular in the late 1960s. (At the time the film came out, the Victorian era indeed was within living memory for some of these blessed seniors!) The effect was modest but eye-catching, actually quite touching. Miniskirts and plunging necklines certainly didn’t go back then, but a pretty dress and a devastating smile worked wonders. In the game of romance, the “less is more” principle often applies.

Then the chief Meanie sends off the flying glove to “oblueterate” the newcomers responsible for the uprising. This begins a video for “All You Need Is Love.” (I should add that although it’s a sweet sentiment, it’s simply not literally true. After all, love doesn’t pay the bills.) The Blue Meanies do manage to regroup for a counterattack, leading to the video for “Hey Bulldog,” a catchy song that oddly didn’t catch on and doesn’t get much airplay. I don’t remember that one from when I saw the movie during my misspent youth, and apparently it was a restored scene.

Epilogue

The Blue Meanie horde is routed, leaving behind the despondent chief and Max. John Lennon (who else, right?) invites them over. “Won’t you join us? Hook up and otherwise commingle.” Jeremy, recently freed, makes the chief sprout roses, and more or less convinces him to be a better kind of blue. Following that is the trippendicular video for “It’s All Too Much,” featuring the Pepperlanders and Blue Meanie hordes conducting a rave near the ziggurat. The film ends with a cameo of the real Beatles.

Not so fast there. Inviting the Blue Meanies for a party before they’ve demonstrated improved behavior? More to the point, what if they take it upon themselves to stay? Like, what possibly could go wrong? In particular, these jokers just conducted an unprovoked invasion of Pepperland. The country was fundamentally transformed to the detriment of the inhabitants. They were never asked, they received no reciprocal benefit from the arrangement, their way of life was overturned, their culture was erased, and their monuments were destroyed. Then they were expected to stand perfectly still for it, or they’d be singled out for immediate punishment. Why does that seem so familiar?

The movie ideologically reflects the hippy dippy Summer of Love. We here have a better understanding, given the aftermath of several disastrous social engineering projects begun around that time. That is, there are certain practical limits to the idea that enough goodwill and mutual understanding can overcome all differences, move past troubled history, and resolve fundamental incompatibilities. This is especially so when one side is bending over backwards, and the other side comes in acting like they own the place. Anyway, I’ll give the movie a break about it, since it doesn’t make an allegory out of this, or deliver a lecture recommending it as a model for immigration policy.

The Final Word

All told, 1968 was quite turbulent. The Cold War was a dark shadow across the world. Moreover, it had opened up an ideological battleground amidst the home front. Radicalism came close to reaching the boiling point in many parts of the world that year. The Beatles themselves were aligned with this Counterculture and quite prominent within it. Still, as their song “Revolution” indicated, they did stop short – barely – of giving full support to it. (Although this number is all well and good from a musical perspective, I wryly call it the “Beatles Apathy Song,” and some of the lefties back then would’ve concurred.) One version does open the door a smidge for equivocation on all that. A bit maddening, isn’t it?

Even so, in other ways, the late 1960s were incalculably more normal than now. Western Europe wasn’t just an economic zone back then. Instead, its nations were fully sovereign, a tapestry of thriving cultures, with profound uniqueness and a long history. From an outside perspective – that is, we ugly Americans who think The Brady Bunch is high culture – that might seem quaint at times. Still, the distinctiveness is charming, they were blessed to have it, and even a small Operettenstaat up in the hills was a priceless treasure rather than an administrative district.

Other than that, population replacement migration merely had gotten a toehold by that time. (In Britain back then, Enoch Powell wisely spoke out and threw cold water on all that, delaying the descent into today’s nightmare conditions.) Public transit wasn’t a subterranean tour of the Third World. For that matter, the big cities weren’t inhabited by a multicultural goulash, full of identical chain stores everywhere, and with the very same mass culture grade pop music blasting out of loudspeakers from Anchorage to Athens. The halls of power in European capitals are now haunted by tricky globalists and their toadies who fear and hate their authentic citizens, but the problem wasn’t as advanced back then. I don’t think I could make a return trip to London; although I’m just a damn American tourist, my heart would break.

In a certain way, Yellow Submarine stands as a monument to this simpler time. Other than that, despite the Counterculture notoriety surrounding The Beatles, the film itself is squeaky-clean entertainment. (The drug references are quite subtle, stylistic for the most part, and will fly over the heads of those who aren’t in the know already.) I’d say it’s worth a look. All told, a quartet of sophomoric leftist dope fiends from the 1960s – degenerate monkeys, if you will – miraculously inspired a charming and family-friendly movie that’s free of woke crap or other destructive messages. Bravo, you tuneful Liverpudlian primates. Well done indeed!