Danny Boyle's "Yesterday": A manifesto of late capitalism

Danny Boyle's Yesterday is an unwitting but perfect allegory of the cultural stagnation of late capitalism.



I cannot help thinking Danny Boyle's film Yesterday is a kind of late capitalist manifesto. Not just a repackaging of pop myths (like recent consumer-friendly biopics such as Straight Outta Compton, Rocket Man and Bohemian Rhapsody) but actually a clear declaration of subordination to the cultural stagnation that capitalism has engendered.

Not only that, the movie can also be seen as an unwitting study of the symptoms of this modern stagnation: the need for constant regurgitation, the warping of authenticity and authorship, the institutionalized homeopathic school of thought that thinks mere dilution of arts – a chain of commercially motivated, derivative art based on art – can be passed off as progress and continued forever.

Yesterday (aptly named) is a fantasy of amnesiac nostalgia. It conveys the atrophied dreams of late capitalism as far as culture goes: to be a thief without anyone noticing. The main character of the movie stumbles upon a parallel universe where he is able to hit this late capitalist jackpot and find a shortcut to stadrom – to be the Beatles before the Beatles.

One thing that especially bothers me is that the movie seems to lack the self-awareness to question its sole premise: that the value of the Beatles' discography could be transported without a hitch into modern age, into today's cultural climate. It is both Boomer arrogance of the highest order and total capitalist myopia. I don't know which is worse.

The utter foolishness and naivety of this presumption (not to mention the underlying capitalist hubris of it) is astounding. As if the sheer value of The Beatles' music – totally removed from the cultural climate the music was being produced in – could so easily be abstracted, reassessed and then milked with no problems whatsoever. The listeners and pop fans, now looking up to the likes of Migos, Cardi B and Kanye, can be, in Yesterday's world, wooed with "I wanna hold your hand". Simply because these platonically perfect songs are just so good. The whole 60s can be brushed off them like dandruff and, lo, nothing of value is lost. The cuban heels and the long hair, the anxious shrieking of socially repressed young girls, the revolution in "Revolution", in Boyle's Yesterday nothing of it matters. Nothing matters outside of this perfect commodity, the Beatles song.

It is a fantasy of late capitalist regurgitation par excellence. With a bit of 1984-esque help from an organisation such as Minitrue, this kind of profitable cycle could be made true.

But art isn't meant to be Ouroboros. It should be rooted in real life. It's sole message is: everything changes. Art makes us conscious of the contingent nature of the world. Whether it's the changing light of the day or the constantly morphing forms of beauty.

Art is supposed to be about originality, about taking risks. This is the only way to keep it in motion. Art, by its very nature, is anticapitalist.

Capitalism has always relied on risk-aversion, plagiarization and theft, in the name of cutting costs and maximizing profits. Capital moves in to conquer any field of trade where a new paradigm has been installed and deemed a success. This is why capitalism, by its nature, leads to and aims for monopoly. To be truly original is truly risky – if venture capital rushes to support you, if technocrats and big money openly indulge your whims, you are most likely a mere part of a bubble, a bubble about to burst.

This capitalist aversion to risk can be seen in the dynamics of post-internet pop culture. We live in an age where the most socially valuable semiotic symbols can be made into products and attached to different brands in a heartbeat. The risk is "long" taken when capital comes into play. The right demographics are mapped instantly, the customer profile gets sketched in a millisecond. The symbol, the song, the paragraph, the story is evaluated and promptly commercialized by AI and homo ludens in an unholy matrinomy, a marriage so abusive it has totally enslaved the human part of this covenant. The sad part is, we are all in this together. The market place keeps expanding, invading our social and emotional life, our social and political imagination. Even those who are more suspicious of brands and corporations in the field of culture can't avoid the bombardment of ubiquitous culture. Every day we partake in this society of spectacle and its more and more hierarchic representations – its tyranny of visibility, where visibility is slowly starting to be mistaken for authenticity.

So does it actually matter whether "Yesterday" is credited to McCartney or Ed Sheeran? Who cares if all sentiment can only be traced back to an image of said sentiment, if the outcome is in line with the expectations of value?