Yesterday, The Beatles and the Assetisation of Art

Though I’m not a particularly big fan of the Beatles or Danny Boyle’s filmography, I was looking for something low-stakes on Netflix a couple months ago and ended up watching the movie Yesterday (2019). I didn’t go into it expecting much, but the movie somehow ended up worming its way into my brain so I felt I should write a bit about it for my first post. Yesterday is an interesting case study for what Mayanne and I want to get across with our writing for Labour of Love–helping us to understand impact of production from both an aesthetic level (what we see onscreen) and a political level (how the movie is actually made), and the murky intersections between the two.

To start, I need to give some context. In the movie, Himesh Patel plays Jack, a struggling musician living in a small coastal town in Suffolk. Prior to the events of the movie, he’s quit his full-time job as a secondary school teacher to commit himself to his dream of making it big while working a part-time gig at a warehouse to make ends meet. One day, while playing a cover of the song ‘Yesterday’ for his friends, Jack is surprised by their claim that they’ve never heard of the song or the Beatles. Upon investigating further, he realises that no one has heard of the band—overnight, the Fab Four have been mysteriously erased from history, and the world’s collective memory. This discovery leads Jack to take it upon himself to recreate their songs to the best of his ability by trying to remember the lyrics and melodies, releasing tracks of the ones he’s able to perfect. With this ‘stolen’ music, Jack begins to achieve success, gaining a local following and eventually landing a prime gig opening on Ed Sheeran’s tour.

Unsurprisingly, the Beatles songs that Jack is able to recall are their biggest hits, performing tracks like ‘Let It Be,’ ‘Help!,’ and ‘All You Need Is Love.’ But doing so is an act of decontextualisation, as there is no reason why these songs should exist within Jack's artistic oeuvre. The Beatles were obviously not just four soulless music machines, but a group of people located within a specific history and social context. According to the logic of Yesterday, however, the music—or rather, the melodies and lyrics of the Beatles—are good enough on their own to draw people in. (Sure, ‘In My Life’ and ‘She Loves You’ might be universal crowdpleasers, but the idea of Jack releasing ‘Piggies’ or ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ as singles to everyone’s rightful confusion is very funny to me.) In other words, the songs of the Beatles exist to become a product. In the world of Yesterday, the Beatles are only of interest insofar as their music is ripe for assetisation—personhood and context become all but irrelevant.¹ Art is transformed into an asset, its significance reduced to something that can be bought and sold.

This brings us to the question of intellectual property, and more specifically copyright. By assetising art, companies or people can make money off of its use. Advocates of copyright argue that this is a way to protect the work of artists. After all, if one were to create an original work, it would be unfair for someone to simply copy it to reap the profits: artists rely on copyrights to protect the income they generate.

That's fine enough, but copyright is an extremely difficult concept to demarcate. This is because while originality is what gives a work value under a copyright, all art exists within larger cultural contexts. When everything is inspired by (or rather, is derivative of) existing culture and history, how does one determine whether something is 'copied' or not? So figuring out what constitutes 'theft' versus 'inspiration' is an extremely complicated and politicised process. Under the logic of assetisation, originality is just a legal concept used to identify the parameters of an artwork to leverage for profit–an extremely reductive view of the creative process.² It turns out that while neoliberalism purported to endorse the supremacy of the free market, it was actually always about creating pathways to ownership and monopolisation.

The movie Yesterday as a product is obviously affected by intellectual property rights. While Danny Boyle and screenwriter Richard Curtis are reasonably famous names and can draw an audience in their own right, Yesterday’s main selling point was clearly the band’s music–which the film’s producers paid a whopping $10 million to licence, nearly 40% of the movie’s $26 million budget. For a non-franchise movie without any major star actors, Yesterday did extremely well at the box office, raking in $150 million worldwide. It’s not a reach to assume that this was due in large part to its familiar soundtrack.

But what I found even more interesting was how the politics of copyright ended up affecting the narrative of the movie itself. Yesterday makes Jack out to be a pretty reluctant character. Initially enticed by the prospect of getting more attention to his work as a musician by playing Beatles songs, Jack ends up clearly dissatisfied and uncomfortable when actually achieving mild fame. In a different movie, Jack could’ve been portrayed as an enterprising asshole who takes the Beatles’ music in rabid pursuit of fame and fortune—only to learn a lesson in humility and the importance of generating his own, original work. Or maybe one where everyone ends up remembering the Beatles and their music midway through the movie, rendering Jack a fraud.

Writing Jack as wholly sympathetic is a problem for the movie because it ultimately tries to have it both ways. Jack is clearly broke, but money is never addressed—the character is only propelled by a desire for an audience. Under capitalism, I’d argue that it’s impossible to detangle the desires of attention and money from each other. But the movie is so resistant to turning itself into a parable of greed that it ends up being an implausible narrative about a guy who is simultaneously self-serving to the extent that he’s willing to steal from other artists, but also so modest that he is perfectly content to continue living in his parents’ home. By attempting to divorce the Beatles' music from its status as an asset in the narrative, Yesterday tries in vain to gloss over the realities of Jack's desires and socioeconomic status.

Yesterday isn’t an actively malicious movie, but it does inadvertently highlight the problems that the presence of intellectual property creates both in the real world and within storytelling itself. People obviously like to complain about properties like those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the prototypical example of derivative, IP-driven filmmaking. In that view, Hollywood seems to be more concerned with making as much money as possible by remaking the same superhero movies over and over instead of telling new stories. But Yesterday is a reminder that IP's dominance extends far beyond the likes of Iron Man and Wonder Woman, affecting both the funding and production of films and their narratives.

The problem is that if we primarily continue to frame copyright as a way for artists to feed themselves, we ignore the many ways assetisation destroys creativity in the long run. The political solution is clearly to work toward building a world in which artists don’t have to rely on assetisation to survive. In Yesterday, Jack’s original, pre-Beatles songwriting is shown to be pretty middling and unimpressive—but it’s his work. I want to live in a world where Jack and every other artist out there feels free to write shitty songs for an audience of their four friends without worrying about their power going out. I think someone like Jack had the luxury of time and resources to truly hone his craft, he could maybe one day reach Beatles-level heights of artistry of his own accord.

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1  Not to mention other basic building blocks of a song like production and musicianship.

2  It’s notable that Ed Sheeran himself has a significant role in the movie, as he has become victim to this conservative line of thinking in real life. In 2022, Sheeran was sued by the Ed Townsend estate, which argued that he had copied the sheet music for the Marvin Gaye song ‘Let’s Get It On’ (which Townsend had co-written) for the song ‘Thinking Out Loud.’ Sheeran demonstrated in court that what he’d ‘copied’ was a matter of simple chord progressions, a fundamental building block in almost all pop music. I’m not a fan of Sheeran’s pretty bland output but I felt for him in this situation, which he rightfully found to be unfair and insulting. Thankfully, he won the lawsuit.