January 27, 1969
Tlie N. C. Essay
Page 4
mP ' SUBWRINE
(aon 't from p. 3)
then does he admit: "Well, the
Bluebird of Happiness is my cousin."
His metamorphosis has begun.
So much is going on at any one
point in the film that the audience
is forced—in the manner of pro
grammed learning—to select from the
abundance of action and image. The
house in which the Beatles live con
sists of a long corridor with in
numerable doors lining either side.
As if on signal, whenever the cor
ridor is clear of Beathles or Young
Fred—who is old—dozens of weirdly
shaped creatures begin rushing madly
out of one door into another. Snails
with candy-striped shells, boxes
with faces on them, clocks with legs
a lightning bolt with an arrow
shaped tip. It might take five, or
seven or ten viewings to catalogue
them all.
At no time have the writers
fallen back on the obvious or the
predictable. When you are absolute
ly sure they are going to use some
thing — the song "Fixing A Hole"
ought to have been in the Sea of
Holes part — they don't. As Ringo
says, "Anything is possible in
Pepperland."
And the manifold possibilities
are thoroughly exhausted in the pro
cess. The SEa of Time prjects the
science-fiction theme of forward or
backward movement in that dimension.
First the travellers grow younger—
"I wants me mum," bawls Ringo, all
of ten years old; then older, as
their beards grow, and Paul sings
"When I'm Sixty-four." All objects
in the Sea of Time wear clock faces,
and there are hourglasses with the
sand running UP, and statues of
Father Time with balance wheels in
side them. Halfway through the se
quence, the screen lights up with a
printed message, like a computer
read-out, that 64 years is a long
time, but that 64 seconds is also a
long time. The demonstration begins
with the "0" in demonstrate, which
becomes zero. In patterning bor
rowed from digital computers, the
numbers appear in forms and shapes
that invest them with baroque humor.
When ";2" appears, the "1" is normal
but the "2" is a swan. This little
bit of artistic paraphernalia de
pends on both pattern and sequence
recognition as well as the relation
between the shape of the number and
the context employed to make the num
ber funny.
The SEa of Science teaches phy
sics through a model of atomic struc
ture with four Beatles as electrons,
.the submarine as nucleus, and a pur
ple elephant as an anti-particle
which is eventually expelled from the
sub through a trap door. In this
section are geometrical shapes of all
kinds, and an oscilloscope pattern
which makes visible the timbre of
George Harrison's singing. Thus, one
of the film's primary objectives—the
visualization of what the Beatles
have been verbalizing in their music.
A kind of visual onomatopoeia.
HIGH PRIEST
(aon't from p. 2)
simply a different frequency. It
was the most shattering experience
of my life."
Leary see the psychedelic ex
perience in a new light (clear
light). MOre than beautiful hallu
cinations , sudden life insights.
Leary, Western man, representing
thousands of years of logical, aca
demic, Christian, scientific, tech
nological thought, T. Leary, Ph. D.,
watches it all dissolve in vibrant,
flowing mandalas projected by his
retina, his infinite mind, on the
ceiling. A modern rational man
struck by his absurdity.
Nothing is real, and nothing to
get hung about.
The book reflects this simpli
city .
Now ahere is turned-on Leary at,
and where is the (now) crashing Pur
ple Quinn tripper, freaked-out hav
ing seen the world as pure energy?
Language is made visible through
out. Pepperland statuary consists of
words—"Love." The lyrics to a love
song fly about to defend John against
the hideous Flying Glove by forming a
wall, a net, a screen. He forms a
cigarette of the world "glove" where
upon the "g" turns to ash and falls
on the ground, leaving....
The puns in the dialogue are al
most uncountable; whales too old for
schools are from the University of
Wales; "Are you bluish?" asks a
meanie.
"You don't look bluish."
Much as Voltaire disguised soc
ial comment in farce, YELLOW SUB
MARINE concelas significance within
simplicity. The American underground
conceptually somewhere between the
French resistance and the Loyal Op
position, doesn't blow things up, yet
constantly struggles to unseat the
hyprocrisy of the age, to unhinge the
establishment which it sees as the
supporter of inequity. The function
of the underground is to punch holes
in the establishment point of view.
And the way the Pepperland is through
the SEa of Holes. The submarine, too
doesn't behave like an establishment
vessel. It floats on air as well as
water, and it isn't even the right
color. But undersea is as good as
underground.
The establishment is further
mocked, in the blueness of the mean-
ies, and the grey/beige of their en
vironment, all coincidentally, de
pending on the locale, the colors of
police uniforms. The Mickey-Mouse
ears on the subservient meanies
makes overt comment on the relation
ship of those with power to those
without, to say nothing of what that
reveals of the film's attitude
towards Disney.
Forther consider the thesis
that the blue meanies' invasion of
Pepperland relates to any invasion
Gwendlyn Patricide
cobweb and cyenide
false teeth
a wig
and a glass eyeball too
Gwendlyn Patricide
uncanny and very snide
reminds
one of
a sickly shrew
Gwendlyn Patricide
hopes she will be
your bride
gnashing her gums
and waiting
for you!
Barbara Stein
of one group or country bey another—
Russia and Czechoslovakia. Max, as
sistant to the chief meanie, speaks
with a Balkan accent.
The only other ' non-human char
acter of any significance is a pom
pous, portly, polyglot animal named
Jeremy Hilarv Boob, Phd.
Spouting poetry and inappro
priate latin— "ad hoa and quid pro
quo/so" little time, so much to
know"— he represents the pseudo
intellectual, the shallow pedant who
talks without thinking and writes
without knowing. (Parenthetically,
John's attempts to explain things
via Einstein's theory of relativity
is hooted down by his comrades, in
dicating a rejection of overexplain
ing—Occam's razor?—because, after
all, all you need is love). Jeremy
the Boob inhabits the totally blank
white space where the rescuers find
themselves after the vacuum-cleaner
moster—Super-Consumer satirized—
has absorbed everything in sight,
including the entire landscape.
"Nowhere Man" is therefore literally
nowhere. The song naturally follows
while the Boob spins on an empty
turntable—a visual pun on the music-
the BEatles weave paths of multi-
hued flowers around him. He is
later reclaimed as a bona-fide den-
zen of Pepperland because, in spite
of skepticism on the part of the
others, Ringo takes him along. Be
cause Ringo is the one who most
clearly shows a non-discrimination
acceptance—another word for love.
The blue meanies are vanquished
with the formula that consists of
love, music, flowers and acceptance,
brining the life and color back to
Pepperland. Tliematically, these
elements are so woven into the fab
ric of the film that there doesn't
seem to be a frame without them.
For scholars the possibilities for
analysis are golden. For children,
there will be no difficulty enjoying
and understanding it. The flexibil
ity here is the vision of an unfet
tered mind — the young mind. And
there is no reason in the world why
a submarine shouldn't be yellow.
Is there?