The protagonist of the new film Yesterday is a failing singer-songwriter who gets hit by a bus and wakes up in the hospital to find himself in a sort of alternative reality in which the Beatles were never a band. The singer-songwriter remembers all of their music that never was. His career, needless to say, improves.
This sort of thing has long been the stuff of science fiction. It can be a big “What if?” For example: What if Hitler had been the first to get his hands on nukes? (The Man in the High Castle) Or it can be a medium-sized change in the reality we know: What if an anomaly in time finds a modern tank crew throwing in with Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn? (The Twilight Zone episode “The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms”) Or even the smallest of alterations: One might ask how the world would be different if 66 million years ago a butterfly had its already brief butterfly life shortened, squished under a time traveler’s boot.
That last one is an essential sci-fi short story by Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder.” Imagine that Ernest Hemingway had written “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with a T. rex dinosaur instead of a lion. Oh, and yes, with a time machine. Bradbury posits that small changes to the past can make for catastrophic changes to the present. And it conforms to the general sci-fi consensus that time travel is a very, very bad idea.
As odd as it may be to call a pop-religious fantasy a work of science fiction, that is what It’s a Wonderful Life is. Just look at how different the world is without George Bailey. There are the ruined individuals, of course: Mr. Gower, the pharmacist, becomes a rummy ex-convict; Ma Bailey is no longer the soul of generosity but has become careworn and hard; little Zuzu has never existed at all.
But the impact on particular people is nothing compared to the transformed town. Charming Bedford Falls has become seedy Pottersville, a ramshackle neon-lit conglomeration of dime-a-dance spots, pawn shops, burlesque theaters, and cocktail lounges.
It’s not all bad, of course. The staid Martini’s restaurant becomes a rough-and-tumble bar called Nick’s where Meade “Lux” Lewis is pounding out rambunctious barrelhouse stride piano. Would I trade a polite spaghetti spot for a tough joint serving “hard drinks … for men who want to get drunk fast?” If it got me Lewis at the keys, you bet.
Which brings us back to the topic of music. Where the movie Yesterday lost me was in its assumption that the world without the Beatles could be exactly as it was with them. If the untimely demise of a butterfly can have ripples that reverberate 66 million years later, just imagine how different our own time would be without the mania for John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Rock ‘n’ Roll may have originated in the U.S., but by the early ’60s it was losing steam. Consider that in every week of December 1963, just before Beatlemania struck America, the No. 1 hit on the Billboard singles chart was “Dominique” by the Singing Nun.
A few random changes that made themselves felt immediately, a few with long tails. The West Coast jazz fad for crew cuts was kaput. For that matter, so was the fad for West Coast jazz. There was the “Summer of Love,” inconceivable without Sgt. Pepper’s, the countercultural ramifications of which are still being felt, both for good and ill. For good: Would we have the radical inventiveness of Silicon Valley if it weren’t for the creativity of late-’60s Bay Area culture? For bad: Would we have the lethal epidemic of illicit narcotics that has plagued the nation for decades if it weren’t for the Fab Four’s trippy soundtrack (and example)?
A world without the Beatles would be dead grotty (in the immortal words of George Harrison) and in a million strange ways that have nothing obvious to do with music. See how many you can imagine. Just please stay away from the time machine. Those things are dangerous.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
