Yesterday is a pretty simple concept, and a fairly simple movie overall. Anyone that’s heard the movie gets the basic concept. A failing musician (Himesh Patel) gets hit by a bus and the rest of the world forgets everything about the Beatles. Its a simple enough concept, but it forgot one of the basic rules of storytelling.
CHEKOV’S GUN
Chekov’s gun is a practice in a lack of excess. The basic idea is that if there is a gun hanging on the wall, then a character has to take it down and fire it. Now, the purpose of the gun doesn’t have to be so explicit. It can inform the audience about a character’s violent nature, or serve as a dire bit of foreshadowing. The point is, the gun has to have a point in the story. If something doesn’t have a point, it shouldn’t be in the story. What does this have to with Yesterday? Well two things…
OASIS SIDEBAR
Before getting into the good stuff, a little sidebar on the band Oasis. When Jack first discovers that no one remembers the Beatles, he runs off to do a Google search. He finds no sign of the Beatles, but finds other musicians, like the Rolling Stones and Childish Gambino, to be completely intact. Then, he searches Oasis and finds nothing. Its a funny little jab at Oasis being Beatles rip offs, but opens a huge can of worms.
I don’t pretend to know too much about music, but I know that the Beatles have a wide and long lasting impact on a huge amount of music, from pop to rock to metal and beyond. The logic of the movie seems to be that everyone forgets about the Beatles, but their influence and impact remains. Like the past wasn’t changed at all, and everyone just forgot. Except that Oasis doesn’t exist anymore, due to the fact that the Beatles don’t exist. Perhaps inadvertently, the film makers are saying that the full extent of the influence the Beatles had on popular music is limited to Oasis, and bands like Coldplay or singers like Ed Sheeran would be the exact same without the Beatles.
This Oasis conundrum at least has a purpose in the story. Its a funny, applicable joke that only begins to not make sense if you think about it for too long. Unlike these other two things…
COCA-COLA AND CIGARETTES
Coke and cigarettes. Now, the main conceit of this movie is that after the accident, the Beatles no longer exist. The world is generally the same outside of that point. There are three major discrepancies though. One was previously discussed in Oasis, but the other two is that the mega company Coca Cola and the mega industry of cigarettes both, also, no longer exist.
The big question is what exactly is the point of Coca Cola and cigarettes no longer being around. Coca Cola originated in 1886, and cigarettes have been around since at least the 9th century. That’s a lot older than the Beatles, who formed in 1957. And its not like these were not popular products until the Beatles influenced them to be. They were very popular before any of the Beatles were even born. So, unlike the Oasis reference, I cannot see this being some half baked commentary on the Beatles influence on popular music.
So, first off, Coca Cola. As far as I can remember Coca Cola is mentioned twice. First, when Jack is going to perform Let It Be and second, when Jack is on Ed Sheeran’s private jet. The first mention is purely superfluous. There is absolutely no reason for it that I can find. The second mention is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke. The stewardess on the jet gives Jack a funny look, implying she thought he was ordering cocaine instead of a soft drink. So that’s a purpose. Its a very small purpose. But it still has a purpose.
Cigarettes, on the other hand, have no discernable purpose. Towards the end of the movie, before a large show Jack has to perform. Jack makes a comment about how he would “kill for a cigarette” and his friend Rocky (Joel Fry) says he has no idea what those are. That’s it. No joke, or commentary on anything. It could have been an interesting exacerbating problem to Jack’s story. He could have been going through withdrawal as well as dealing with his newfound fame. However, its just a throwaway line.
WEIGHT
Every story has throwaway lines of dialogue. Mostly empty, vague words of little importance that help the movie along. Not every line can be a perfect masterpiece, and nor should they be. A story without throwaway lines would lack a good amount of connecting tissue that would make the story hard to follow for anyone experiencing it.
The trick is knowing what can be a throwaway and what cannot. Just think of all the Star Trek style science fiction, where a fair amount of the script is techno-babble that doesn’t really mean anything.
“Because of the spinning gravity of the nearby planets are throwing off the rotating black matter thrusters on the ship, we cannot get enough momentum to move forward”
Does any of that sentence make sense? I should hope not, I made it up on the spot as a poorly written example of this throwaway line in science fiction. But does it matter if the audience fully understands this or not? The implication is perfectly clear. “We’re stuck.” That’s what the narrative needs to convey to the audience, and unless it is crucial to the plot, and science mumbo jumbo works just as well as the next.
However, when the entire movie is about the whole world forgetting one thing, there must be a great reason for any other examples of mass amnesia (and I mean reason in the story sense. There has to be some reason in the narrative for something so integral to the plot existing. I’m perfectly okay with the lack of explanation why everyone forgets).
Think of it this way, if you have a story that takes place in tens of rooms, and one of them has a gun in it, does it really need to fire? It should serve some purpose to the narrative, but there are tons of other rooms, so the importance is diminished. But if the story is a contained thriller set in one house or one room, that gun had better go off. There’s no wiggle room of a lack of emphasis, or a proverbial watering down of the walls. If its so important, use it or delete it. The only question is why wasn’t cigarettes and coke used or deleted in Yesterday?
The Sensations of Storytelling 