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Yellow Submarine (1968)
Director: George Dunning
I always wondered about the meaning of this seemingly nonsensical song. What the heck could they mean when they said, "We all live in a yellowish submarine," and "all we need is sky of blue and sea of green"?
What's more, it was made into a full, lengthy animated feature film using psychedelic colours and wavy lines. Initially, I thought it was a children's song. Over the years, I came to understand it was no child's play.
The song, Yellow Submarine, and the movie are satirical depictions of modern society. It showed the dark side of modern society; how people run their lives as ignorant fools, controlled by people in power and probably big corporations.
In summary, the story is about the spoilsport brads, the Blue Meanies, who abhor the colour and cheery atmosphere of Pepperland. Its leader bamboozled his way to shoot down and drain off all the colour of the land, changing it into a drab shade of grey. One of the residents managed to escape Pepperland in a yellow submarine to ask for help. Who comes to their rescue but no other than the wise-cracking, word-playing, nerdy-joke-filled members of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band, aka the Beatles.
The whole is filled with tongue-in-cheek one-liners that the Gen Zs and millennials would call lame. For example, in one scene, Ringo is told not to pull a lever but does so anyway, replying, "can't help it I'm a born lever-puller," which sounds just like “I'm a born Liverpooler.”
It starts with a rather melancholic song, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, which tells about a rather lonely lady who spends all her time serving the church. A self-conceited pastor writes sermons that nobody listens to. When Eleanor dies, she dies a lonely death. Missed by no one. Even the pastor who handled her ceremony, Father McKenzie, seemed so impersonal. To him, she is just another dead body that needed to be buried. Nobody was saved in a theological sense. They are just trying to illustrate the futility of man's conviction that a personal God is looking after us and that, by serving Him, we would be saved.
Interspersed between scenes are examples of lonely people apparently indulging in purposeless activities like binge eating and playing with pets.
Even though, according to The Beatles, Paul McCartney was supposed to have written a whimsical children's song for Ringo Starr to sing, its contents are deep into psychology and higher-level thinking. There are even a lot of ink blot charts, which are part of the Rorschach Test to uncover personality characteristics, emotional functioning and thought processes. There is even a mention of the nuances of time expansion theory, which is no child's play. Lines like 'he's so smart, he doesn't know what doesn't know' must surely be a veiled reference to Socrates' 'I know that I know nothing'.
Most people in their 20s do not really bother about ageing. But not the Beatles. McCartney allegedly wrote the song 'When I am 64!' when he was 14. The 'Nowhere Man' may have reference to Maharishi, the Beatles' spiritual guru at one time. The Guru is supposedly all-knowing about the Universe, but in reality, he does not have all the answers. 'Sitting in his nowhere land, Making all his nowhere plans for nobody' seems apt for a man sitting in the Himalaya telling people how to live life. In reality, 'He’s as blind as he can be, just sees what he wants to see….' Someone with all the intellectualism without an emotional connection is going nowhere.
In the story, the Blue Meanies, implying the evil forces of the world, probably people in power, political leaders and clergymen, were just draining the colours of our lives and turning us into grey, uninteresting, lifeless statues. Clearly, the people of Pepperland needed 'Help!'.
So, the Beatles saves the day not with violence, but with lots of love (All you need is Love), with 'A Little Help from My Friends', and in the true fashion of the 60s with a little flash of psychedelia (in the sky of blue and land of green and Strawberry Fields). Flashes of green and blue seem to be prevalent in an acid trip.
Yellow is the colour of fear, and a submarine submerges in the crypts of the cold dark seas. The reference here is that the mean-meaning Blue Meanies are hellbent on sending mankind into submission. Love, music and art are the saviours to overcome oppression, conformity and emotional isolation.
Farouk Gulsara (asokansham@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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