COME BACK MILLY!
To be a cinephile means to be overwhelmed by the overlooked details in moving pictures, to probe with obsessive concentration, searching for heartbreak in the background. To get over definitions quickly, Wikipedia will do in this case:
As described by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Fremaux, the "definitive essence of cinephila" is a "culture of the discarded" that prefers "to find intellectual coherence where none is evident" and to "eulogize the non-standard and the minor." (Keathley, Christian. Cinephilia and history, or, The wind in the trees. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005.)
And so, watching the revisionist The Beatles Anthology, I was suddenly overwhelmed during the most satisfying colourisation I've yet seen, the clip for All you need is love, featured at the start of Episode 7.
For those with a perverse journalistic/historical bent, I will aver that All you need is love comes towards the end of six month run of absolute perfection for The Beatles, beginning with Strawberry Fields Forever (in my opinion the absolute high watermark of Beatles' creativity), through Sgt Pepper's and on into the Magical Mystery Tour project.
The song and clip functions as a kind of a valedictorian statement for The Beatles (being commissioned and performed to represent England to the World) and the hippie movement (being televised right in the middle of the "summer of love").
We are repeatedly told in The Beatles Anthology that love was the central theme of The Beatles oeuvre. Perhaps so, but let us not be too revisionist: this theme began as (and remained) sexual desire, but sometimes along the way morphed into universal, spiritual love. The maturation of sexual desire into love may be the central narrative in The Beatles' writing. This is made explicit in All you need is love: the "yeah, yeah, yeah" of She Loves You becoming "love, love, love" (and so that no one could miss the connection, John sings She Loves You during the fade out).
Of course it's a great song and the clip is a lot of fun, especially colourised. The close-ups give the impression the whole world is there involved in the hippie love movement, but the wide shots show a lot of empty space around a central, overly crowded area. As well as Mick Jagger clapping along, a beautiful image for cinephiles is a man sitting alone (and quite bored!) behind the scenes, glimpsed through the set. But the punctum is towards the end of the clip. As loved up hippie revellers spread the love in sandwich boards covered in love slogans in various languages, one hippie cannot lose their personal concerns in the universal message and holds up a very tangential message: a sign reading "COME BACK MILLY".
Heartbreak!
One heartbroken hippie is unable to get into the spirit of universal love, and holds up a call from the heart for the TV cameras and the satellites to beam around the world in the vain hope that Milly will see them and the sign, be moved as I was moved, and come home.
Here is the deliberate imperfection, the wabi-sabi of the clip. The other signs will live on, but Milly will either come back or not. One timely, personal dot amidst all these universal, timeless messages makes one question all of them. In hindsight, perhaps unfortunately, the 60s' imperative to "love" looks as dated as "Come back Milly", as if the whole hippie movement made a sign of the imperative tense of "to love" and based an ideology around it.
The "Come back Milly" sign, in context, points more accurately to central themes of The Beatles: personal love amidst universal love, the relationship between selfish and selfless selves.
Universal love is meaningless without personal connections, it is built from the ground to the stars and not the other way, which may be why being told "God loves you" by people you don't like and who don't like you, makes one shudder. From one person to another love can be abstracted to all humanity. But to love humanity and not love any person is misanthropy.
The phrase "come back" also doubles as a plaintive for anything lost, from a lover, to time, to the lost object, and these yearning feelings are evoked by the sign. Grammatically it may be a command, but it always sounds like a helpless beg. In attempting its valedictorian, sweeping statement, All you need is love makes reference to many songs, by and not by The Beatles. But the sign doing its own thing, with its "come back", evokes memories of several Beatles' lyrics, and particularly resonates one song not referenced in All you need is love, a song one hopes Milly will sing:
It's been a long time
Now I'm coming back home
I've been away now
Oh how I've been alone
Wait til I come back to your side
We'll forget the tears we've cried
- Wait, The Beatles, 1965
cause and affect
Being a good cinephile also means being a dutiful scholar, and anyway we all have a perverse journalistic/historical bent, so in preparing this piece I was foolish enough to Google "beatles all you need is love come back milly", only to discover what seems to be the true purpose of the sign, and though there is a cheeky poetry to its pragmatism, I won't ruin it for you.
So often it is more satisfying to find your own meanings and indulge possibilities rather than find the "right" (historical) one. The true purpose of the sign is the historical cause of its being there. But causes only create effects, they do not create affects. Meaning is what happens inside you when you experience something. It may or may not have anything to do with the cause that created the effect that affects you.
Meanings and causes are different countries, they do things differently. This is why cinephiles take such pleasure in the details: they are unchartered territory. And this is the manifesto of the cinephile: create your own meanings.
