I first watched Yesterday last night.

You know, that movie in which a failed singer wakes up from an accident to find nobody else recalled The Beatles.

I wake up every day in a world in which a lot of people have come to love the GNU operating system, but think a Jack Malik from Finland wrote it, even though he came clean about it from the very beginning!

Unlike the movie, everyone's forgetfulness is not caused by a weird worldwide blackout, but by a very well-funded disinformation campaign.


Spoilers of the movie follow. You have been warned.


I was quite disappointed at the end, when he decided to publish on the Internet all of the Beatles' songs misattributed to him, as if contributing them to the public domain. Given that manager, in the unlikely hypothesis that he could unilaterally release the songs to the public like that, the consequences would have been a lot different. Instead of ending up with a simple life as a school teacher, as hollywood would have it, he would have ended up even more famous, and got a lot of work singing all over the world. Maybe he wouldn't have enriched the manager quite as much. But, coming from hollywood, such an ending would be too subversive, I suppose.

Another bit of surprise was how he accepts the notion that, after the accident, he recalls something that the rest of the world doesn't. I suppose most people would doubt their own recollections of an alternate reality that nobody else shared (he got his head hit hard, after all!), and end up concluding that they were some kind of injury-induced dream, and that the songs, brilliant as they were, came to them in that dream and have thus been composed by their own injured mind. No conscience drama, but a lot less interesting of a story ;-)

So blong,