The Cathode Ray Mission: I’m Not There and Printing the Legend

One thing to make clear up front: I’ve become obssessed with Bob Dylan over the past year. I’ve listened to all of his studio albums in the order they were released, including the unauthorized 1973 collection of outtakes Columbia put out, dipped into some of the bootleg series and his live records — Spotify tells me that I’ve listened to over 6,000 minutes of Dylan, over 20% of my entire music listening this year. I’ve read contemporaneous reviews of his albums, finding myself mystified by both the hatred for Self Portrait and the excitement for New Morning. I’ve watched the key movies he’s made, he’s starred in, or he’s been the subject of: Hearts of Fire is bad, Masked and Anonymous is strangely engaging, Renaldo and Clara is alternately confounding and electric, Don’t Look Back is essential, No Direction Home is greatly insightful, Rolling Thunder Revue is a ton of fun (missing is Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which Dylan composed the soundtrack for and plays a small role in). I haven’t yet read Dylan’s books, but I can’t imagine it’ll be long until I do. Point being that I’ve become intimately familiar with the story and the work of Bob Dylan, and any traditional biopic approaching the man’s life and career I would end up watching, but mostly out of an academic sense of seeing how key moments are translated to film, how this titanic figure of American culture could be illustrated to make sense of his genius.

Except that’s an impossible task, and what makes I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s 2007 fictional assemblage of Dylan’s biography, so great is that it knows that. In merely the first decade of Dylan’s career, he went from scruffy Woody Guthrie fanboy kicking around Greenwich Village, to the voice of change and protest singing at the March on Washington, to international rock star decried as “Judas!” by his biggest fans, to a reclusive crooner playing country songs in Nashville and tending to his farm in Woodstock, to already being washed-up, myopic, out of touch, and primed for the cycle of critical/commercial disappointment-to-career revival that would come to characterize a lot of the discourse of his mid-to-late career; the following five decades(!) only continue to spin any semblance of a coherent arc to his life into corkscrews. Dylan is famously very private, so any attempt at ascribing intentions to his actions is speculative at best, but one of his most striking qualities that appears in his public life is how radically and often contradictorily he alters himself, changing musical styles, clothes, personalities, at one point even religions from one stage appearance to the next (Roger Ebert writes in his review, “If you made a biopic with Dylan played by the same actor all the way through, it might become the portrait of a shape-shifting schizophrenic.”). This is one of the great appeals of him as an artist, the task of putting together his puzzle has even birthed an entire cottage industry of music criticism, but it also reveals a person that has been tethered to the times and the culture around him and just wants to get away, never able to do so completely.

Todd Haynes is a director that knows how to handle a personality crisis. His 1998 film Velvet Goldmine was a fictionalized chronicle of the 1970s glam rock scene, David Bowie in particular, and how he both empowered queer audiences as an iconic figure of sexual transgression and instrumentalized them as a marketing tool; his 1995 film Safe follows a Los Angeles housewife undergoing a strange affliction, ultimately abandoning her family and being subsumed into a New Age-style therapeutic cult. The tactic he takes for I’m Not There is nothing short of a brilliant rebuttal to the dull biopic formula that has been iterated ad nauseum. Instead of attempting to contain Dylan’s paradoxical multitudes in a single contiguous persona, the biography fractures into six distinct, lightly fictionalized entities, all played by different actors: the young Black boy “Woody Guthrie” (Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the rails with his acoustic guitar and playing anachronistic folk tunes; Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), a troubadour who came on the New York folk scene a naturally gifted poet, giving words to the feelings of his time; Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett, genuinely one of the best casting decisions of all time), a dazed and confused rock star on a thankless tour of England; Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), a rising star actor in a disintegrating marriage with a French artist (Charlotte Gainsbourg); Billy McCarty (Richard Gere), a former outlaw living quietly in a rural hamlet; and tying it all together is Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), a young man monologuing before a panel of some sort. The film is structured nonlinearly, cutting between each chapter sometimes with clear reason, sometimes not. Every chapter takes a different stylistic approach as well, from the sharp black and white of Jude’s story to the faux-documentary of Jack’s to Robbie’s more austere domestic dramatics.

Part of what I find so appealing here is that Haynes is clearly a nerd about this whole world he’s looking at. Seeing Jack’s story mimic No Direction Home’s mixture of interviews (complete with Julianne Moore playing a Joan Baez facsimile) and archival footage (including replications of Dylan’s first local TV interview and his disastrous Emergency Civil Liberties Committee award speech) is a total delight. Jude’s chapter pays homage to classic European arthouse cinema, 8 1/2 and the films of Bergman in particular, on top of being in itself a kind of loose retelling of Don’t Look Back. Billy’s chapter behaves like a sort of coda to Peckinpah’s film, on top of a somewhat surreal bend that recalls more of Fellini, if not some of Dylan’s own songs, specifically what he recorded on The Basement Tapes. The intertextual references of course include a lot of Dylan’s work, in ways that are both superficial (Robbie’s star-making turn is in a film called Every Grain of Sand, named for the Shot of Love closer; Jack’s album covers clearly recall Dylan’s early records) and more in-depth (Robbie and his wife Claire reenact the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album cover, but only seen looking down from a window overhead, suggesting Claire to be not only an analog of Dylan’s first wife Sara Lownds, but of his girlfriend on the cover of Freewheelin’, Suze Rotolo; Jack ends up becoming a pastor, alluding to Dylan’s own Evangelical Christian turn in the late ’70s and aligning that turn on a continuum with his early folk singer persona). The breadth of events from Dylan’s life that are replicated is impressive, but there’s hardly any effort to illuminate what is and is not invention, either you know or you don’t. I knew a lot of what’s what, but I’m sure I missed quite a bit; to someone coming to this with little knowledge of Bob Dylan besides some of his songs, I have to imagine the whole affair is completely impenetrable. When Jude and his band open up their instrument cases, pull out machine guns and start spraying at the folk festival crowd, that hit me as a brilliantly clever abstraction of Dylan plugging in the electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, but to someone without the context to understand what Haynes is referring to it probably just comes off as a digressive moment of surrealism. However, I don’t think this is a failure on the part of Haynes or the film. Not all movies need to be accessibly understood by everyone, and especially a movie about a subject as complex as Bob Dylan could not stop to explain itself without missing the point and flattening out completely.

The point, of course, is right there in the title, I’m Not There. The play with structure, with reference and pastiche, is an attempt at forming a postmodern biographical approach, less about relating the events of a person’s life in coherent order than of using those events to form a complex web of fact and fiction to better inform the meaning of this person than either mode could suffice on their own (to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, it’s more rhizomatic than the traditional biography’s arborescent, hierarchical nature). The resulting portrait strikingly illustrates how Dylan is simultaneously someone who is both shaping the context that informs his identity, while also trying to escape those contexts and not be beholden to the expectations of others or the cultural currents. Of course those efforts are in vain, as you can never really remove yourself from the culture around you, especially someone with as large a profile as Dylan. What we see then are the frustrations with this failure manifesting in different filmic ways. Jude’s chapter mimics 8 1/2 fairly directly at some points, calling to mind that film’s self-reflexive picture of an artist at a total creative dead-end with the entire world watching; Robbie grows dissatisfied with his domestic bliss, leading to the breakup of his marriage; Woody rides the rails and invents numerous backstories for himself until his real past comes calling for him, similarly to Billy, who is literally someone that has run away and is hiding out off the map, except when the man that’s been hunting him for his whole life turns up threatening the town. As far as he might be able to go in any given direction, he can’t disappear completely.

There’s a pattern that emerges in Dylan’s life of self-invention and self-mythologization, whether that be in his music or in his public appearances or whatever other vector that he is presented. Even his most obviously personal work, Blood on the Tracks, is deflected as being “inspired by Chekhov.” There’s always been a distance between Dylan and those that observe him which has led to a lot of tension with Dylan as a superstar artist throughout his career, and Haynes provides an assist in further clouding that perception, literalizing the idea that Dylan is not the same person from one moment to the next. He wears a series of rotating masks designed to obscure efforts to identify who the real person is behind Dylan’s facade; the simple fact that those efforts miss is that maybe the masks are all there are.