Interview
November 2007
with DVD notes to I’m Not There
2008, rewritten 2010
Imagine that, given all the different masks, wardrobes, accents, and gestures Bob Dylan has assumed over the years—the way in which he has seemed to be, moment by moment, almost different people—that he was different people. Each with his own different name, face, motive, passions, way of walking, way of talking—and different destiny. Then the story—of a generation, an era, or merely a single person whose voice other people wanted to hear—could open up in any direction at all. The full range of the imaginative transformation Bob Dylan has for nearly five decades offered the world at large—from Puritan folksinger to drunken Surrealist to born-again Christian to fatalistic traveler, with countless selves in between—could be transferred to an audience, who could then reimagine the story for themselves. Todd Haynes made his film I’m Not There as part of that audience. “You think,” he says, “I’m going to give people the Dylan movie and be very rigorous about trying to convey as many aspects of him as I think are true and recurrent”—but a spirit of play, the thrill of improvising on the spot with actors, musicians, designers, cinematographer, makeup artists, carries your rigorous intentions away. The result is a film with a cakewalk of lead actors, none playing a character who is precisely Bob Dylan—and, just as vitally, a film where no one on the screen is precisely not.
Todd Haynes’s movies get under your skin or they pass right over it. Velvet Goldmine (1998) was seductive from start to finish and I’ve almost never thought of it since. I could hardly bear Safe (1995) and Far from Heaven (2002) when they came out, and few weeks have gone by without some blocked gesture, an uncompleted sentence, crawling out of what I had no intention of ever thinking about again. I’m Not There is different. It’s immediately engaging. It cuts back and forth between different times, stories, protagonists. Music—Dylan’s songs in his own voice, in the voices of the actors, in the voices of the singers the actors are miming—flies through the air like a trapeze artist shooting out of the frame on one side of the screen and returning on the other with a different face and different clothes.
The story of one character is not dependent on the story of another. All of the characters pursue their own fate—often with a crowd professing love or hate pursuing them—independently of each other. Each character’s story reaches a kind of conclusion in a territory none of the others may have ever visited.
Still, nothing is resolved. Perhaps because no character is killed off (there is a motorcycle accident, the rider is laid out on a table, but since we know Bob Dylan is not dead, the scenes communicate as a device, merely literary), not one story ends, or even merely stops, in a manner that’s acceptable, that doesn’t leave you hanging, trying to imagine how it could have come out differently. So you leave the theater ready to talk about the movie, buttonholing the person next to you—but even more than that, you want to see the picture again, right away.
It all moves so fast, there are streams of lines and facial expressions and physical stances no one could catch entire the first time through, and walking away, looking back over your shoulder, you find yourself thinking that maybe what you thought happened isn’t what happened at all. Maybe the citizens of Riddle rush the bandstand and kick Pat Garrett to death. Maybe Jude Quinn gets away clean. Maybe Pastor John will come back to the world—or lead you to accept Jesus into your heart.
Picture yourself taking a figure from postwar culture and contriving an imaginary biography for that person: John F. Kennedy. Philip Roth. Elvis Presley. Marilyn Monroe. Aretha Franklin. Chuck Berry. Elvis Presley. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frank Sinatra. Now imagine that this person, whoever you choose, will be portrayed by numerous persons unlike each other. Young. Old. White. Black. Male. Female.
Right away, you can tell who contains multitudes—and who doesn’t. For some, the idea breaks down in the face of the person it’s supposed to realize. For others, you realize you’ve never had a clue who this person was—and you believe this may be the way to understand, if not who that person actually was, who and what he or she might have been. What the person wanted from his or her time, and what the time wanted from the person.
Who is that person? Throughout the film, there are interludes with Ben Whishaw as a dandy claiming his name is Rimbaud and facing a battery of are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-a-poet inquisitors—but the story truly begins in 1959, with Marcus Carl Franklin as an eleven-year-old African-American boy named Woody. He’s a hobo guitar-player in love with the dust-bowl ballads of the Great Depression and trying to live them out, a dreamer brought up short when a woman who’s taken him in for a decent meal looks him in the eye and tells him to “sing your own time.” He runs, hops a freight, is pitched out of a boxcar by old men as the train passes over a bridge and into a river, where like Pip he sees a whale coming right at him: the rest of the story.
Soon we meet Christian Bale as the early sixties protest singer Jack Rollins, his face all angles and anguish. He is an instant legend so potent that a movie actor named Robbie Clark will become world-famous when he stars in a film about the young conscience of his generation. As Robbie Clark is played by Heath Ledger—and Clark’s wife is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg as a cross between Bob Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, his real-life wife Sara Lowndes, Patti Smith, and, as she has built a persona over the years, Gainsbourg herself—they will together act out a version of the romantic life of a real-life Bob Dylan who is now, already, no longer anything like the owner of his own story.
We meet Christian Bale again, now called Pastor John: Jack Rollins twenty years after he fled to an evangelical ministry in the Gateway Fellowship Church. And then, at first slowly, then with an unstoppable momentum—with Cate Blanchett’s Jude Quinn, a mid-sixties pop star at war with his own audience, and with the dreamlike vertigo of Richard Gere’s Billy the Kid, a hermit living on the outskirts of the dream-town called Riddle—the balance of the film shifts. The play of identities slows, and the pace of characters in trouble, trying to outrun their own fate, takes over.
Blanchett is a marionette in constant motion, an actress scaring her own character as the character, trying to manipulate his own strings, makes history with every fluttering gesture, every errant or loaded word. The sardonic face he tries desperately to keep in place—sometimes hilariously, as he dances before a bigger-than-life statute of Jesus on the cross, crowing “Do your early stuff!” like one of his own angry fans—is turned not forward but backward, as he attempts to keep the flood of the history he has already made and that has made him from sweeping him out of history, his own and anyone else’s. That’s how I’m Not There gets Blanchett’s Jude to a Warhol-like gallery party in 1966 where a huge video screen shows the president of the United States quoting Bob Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues” just like a college student: where, in his own voice, LBJ all but bursts out of the movie like Pecos Bill to thunder “DEATH TO ALL THOSE WHO WOULD WHIMPER AND CRY” and you can’t believe he didn’t say exactly that when he had the chance. Jude collapses, vomits; hustled out of the building and into a waiting limousine surrounded by screaming fans pounding on the windows, he looks straight into the eyes of a woman in the crowd looking straight into his, straight through him, as she lights a match and, without blinking, sets her hair on fire. That, the woman seems to be saying to Jude Quinn, is the real song inside the music you’re making now—the song you’re afraid to sing, the song I’m not afraid of. Over the years, countless people have told Bob Dylan that he said what they felt but couldn’t say, that he gave them a voice. This small, irreducible event is that story—an incident which my memory tells me happened then, though my memory won’t tell me where, why, who did it and to whom—turned back on the singer.
Gere’s performance—and the setting of a small country town where the citizens carry the names of characters in Dylan’s crazy-quilt farrago of the mostly still-unreleased songs from the basement tapes—may be the key to the vitality of the film itself.
“The Billy section,” Haynes says, “enacts one of Dylan’s escapes, one of his retreats from life, from the public glare, which happened throughout his career, and first and most notably in 1967 after his motorcycle crash. And his retreats from public life were also, at times, retreats from modernity, from the urban life”—and so, Haynes says, “you had to have a western.” In his retreats from public life, “Dylan was a wanted man, an outlaw—to me, it wasn’t a huge departure from the real.” But as with the woman setting her hair on fire, it’s a departure big enough to allow the people of Riddle to step out of the basement and tell a story the real Dylan’s songs never contemplated. Here, everyone goes about in masks, one person with a flag painted over one side of his face, another wearing a woven basket around her head. When, to speak at a public gathering, Gere’s Billy puts on a clear plastic mask, it becomes plain that, as in a miniature of the conceit of the film itself, it is only when one can appear as someone else that he or she is free to say what he or she really thinks, to truly use that voice that, here, every character did receive from some now spectral, perhaps altogether mythical figure named Bob Dylan.
The departure from the real is big enough for the reimagining or invention of moments that may go farther into Bob Dylan’s real-life career than any writer, filmmaker, poet, or musician—any fan—has gone before. For me, at least, there is a clarity in Haynes’s film that actual, documented, all but court-adjudicated events have never given up. There are two incidents in Bob Dylan’s career that I’ve never understood: fans booing him at the Newport Folk Festival when he came onstage with a band and played “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and his conversion to Christianity. But on Haynes’s screen they make living sense.
On the West Coast, the reaction of East Coast folkies to Bob Dylan’s new rock ‘n’ roll seemed absurd. Where I lived, where the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were a constant, people wondered not why Dylan had turned his back on folk music, but why it had taken him so long to get on the train. As Haynes restages the Newport crisis, it’s an assault: from both sides. The music that is flung out at the crowd is so nerve-smashing, and so loud—loud on the soundtrack, in decibels, but loud in a deeper manner, as if rising out of some internal rhythm—that, in the theater, it’s shocking, or even evil. I could imagine myself in the crowd, and I realized I had no idea how I would have responded.
Christian Bale’s Pastor John speaks quietly, even blankly—“with a paunch,” Haynes says, “and a bad perm”—of his new life with Jesus. He’s speaking from a film inside the film: a documentary, made for evangelical TV, with “the first interview with Jack Rollins in more than twenty years!”—and with the unnatural color of its cheap production perfectly validating its reality, taking you right out of the movie you thought you were watching. We sit with the interviewer in Pastor John’s little office, and then we move into a commons room. Pastor John takes the stage; behind him are three well-dressed black women, and a band made up of a few men who look like meth addicts rounded up off the street. Before him are twenty or so people seated in folding chairs, with a few children playing in the background. It looks like an AA meeting. “Hi,” you can imagine Bale saying. “My name is John, and I’m a folk singer.” The people in the audience are human wreckage. But they are not an audience. They are part of the same fellowship that Pastor John is part of. As he begins to preach, and then, with the voice of John Doe, founder in the 1970s of the Los Angeles punk band X, coming out of Christian Bale’s mouth, as Father John begins to sing and play “Pressing On,” with a straining voice and a sense of mission the song may never have given its composer, you realize that the man on the stage is not giving the people in the chairs anything they have not given him, that he is not telling them anything they have not told him. There is no star, there is no audience, there is no persona, there are no puppet’s strings, there is no mask in this place; in this church, everyone is accepted for who he or she wishes to be, a servant of the same god, and in that way, of each other. For the first time, I did understand: Bob Dylan had been offered the kingdom of being recognized as himself, as someone he had all but forgotten, and he had said yes. It was no matter that Todd Haynes made it all up.
The film is confusing only if one demands that a dream explain itself—and if one refuses the implacable logic on which dreams float. When identity is as fluid as it is in I’m Not There—and when a person whose public life has been so bound up with the lives of other people wants to break the invisible contract between performer and audience—then the possibility must be present that identity can be cast aside altogether.
The private person must be able to lose himself in the community. The performer must be able to disappear into the audience. He must be able to dissolve into the fantasies of his own songs: once his own fantasies, then the fantasies of whoever heard the songs.
“I’m Not There” remains the most haunting of the basement tapes songs—and, though it has been bootlegged for years, it has never, until now, as Dylan’s original recording plays on the soundtrack of I’m Not There, been officially made public. Here it is as much of a whirlpool as it ever was, but instead of capsizing a filmmaker’s fables with its own supposed authenticity, it fades into the picture, nothing more and nothing less than one more story among all the rest.
The picture holds its shifting shape. In Todd Solondz’s Palindromes (2004), a slew of people play a single young girl, but the impression you have at the close is that the character required so many actors because she didn’t exist; here, by the end, the figure of Bob Dylan is at once more elusive and more interesting than before, and you are still certain neither he nor any of Haynes’s characters have told half of what they know. In What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), you may be with Angela Bassett’s Tina Turner all the way—and then the real Tina Turner appears and the movie dissolves. In the last moments of I’m Not There, Bob Dylan appears, playing his way across a Möbius strip of a harmonica solo—and he, the real thing, does not reduce the people whose adventures you have watched in any way. You don’t know where the notes Bob Dylan is playing are headed, or even, necessarily, what song they’re from; you don’t know what really happens in Riddle, or, if Billy does escape, where he could possibly go. And that is why, leaving the theater, you are already on your way back in.
I’m Not There, directed by Todd Haynes, written by Haynes and Oren Moverman (Weinstein Company, 2007).
Bob Dylan, “I’m Not There,” from I’m Not There—Original Soundtrack (Columbia, 2007).