I’m Not There - Unknown Author

7/31/2019 I’m Not There - Unknown Author

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/im-not-there-unknown-author 1/4

I’mNotThere-http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=617

As I have written before, I am pretty ambivalent about the whole Dylan mythology thing.

Nonetheless, I found Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There very affecting, for the way it probes that

mythology and makes it resonate. Haynes has six different actors playing six characters, all with

different names and biographies, but all lightly fictionalized aspects of Dylan; and the movie as a

whole tells their stories by blending together a motley assortment of film stocks (both color and

black and white), genre markers, settings, and styles of editing and cinematography. In the

abstract, this might sound like a dry intellectual conceit; but in practice it works fabulously, due

both to the brilliance of all of the performers, and to the fluidity with which Haynes mixes and

matches all those performances and styles. Everything is mediated and staged, and yet it all has a

dreamlike suppleness and conviction. The move, for instance, from “Dylan” as an 11-year-old

black kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the rails to “Dylan” as an older man (Richard Gere),

identified as a version of Billy the Kid who escaped Pat Garrett’s bullets, and his jail, and is now

riding the rails to an unknown future destination — this shift seems “natural” and almost

seamless, in the way that dream transformations always do as long as you remain inside the

dream.

[I'm not going to try to track down the film's ten million allusions, but I do feel compelled to

mention that, in the sections with Gere, Haynes is referencing -- among other things -- Sam

Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid , in which Dylan had a small role and for which, of course,

he wrote the soundtrack. I only point this out because I think that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is

the most beautiful Western ever made. Some of Peckinpah's gorgeous melancholy passes overinto Haynes' re-creation of a belated Western/cowboy/outlaw "Dylan." In some "postmodern"

works, all the citations of other "texts" tend to work like a jigsaw puzzle; it's really just a matter

of being clever enough, or nerdily obsessive enough, to "get" them all. But in I'm Not There , the

flotsam and jetsam of alluded-to culture generally manages -- if you know the allusion, and

even when you don't -- to drag its affective associations along with it, so that you

actually feel the way that the movie, like its subject, is a heterogeneous patchwork of things

pulling you in all directions at once. I say this in the awareness that, as I am not a professional

Dylanologist, there are certainly loads of allusions that completely passed me by.]

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is this. Although the film is certainly a neo-Brechtian

exercise in critical distanciation, for the way it makes us realize how all of Dylan’s personae are

fictional constructions, drawing both on “archetypes” of Americana, and on the media, and their

ubiquity in the “present moment” of Dylan’s greatest prominence as an artist (the film mostly

deals with the “Dylans” of the 1960s and 1970s, though there are dramatizations of later

moments — like his 80s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity — as well) — although the film

is that, it is also much more than that. Which is a way of saying that I’m Not There is affective as

well as intellectual, and that it feels “intimate” even though it is all clearly distanced — or, better

(to risk a Blanchotian formulation) that it makes us feel the intimacy of that very distance. All six

“Dylans” are self-consciously performative; each one individually — to say nothing of their cross-



references and resonances — displays the “self” as something manufactured, as something that

can only present itself “in quotation marks” (i.e., by performing and by self-consciously calling

attention to the fact that it is “merely” performing). And yet these six performances are all utterly

compelling, by the very fact that — although they are not “authentic,” and in fact trash the very

notion of authenticity (much as Dylan himself did when he played an electronic set at the all-

acoustic folkie festival — an event that Haynes reproduces, not as it actually happenend, but in

its full-blown mythical shock and splendor) there evidently is nothing “behind” them, no face

behind the mask(s).

Bob Dylan is fascinating, of course, precisely because he is “not there”; and Haynes’

accomplishment is to put us in immediate contact with this not-thereness, and with the frenetic

performativeness that at once covers over this absence, and expresses it: expresses it in the

sense that all six personae in the film (six characters in search of an author?) are not trying to

project a seeming “selfness” to cover over the void, so much as they are projecting this void

itself, in order precisely to tell other people to go away and just leave him the fuck alone. (“Him”?this itself is not any real essence of “Dylan,” but rather a facade that each of the six “Dylans”

expresses in his own way).

This is most evident in Cate Blanchett’s bravura transvestite turn as “Jude Quinn”: the pop-star

“Dylan” visiting and performing in London, utterly seductive because utterly cold, a perfect

narcissist, eyes hidden behind shades, continually dosed or overdosed on uppers, mean and

belligerent to everyone, and always heaping scorn on any idea of authenticity, sincerity,self-

revelation, political or personal committment, belief, or having anything to say. (The Blanchett

sequences are supposedly based on D. A. Pennebaker’s Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back ,

which I have never seen).

Dylan might seem as far removed from Andy Warhol as any two pop figures from the same

decade could ever be; but I’m Not There explores, and refers back to Dylan himself, Warhol’s

great question: “When a mirror looks at its reflection, what does it see?” Haynes’ six “Dylans”

reflect everything and nothing. Their careers coincide with the upheavals of the 1960s, and with

the consolidation of the consequences of those upheavals that was the 1970s. But they mirror

these decades mostly by their refusal to express, to serve as a spokesman for anyone or

anything: renouncing a “folkie” past, the various “Dylans” deny political intent (because songs

don’t make anything happen, as several of them say), or even personal, self-expressive intent.

(This may be why “Jack Rollins,” the “Dylan” played by Christian Bale, is the one who — after

withdrawing from the scene in the early 1960s as a disillusioned folkie — re-emerges in the

1980s as a Jesus fundamentalist). (Though even this apoliticism is denied in an odd scene where

Huey Newton tries to explain to Bobby Seale how “Ballad of a Thin Man” is really a radical song in

support of the black liberation struggle — though this is an interpretation that Jude Quinn

scornfully rejects).

Dylan’s songs are up for grabs, open for interpretation, precisely because they refuse to wear

their meanings on their sleeves. But behind all the disjunctions and surreal metaphors,and even



behind the invocations of a mythical “weird old America,” which are the one concrete (if bullshit)

meaning that they still possess, they have an affective pull that can only be felt, in modes from

hostile sarcasm to world-weary melancholy. And yet even these affects — which are the thing

that really powers I’m Not There , filled as it is with Dylan’s music, performed both by Dylan

himself and by many other artists — are finally expressions of a void, or of a desire that is too

diffuse and disorganized and at second (or third, or fourth…) remove ever to speak its name, or

of a mirror that is only able to mirror the act of mirroring itself.

Indeed, I think that this is the secret affinity between I’m Not There and Haynes’ previous film, Far

From Heaven . Speaking of the 1950s melodramas by Douglas Sirk and others, that were his

models for Far From Heaven , Haynes says:

“There’s something really direct about emotional themes in these films. They’re sort of pre-

psychological. The characters in the Sirk films, their realizations are very much on the surface.

They’re very much dealing with the quite apparent constraints of their society, and making quite

apparent and overt decisions that usually mean depriving themselves of something that wouldmake them very happy.”

– cited from here

Though Dylan is a figure of the “freewheeling” Sixties, rather than of the hyper-repressed Fifties,

I think that his personae, as presented by Haynes, are in fact similarly “pre-psychological,” in the

sense that their decisions and actions seem unmotivated, unconnected to any sort of “interiority.”

We even get a glimpse of a Far From Heaven -like world, early in the film when the version of

“Dylan” as an 11-year-old black kid who calls himself “Woody Guthrie” is invited to play in a

well-to-do, white Southern liberal home (the year is 1959). It may be that, in terms of

subjectivity, the (supposedly) unrepressed Sixties is not as far from the ultra-conformist and

severely repressed Fifties as our standard mythologies would have it. This is a (seeming) paradox

that Foucault might well have relished. It also has something to do, I think, with the fact that, for

all that Haynes is celebrating continual transformation and self-reinvention (as opposed to the

old mythology of a fixed, essential self) he nonetheless is doing this entirely mythologically — I

mean with a mythology that (contrary to his practice in all his other films) he gives no hint of

criticizing or deconstructing. Haynes’ Dylan is a hero of postmodernity, in much the same way

that I made Dean Martin out to be such a hero, in a bookthat I published over a decade ago.

I didn’t blog a “top 10″ list this past year, because I simply didn’t see enough films (or hear

enough music) to be able to creditably put together such a list. I missed way too much. But of the

American films released in 2007 that I did manage to see (and especially noting thatInland

Empire doesn’t count here, because it was released in 2006, and that I still haven’t seenThere

Will Be Blood ), I’m Not There is right up there with Zodiac and Southland Tales . Nothing else I saw

in the past year came close to any of these three.

I think, in a way, that I’m Not There and Southland Tales are complementary opposites. They

both deal with the form of subjectivity (decentered, multiple, and not characterizable in terms of

“authenticity” or its absence) that is correlated with, or that answers to, our age of media



saturation and ubiquitous capital flows. And they both present this form of subjectivity without

apologies, and without opposing it to (and also, without expressing nostalgia for) some sort of

supposed lost, unified, and more authentic form of selfhood. But they do this in quite different

ways, reflecting how Bob Dylan is different from, say, Justin Timberlake. Dylan is still a creature

of myth, even though it is a sort of myth that could only exist in our contemporary mediascape.

But “myth is gossip grown old,” asStanislaw Lec is reputed to have said, and Timberlake is young

enough, and lives in an age cynical enough, that his media presence still exists in the form of

gossip, and resists congealing into myth. This is why Haynes’ film is retrospective, and deeply

cinematic; it’s really about (both personal and cultural) memory. Whereas Richard Kelly’s film is

prospective (forward-looking) and formally post-cinematic (it’s still a movie, not a tv show or

video; but it’s a movie permeated with the effects of CNN and youtube): it’s about short attention

spans and the continual effacement of long-term memory.I’m Not There is very much a film, in

the cinephilic sense; Southland Tales is a real movie , but it isn’t in the least a film . Of course, it is

not a question of choosing between these two movies, or these two modes. They offer vastlydifferent perspectives on celebrity, on the mediascape, and on the strange detours of desire; but

both of these perspectives are necessary ones. In 2006, Justin Timberlake offered the world a far

better album than Bob Dylan did; but in 2007, they both, equally, embodied aspects of the

media-drenched dreamworld from which we are unable to awaken, even if we wanted to (which,

as I write this, in 2008, we evidently don’t).

Documents

I’m Not There - Unknown Author