Mister Tambourine Man

Rating: Null/10 (28 May 2008)

Bob Dylan helped show the Western world popular music could be more than just boy-meets-girl tunes and superficial hooks. His songs had, at times, depth and vision. But "I'm Not There" doesn't care about any of that. Instead, director Todd Haynes (who, unsurprisingly, has an Arts Degree in Semiotics) reduces Dylan to a series of signifiers and signs. Dylan, of course, has himself frequently been accused of being "meaningless", "opaque" and reliant on "nonsensical metaphors" and ridiculous "signs".
"I'm Not There" thus sets about portraying Dylan as a kaleidoscopic conman. "Who is Bob Dylan?" Haynes asks. "Whatever" is his postmodern answer. He's not here, he's not there, we can never know.
Whilst some of Haynes' subplots do offer "interpretation", and so concede that Dyaln himself might "mean something", for the most part the film eschews truth for fashionable obfuscation. Haynes doesn't care about Dylan's music or Dylan the historical figure. Instead, he presents us with the public's ever changing perception of Dylan. He approaches Dylan through a layer of smoke and mirrors, presenting us with masks rather than truth. For those of us who know or care about Dylan, the film is the equivalent of flicking through Dylan's album covers.
Dylan's "different faces" evolved out of the public's growing need to peg him down. Here was an artist who constantly jumped from one genre to the next, playing with the plasticity of music as he moved from folk, to country, to rock, to Gospel, to reggae, to pop, to jazz and finally to blues. Each change confounded the pubic. Dylan's abstract prose and poetic metaphors only served to further muddy the waters. Who exactly is Dylan and what exactly was he trying to say? No one seemed to know.
Dylan was also an intensely private man who only presented his art to the world. As the public had no true perception of his private life, they mythicized him. As they had a shifting perception of his music, they created masks for each stage of his career. There was the rock-n-roll face, the wise prophet face, the skinny country hick face...each one presenting itself at roughly 5 year intervals.
But though Dylan's music continually reinvented itself, changing shape and form, even an idiot could tell that artist's "voice" (not in the acoustic sense) and personality stayed the same. He was always the same guy. Always trying to distill, for better or for worse, some truth down into song form. One need only listen to his music to see the singular human being behind those plural masks.
But Haynes doesn't understand the essential thing about Dylan and his life: his music. Or maybe he's intimidated by genius, and has no means of finding the visual equivalent of Dylan's tunes. Or perhaps he wisely intends to let the songs speak for themselves.
Regardless, Haynes takes the easy route and creates a film comprising of 9 or 10 disconnected segments. Each segment has Dylan played by a different actor. Each segment adds fuel to all the usual Dylan clichés. In other words, Haynes' film is a fitting tribute to the Dylan many perceive has made no literal sense since 1963, but an insult to Dylan the lyricist and artist. Haynes is content to give us an Andy Warhol style portrait of man who doesn't exist.
The problem is, I think, that "I'm Not There" was made by people who were mere children in the 1960s. People who had gained generational consciousness only in the 70s and early 80s. Of course an artist need not belong to the era he's expressing through his art, but those arising out of the 70s and 80s all had postmodern sensibilities. These filmmakers are akin to DJs, inclined toward pastiches of popular culture. A copy of a copy or a quote of a quote. Everything is trashy so let's just revel in junk.
All artists draw from previous achievements, but great artists also reach for the unique, the personal, the sublime, some ineffable truth. We don't get this with hyper post-modernists. As most of popular entertainment is pretty superficial, bubblegum, trendy, and outdated fast, hyper post-modernists basically indulge in cut-and-pasting and so replicate superficial material. What is there to really think about in most popular art? Now Todd Haynes isn't the postmodern monster that Tarantino or the Coens are - judging from his excellent other films, he has a sort of beautifully homosexual, introspective and intellectual side - but here his postmodern sensibilities are entirely at odds with Dylan's more traditional, modernist sensibilities. Haynes cuts and chops, giving us montage and murals, whilst Dylan just wants a simple pen in his hand and a harmonica in his mouth. Dylan's a thinker and feeler who's been chopped up and reduced to a series of freak-show segments, tabloid images and advertisement posters. Depressingly, this is also the film's very point. Haynes is unable to peg Dylan down so instead serves us a giant "he's not here".
7.9/10 - See Altman's "Vincent and Theo" and Ashby's "Bound For Glory".