FEBRUARY 8, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 1

"The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name."

It is this distinction that is being made in the film I’m Not There. Filmmaker Todd Haynes has written and directed a picture that simultaneously deconstructs the many celebrity identities of Bob Dylan and calls into question the hero status of this American music legend. Given the times, it is not all that surprising that a film like this would be made now. We live in an age when celebrity gossip attracts just as much media attention as the war in Iraq. Most of the celebrity news shows give a good amount of their time to the trials and tribulations of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Celebrities are an open book, and their personal troubles are all part of their public identity. Bob Dylan managed to create a plethora of identities, each one distinct and compelling to the public. Like Madonna and David Bowie, Bob Dylan has managed to recreate himself repeatedly. This film goes beyond the various faces of Dylan and looks at the intention behind each one. What is revealed is a man disinterested in politics and convinced that music cannot change the world. As the war in Iraq rages on and people are out in the streets protesting, the image of Jade Quinn (Cate Blanchett’s Dylan persona) telling the British press that songs don’t change things has an odd resonance. This film is doing more then just speaking about Bob Dylan, it is a commentary on celebrity—how it existed then and how it exists now—and a message to all those young singer songwriters who want to go out and change the world like Bob Dylan did.

The structure of I’m Not There makes it feel less like a narrative and more like a comparison. The film is comparing six different faces that are all part of one identity; that identity is Bob Dylan. Throughout the entire film, though, the name Bob Dylan is never mentioned. Instead, each different persona is given its own name and face. Marcus Franklin, a young African American actor who appears to be in his mid-early teens plays the youthful Dylan appropriately named Woody Guthrie. Woody is introduced to us in the film riding on a freight train with a guitar case that has the phrase “this machine kills fascists” on it. This same phrase was written on the real Woody Guthrie’s guitar case. While this character is not a literal portrayal of Bob Dylan—he was never a young African American man—it does represent a kind of mythology that surrounds Bob Dylan. In 1961, Bob Dylan actually left art school and went to New York to meet Woody Guthrie. This character also represents the ideal of who the young Dylan was. The character of Woody travels around on the rails and meets up with a few families who give him good old country wisdom and he takes it to heart. The places that he goes and the people that he meets are all set in a depression era. It is as though the film is time traveling whenever Woody is on screen. Haynes was probably trying to represent that imagined childhood of Bob Dylan the icon. Much of the early folk music in the late 50s and early 60s were simply old depression era songs.

One of the most surprisingly compelling performances was by Christian Bale who played two personas of Dylan. One was Jack Rollins who represented the early performer Dylan when him and Joan Baez were lovers in the summer of 1963. Bale manages to wrangle his bulky form into a shy mumbling hunched over recluse who simply moans his way through songs and grumbles his way through interviews. Joan Baez is represented as Alice Fabian played by Julianne Moore. This section of the movie plays like a VH1 Behind the Music segment. Moore explains to the camera the nature of her ex-lover Rollins while the film cuts between her retelling old stories and old black and white clips of him performing or giving interviews. Bale also portrays the born-again Christian phase in Dylan named Pastor John. Bale sports a ridiculous permed Afro and a nauseatingly sparse and scraggily beard. He stands in front of a plastic-looking rec-room chapel and sings a fevered spiritual as he raises his arms, lost in metaphysical ecstasy. The only thing keeping him from jumping straight into heaven is his tacky bellbottom leisure suit tailored from cheep beige fabric. While the born-again image of Bob Dylan has the potential to become an extremely comedic event, this brief segment of the film manages to avoid turning Dylan’s conversion into a joke, and simply treats it as another face of the Dylan celebrity. In addition, I think that while these are two personas, they are in actuality meant to be read as one, which is why Haynes uses Bale for both parts. It is the similarities between the born-again Dylan and the early 60s Dylan that make Jack Rollins and Pastor John simply two stages in a single persona.

The two faces of Dylan that seem to dominate the film are Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) and Jade Quinn (Cate Blanchett). Robbie Clark is the movie star Dylan. Ledger manages to adopt some of Dylan’s mannerisms, but for the most part re-personifies what Bob Dylan was. His character introduces the viewer to a cruel depiction of Dylan, one that is chauvinistic, hurtful, and unloving. Robbie Clark highlights Dylan’s personal troubles with his wife. Ledger’s good looks help the audience to believe that Dylan could be this dismissive to his wife. Ledger serves as a kind of example of how Bob Dylan was perceived by many at the time. As is the case with all of the actors in this film, the physical aesthetic of the actor communicates to the viewer a kind of cultural knowledge of the times. It is as if each actor is saying “this is how he looked to people then.”

Cate Blanchett offers up an aesthetic that looks closer to the real Dylan then any other actor in the film. Her facial expressions, body language, and even (miraculously) her voice are disturbingly close to Bob Dylan’s. Her character, Jade Quinn, is the drugged out Dylan of the 60s; he is the rock and roll Dylan. Shot in black and white, the scenes with Quinn are some of the most visually exciting in the film. It is Quinn who sparks the explosion of boos when his band plays "I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More" to a crowed of disappointed folk fans, and it is Quinn who travels to England and has a brief yet extremely comical encounter with the “John, Paul, George, and Ringo,” all of whom come in and out of a single scene moving in fast forward and jabbering like chipmunks. And it is Quinn who explains on several occasions to various media groups that he does not believe that music can change things. When this news is delivered Blanchett does a good job appearing almost mockingly annoyed by the obvious logic behind the statement. At that point the film seems to be communicating a complete disgust for anyone who thought that there was anything behind Bob Dylan’s music other than an apathetic flow of poetry and rhythm. Ultimately it is Quinn who steps up and debunks the myth that Dylan was political.

Arthur Rimbaud, played by Ben Whishaw, is an odd face of Dylan that I can’t quite pinpoint but appears in the film intermittently. He sits at a table smoking a cigarette and spouts odd poetic phrases that help to reassure the audience that Dylan is functioning on his own set of ideals. It almost looks as though he is being interrogated in these scenes, and perhaps that is what Haynes was going for. Rimbaud might simply be that side of Dylan that tried to explain himself to the world but could not. The brief little monologues, while a little confusing, are also illuminating, because while the other characters in the film do respond to questions and speak about what their feeling, none of them manage to communicate as well as Rimbaud—he is a window in a clouded mind, and while he is not all together clear himself, he does help to shed some light on areas that would otherwise remain completely mysterious.

And yet another face of Dylan is Billy the Kid, played by Richard Gere. This character, much like Woody Guthrie, allows the viewer to once again time travel. This time, though, they traveled to an old ramshackle town that seems to be a living carnival. There are giraffes and the clothes people wear are strange impractical attire. Here, Gere lives alone with his dog in a cabin in the woods and has escaped the troubles of the world, but then news comes that there is going to be a highway built going through the carnival town and that the people will have to leave. Billy the Kid is wanted—you don’t know why—and he has given false names to all the people in town. The man who is going to build the highway comes to the town to talk to the people. The actor who plays this man is the same actor that plays an annoying reporter who hounds Quinn about his stance on politics and music. Now he is the highway builder and he recognizes Billy the Kid from the poster, but does not arrest him. The return of this actor is very telling, because it was this reporter who, earlier in the film, reveals the true identity of Quinn on his show. He also has acted, in a sense, as a moral compass, reassuring Quinn to see more in his own art. Now he is back and pulls Billy the Kid out of his dream world. The film ends with Billy the Kid back on the freight train where Woody started out. He finds that same guitar that Woody had and rides down the tracks heading back to civilization.

Ultimately this film manages to comment on both celebrity status and political activism, both of which have become rather complex issues today. This is not to say that they ever were simple issues. Back in the 60s these were big issues too, but today, thanks to advancements in technology, the media and celebrities have different relationship, and the mythology of Dylan would be difficult to create in our information-saturated society. Likewise, political activism has become a shadow of what it once was in the 60s. By revisiting Dylan, and showing how he perceived activism and music, Haynes is communicating a message to the audience that I think is at once disappointing and insightful—activism, like art, is not a conscious act, but rather the result of an unconscious insight that speaks to people during times of trouble. By playing with the structure of a standard narrative, and splintering the persona of Dylan, director Todd Haynes was able to produce a film that not only was interesting and engaging in a new way, but that also gave a real and honest portrayal of a celebrity that did not attempt to turn them into a hero. I think Bob Dylan is a good musician, but he is not a hero. I feel the same way about Jim Morison, and that was one of the things that bugged me about the movie The Doors, it felt more like hero worship than an actual look at Jim Morrison. While I was skeptical of the idea of six actors playing one man, I have become convinced that it was the perfect form with which to tell this story. It takes six faces to tell the story of a celebrity.