Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (82 page)

You do care, you care in a big way, otherwise you wouldn’t be there. But it’s a different kind of connection. It’s not a light thing … It’s alive every night, or it feels alive every night … It becomes risky. I mean, you risk your life to play music, if you’re doing it in the right way.
²⁶

In the same conversation, Dylan made an odd remark about writing the songs for
Modern Times
in a ‘trance-like, hypnotic state’ and of questioning himself as he wrote: ‘This is how I feel? Why do I feel like that? And who’s the me that feels this way?’ It was the old and perennial enquiry:
who’s the me?
A man in his middle 60s was still posing the question. No one had provided him with an answer.

The belief that Dylan simply ‘reinvented’ himself periodically was wearing very thin. The notion that his career was best represented by a series of masks didn’t seem so credible after a religious fervour that had been only too real. The talk of continual reinvention had always been a little glib. How does a person manage such a thing and keep any kind of grip on reality? The equivalent idea that Dylan dealt in riddles, that his entire body of work was some giant puzzle full of clues to be unravelled, was another test of credulity. It was one thing to argue, as Scott Warmuth was arguing, that a single text such as
Chronicles
was best understood as a precision-made enigma, but even that clever thesis ignored the life lived, the life described. However he had come into existence, this ‘Bob Dylan’ was not just an evolving piece of art or a self-created conundrum. There was a person in there. That character continued to intrigue a lot of people.

The movie
I’m Not There
was less an attempt to solve the mystery than to depict it. When shooting began in Montreal at the end of July 2006, six actors were on hand to give life to aspects of the artist in his several manifestations. In one sense, the picture’s director, Todd Haynes, was employing some of the known, multiple Dylans much as the artist had done. In the film-maker’s hands they became devices for asking questions of the audience. The result was vastly entertaining for fans, with some fine performances (and some not so fine) from the cast, but it was a little way short of the greatest movie ever made. The film was a biopic that attempted to fuse several contending biographies into one while leaving room for myths, legends and whatever illumination there was to be had from an eclectic selection of Dylan songs. It made for a crowded two hours and fifteen minutes. Haynes tried to get the contents of Dylan’s imagination onto the screen alongside the public record of the artist’s career, some suggestive fictions and a meditation on the nature of identity.
Masked and Anonymous
had already seemed to prove that film probably wasn’t the best medium for this kind of effort, but Haynes had other ideas.

He had lots of ideas. The most eye-catching was to have Dylan in his mid-’60s pomp played, and played brilliantly, by Cate Blanchett. Her performance became an exquisite act of impersonation, one that said more about identity than anything in the script. The film’s title, lifted from one of the venerable basement tapes songs Dylan refused to take seriously, was another unambiguous statement. The subject of the film was as elusive as any final judgement on the subject. (The track proved to be elusive, too. Neither Columbia nor the artist’s management possessed the tape. It had been loaned to Neil Young years before and somehow forgotten. The writer truly didn’t care about his song.) Nevertheless, the picture would remain a challenge, as they say, for mainstream audiences. A movie about a person who could be present and absent simultaneously, known to millions and yet somehow unknowable, essentially impersonal yet capable of making audiences feel as though he had touched each one of them personally: what could go wrong?

When
I’m Not There
was released in November 2007 most of the movie critics would rise to the occasion with more agility than they had summoned for
Masked and Anonymous
. The idea of having six actors attempt different aspects of a single person wouldn’t bother the reviewers too much. A messy, confusing western sequence involving Richard Gere as ‘Billy the Kid’, an alias for Dylan’s Alias in
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
, would be tolerated because Blanchett’s hypnotic acting was going on, so to speak, next door. Even the idea of having a young African American (Marcus Carl Franklin) represent ‘Woody Guthrie’ would fail to test hard-working journalists unduly. It made a kind of sense. Much of the film made plenty of sense, in fact, but only if one key condition was fulfilled: you had to know
something
, ideally any number of things, about Bob Dylan. A fan would not have blinked to hear the character called ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ (Ben Whishaw) answer questions with verbatim quotations from interviews Dylan had given down the years. The uninitiated were liable to wonder what was going on and ask why some nineteenth-century French poet was being subjected to intense official interrogation in what looked like the middle of the 1960s.

In due course, the artist would give the picture what passed for his seal of approval. Talking to
Rolling Stone
in 2012, Dylan would at first say, ‘I don’t know anything about that movie. All I know is they licensed about 30 of my songs for it.’ Pressed, he would concede that
I’m Not There
was ‘all right’. He seemed slightly impressed by the fact that Haynes had appeared not to care whether his picture was understood or not. Asked about the film’s investigations into ‘phases and identities’, however, Dylan resorted to his usual answer: ‘I don’t see myself that way. But what does it matter? It’s only a movie.’
²⁷

The director had told a writer from the
New York Times
magazine that Dylan’s ‘refusal to be fixed as a single self in a single voice [was] a key to his freedom. And he somehow escaped this process of being frozen into one fixed person.’
²⁸
For all the movie’s stratagems, that ‘somehow’ would form the basis of a question left unanswered by
I’m Not There
. Yet as brave tries go, the film was among the bravest. Haynes was asking the audience to submit to a piece of cinema much as they would submit to Dylan’s music. The film, effectively six short films yoked together, was an attempt to reproduce a phenomenon rather than describe a life. As the director had said to the
New York Times
:
‘
What would it be like to be in that moment when it was new and dangerous and different? You have to do a kind of trick almost to get people back to where Dylan did what he did, or Mozart did what he did.’

Haynes had been trying to put his disconcerting movie together for years. As far back as the summer of 2000 he had been invited to send a single-page proposal to the artist by way of Dylan’s ‘representative’, Jeff Rosen. The invitation had been extended with the advice that there should be no mention whatever in the pitch of the word genius. The phrase ‘voice of a generation’ had also been placed beyond bounds. The text had commenced with the old Rimbaud ‘I is another’ quotation. Haynes had written of making a film ‘in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced’.

The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces – old men, young men, women, children – each standing in for spaces in a single life. [A seventh, Chaplin-type character was cut from the script.]

Dylan had known a little bit more about the picture beforehand, then, than his recollection of a request to license some songs would suggest. On the other hand, he had made no effort to become involved in the production. The first serious attempt to fictionalise his life directly was complicated enough without that kind of contest between perceived realities.
I’m Not There
would go on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and gain Blanchett an Oscar nomination, but fail at the box office. As Richard Goldstein observed in a doleful article in
The
Nation
in 2006, Dylan was ‘cruising towards sainthood’ among those who subscribed to the cult. ‘We’re witnessing a consecration,’ said the writer. The artist had acquired ‘enduring status as a fetish’ irrespective, it was argued, of the quality of the music.
²⁹
Haynes had made his picture as a fan, apparently forgetting that the cult was not universal. A lot of non-aligned movie-goers would decide that
I’m Not There
offered a challenge they didn’t care to meet.

In a notebook, the director had jotted down his ‘governing concepts/themes’ for the film. The notes had read: ‘America obsessed with authenticity/ authenticity the perfect costume/ America the land of masks, costumes, self-transformation, creativity is artificial, America’s about false authenticity and creativity.’ The result, as Blanchett described it, was an impenetrable script ‘completely and utterly inside Todd’s brain’. Haynes would tell the
New York Times
that his movie was ‘intimate and panoramic, the story of a personality and a nation’. One of the director’s friends added, for the journalist’s benefit, that ‘it’s no less than a history of American conscience and American soul … It’s a movie about Bob Dylan as the President of America.’

*

In 2008, that job would become available. In fact, a candidate had declared himself on 10 February 2007, in Springfield, Illinois, picking his spot outside the Old State Capitol where Abraham Lincoln once had stood to notify an interest in the position of head of state. Barack Hussein Obama didn’t have a stovepipe hat, or a fund of tall tales. He was 45, personable and articulate, a rising orator among Democrats, highly intelligent and, some said, effortlessly and ineffably cool. Amid an eclectic collection, he kept 30 Bob Dylan songs on his iPod. He wasn’t white.

That aside, Obama was another all-American politician whose time was almost upon him. Few realised as much on a cold February day. It was not a perception the former junior senator intended to foster when he told a boisterous crowd about his ‘different kind of politics’. Obama had written a couple of very successful books, one with the word dreams in its title, a second, newly published, invoking audacity and hope.
³⁰
Those words would play a big part in the nomination campaign he would win against the odds, and in the presidential race he would win easily. In a country tired of war and George W. Bush, Obama would portray himself as the personification of faith in the idea, whatever it meant, of ‘change’. He would also create expectations that were impossible to fulfil, even for a candidate who meant every word he said.

According to reporters from the
Washington Post
, Obama had declared in a statement before the announcement of his candidacy that he would emphasise ‘traditional Democratic goals such as lowering health-care costs, providing college-tuition assistance and developing new energy sources. He only briefly mentioned the Iraq war, the issue that could well drive the 2008 election.’
³¹
The new candidate said, in fact, that America was ‘mired in a tragic and costly war that should never have been waged’. By 2007, his was not an unpopular position.

The Bush administration was persisting with its attempts to portray the Iraq incursion as a victory-in-the-making for liberty and democracy. Even among conservatives, few were still falling for that. According to Gallup polling in July 2007, only 29 per cent of Americans could be found to approve of the way their president was doing his job.
³²
Bush’s ratings would sink lower still before he was done. Despite a ‘surge’ involving an additional 30,000 troops in the second half of the year, 2007 would inflict a bloody toll, with 899 American lives lost. According to surveys conducted by the Associated Press, 18,610 Iraqi ‘non-insurgents’ would also perish. The news agency’s figure would be a conservative estimate for the year, but since the occupiers chose not to keep records of civilian deaths it stood as an entry in history’s ledger. Here were modern times, just like the old Vietnam times.

In Springfield, Obama had invoked Lincoln shamelessly. The young black candidate possessed the oratorical gifts to make the association sound plausible, at least for those who wanted most to believe that ‘there is power in hope’. The possibility that hope could be disappointed was a thought not fit for a modern political campaign. Thanking his audience for turning out on a freezing day, Obama had said:

It’s humbling, but in my heart I know you didn’t come here just for me. You came here because you believe in what this country can be. In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that’s shut you out, that’s told you to settle, that’s divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what’s possible, building that more perfect union.

The Periclean triplets had been sonorous – Dylan knew all about that kind of rhetoric – but manipulative. Like all inspirational poetry, they made nothing happen. Anaphora, the trick of repeating a phrase at the start of successive statements, had been a device favoured both by Lincoln and by Martin Luther King. Obama’s fine words had also had the effect of seeming to address an issue without once naming that issue. He wasn’t white. Nevertheless, that Saturday in February he had stood where the liberator of black slaves once had stood, claiming Lincoln’s mantle and sounding very like King. The symbolism had been deliberate yet deliberately vague.

By 2007, Dylan had seen 11 men occupy the Oval Office. He had even met a couple of them. But he had also performed on 28 August 1963, during the Great March on Washington. He had sung ‘When the Ship Comes In’ before a quarter of a million people, most of them black, who had marched that day ‘for jobs and freedom’. Dylan had listened while King preached of his dream of human, social and racial justice. The artist had done more for civil rights, for a brief while, than most white entertainers. He had made a career from the legacy of the blues and married a black woman for love. He had drawn a cordon around himself for protection against politicians and their slogans, but he had never lost his political intelligence or, more importantly, his gift for empathy. Still, Dylan must have wondered what would become of Barack Obama in twenty-first-century America. Election results might say in due course that the civil-rights movement had won its victory with the election of a black citizen to the White House. The unremitting hatred of Obama from an unreconciled portion of the nation would say something else entirely. As president, the black lawyer would turn out to be the least radical of Democrats, with a near-suicidal instinct for compromise, a willingness to indulge the military, a tendency to betray ‘hope’ whenever its meek head appeared, and a strange need to appease Wall Street. It would make no difference to his enemies. Obama would inspire in them an attempt to ‘reclaim America’ from the upstart and his supporters. Sometimes the diehards would make the democratic process sound like an irrelevance. As the artist would describe the state of the nation just before the 2012 election: