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Another Kind of River |
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It
must be terrifying to work with Bob Dylan. In the first volume of his Chronicles, (2) Dylan presents an unapologetic portrait of himself as a creature of mood: the
songs, as recorded, never quite have the sound he had in his head;
determinations to leave this or that track (like the classic “Blind Willie
McTell” recorded in 1983) off the official version of an album are reached
purely via the whimsical sense that it “didn’t fit” or “didn’t feel right”
(thus enraging and perplexing his fans); certain key life decisions are made
according to sudden but absolute hunches, inexplicable changes of feeling or
intuition. In a typical piece of Dylan mythology, he once declared that his
first marriage was over because he learnt a new painting technique that changed
his entire life-view, and “no one knew what I was talking about anymore.”
(Little wonder.) Similarly, in Chronicles he describes walking out of a rehearsal session with The Grateful Dead without
telling anybody, and with no intention of ever returning, since he feels
uninspired, dried up, wasted; later, in a bar, he happens to witness a jazz
singer whose manner and approach in performance affords him an indirect revelation
about how he, too, must proceed – so then he goes back to the session “as if
nothing had happened”. (3) No
one with whom Dylan collaborated, in the years and incidents covered by Chronicles, could have had the slightest
idea of all these seismic shifts and changes, breakdowns and epiphanies, going
on within him.
The
public trace we have of the man and his career – the records, concerts,
interviews, writings, photos and so on – is the scattered, unreliable fallout
of these successive internal moods. It is positively Spinoza-ist: a life lived
entirely according to affects, omens, signs, hunches. (4) Ecstasy and dread alike are hitched to this unpredictable parade of signs.
Sometimes, something spooky, something uncannily prophetic attaches itself to
these emanations of an artist’s mood, in the case of Dylan as much as for
Jean-Luc Godard or Leonard Cohen: re-read, for example, the apocalyptic pages
devoted to
Apocalypse
is almost always tied to signs of weather in Dylan’s music. But so, for that,
matter, is happiness (like in “New Morning”). It is remarkable how many of his
songs, particularly in recent years, begin with an evocation of the weather:
the rising water, the dark clouds, the filthy rain, the sun through the trees.
Actually, this habit or method, picked up no doubt from traditions of blues and
folk, is pretty much there from the very start of the ‘60s: “Down the streets
the dogs are barking / And the day is a-gettin’ dark … “ – and this in a song
that culminates in the most non-psychological of gloomy gestalts, “We’re both
just one too many mornings / and a thousand miles behind.” This, too, carries a
hint of contemporary continental philosophy, knowingly or not: the human being
is the intensive sum of his or her affects, many of them arising externally, in
the flux of the world and its states; that is how the German filmmaker Harun
Farocki describes the characters in Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990), as “participating in the unruliness of the
summer.” (5) The weather is plenty unruly in Dylan.
Bob
Dylan is often thought of as a narrative songwriter, a storyteller; but that is
far from the truth. Nothing could be less narrative than the ten songs on Modern Times (2006). In many respects,
Dylan has held firm since the mid ‘70s to the cubistic method (precisely the
one he picked up in his painting class) that he introduced and cultivated on Blood on the Tracks (1975): lyrics
approach a subject or theme – often cryptically buried at the centre – from a
succession of different times, places and viewpoints. Although less obviously a
narrative mosaic than “Tangled Up in Blue”, the song “Sugar Baby” from ‘Love and Theft’ (2001) is just as
enigmatic, and follows exactly the same compositional method: every couplet
forms a perfect non sequiter in relation to what precedes and follows it (which
rarely stops people quoting entire verses as if they make perfectly continuous
sense). The story element ends up disappearing entirely in this process; what
we are left with, as in a late-period Godard film, is a succession of images,
allusions, descriptions.
Sometimes
the ‘plot’ stops dead at the initial situation of a man walking or arriving in
a particular place, a particular confluence of mood-affects. “Nettie Moore” on Modern Times is a striking example of
Dylan’s non-narrative art. If you do not happen to know (as I did not, at the
outset) that the recurring chorus reference to the person named in the title is
a quotation from a famous old tune about a woman sold into slavery, you would
be hard put piecing together the discontinuous succession of events into any
kind of unity – beyond, that is, the unity of (melancholic) mood imposed by the
song as a whole, by the chords, the arrangement, and the rhythm of Dylan’s
vocal phrasing (he has long been fond of asserting that the meaning is always
to be found in the rhythm).
II.
These
aspects (among others) of Dylan’s art and personality pose acute problems for
anyone hoping to make a biopic, whether documentary or fiction, about the
singer’s life and times. There is, firstly, the frightful coherence – a
classically narrative coherence – imposed, almost by definition, in the very
thinking of such a project: birth, origin, maturation, fame, fall, reflection …
But how do you cohere a life-story if a life is to be conceived (après Deleuze) as an immanence, as a
flux of affects and events not (strictly) bound to a developmental, biological
system? Martin Scorsese’s documentary treatment of Dylan’s life comes up hard
against the unsuitability of the hackneyed ‘journey’ model – a man ‘coming
into’ his essential destiny, or finding his way back to his origin … The very
title No Direction Home (which was
also previously used by Dylan’s biographer Robert Shelton) evokes uncertainty
or a loss of bearings – locating the artist right inside his most turbulent
period of rapid aesthetic change, from the early to the mid ‘60s – but it is,
finally, still too sentimental. And in the doco itself, Dylan scrambles the
premise of such a template placed upon him: “I was born a long way from home”,
he declares enigmatically.
It
is intriguing to speculate about the degree of fit between Dylan as a subject
and the character-psychology of Scorsese’s standard (anti-) heroes. Whatever
the unknowable, private truth of the matter, Dylan presents himself – in Chronicles, the No Direction Home interview segments, and in many other places down
the decades – as essentially a man without roots, without family, without ties
of any sort. From the beginning of his orientation towards music, this “musical
expeditionary” (as he calls himself in Scorsese’s film) simply moved forward,
taking and discarding whatever (and whomever) he needed along the way. “I had
nothing to go back to”, he comments firmly in No Direction Home. It is precisely this mood or aura which was so
brilliantly conveyed by the inspired cinéma-vérité method (no spatial-temporal orientations, no explanatory voice-over, no shape
to the progression of fragmented glimpses) in D. A. Pennebaker’s immortal
tour-portrait Don’t Look Back (1967)
– a better and truer title à propos Dylan, in my opinion, than No Direction Home.
Likewise,
Dylan’s tenacious habit of clouding his personal, family life in mystery – Chronicles names not a single wife or
child in his history – speaks not only to his need for privacy but also to this
created persona as the Man Without a Past, Kaurismäki-style, without baggage,
eternally travelling light. If there is something undeniably solipsistic (and
also a little cold) in this elaborate self-begetting, it is also in line with a
certain American Condition of the post-Beat hero which Scorsese, too, draws
upon: whether Travis Bickle the psycho-killer (in Taxi Driver, 1976), Ace Rothstein the ace gambler (in Casino, 1995) or Richard Prince the
high-wire hanger-on (in another doco, American
Boy, 1978), we are presented with classic Heroes Without Roots, moving
straight ahead into fame, notoriety or riches with their compulsive-obsessive
determination on one task, one skill, one goal.
On
the other hand, there is a complex dialectic between forgetting and remembering
– less in personal than in cultural or aesthetic terms – in Dylan’s art. In
recent years, exegetes of a literary bent have dug up quotations from a vast
range of sources in Dylan’s lyrics. The Wall
Street Journal briefly imagined it had a scandalous exposé on its hands
when it reported on the number of lines that Dylan had filched (with minor
rewriting) for ‘Love and Theft’ from
– of all things – Junichi Saga’s lurid autobiography Confessions of a Yakuza (not just tough-guy declarations like “I’m
not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded”, but even intimate details,
rendered completely opaque by Dylan, such as “I don’t know how it looked to
other people, but I never even slept with her – not once”). (6) Such borrowing, as most Dylanological commentators realise, hardly requires a
fancy postmodern justification: it is fully part of the blues, folk, jazz, rock
and pop traditions that Dylan installs himself within. (In an interview
reprinted in a special Dylan issue of Uncut a few years back, he describes his process of writing a song by ‘meditating’ on
another, previous song within a particular tradition, singing it over and over
to himself for days as he goes about his business, until a new form of it
mutates.)
And yet, with all this remembering, comes an equally willed forgetting, an oblivion; in an especially striking passage of Chronicles – fully psychoanalytic in its tone and implications – Dylan recounts how he immersed himself in hundreds of books and documents in both the houses of friends and in libraries, but without taking any copies or notes with him: “I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later.” (7)
Dylan’s
relation to popular music (in all its forms), as well as literature and cinema,
might best be described as a kind of immersion which allows, over many years, impressions, phrases, snatches of narrative to
emerge unbidden in his mind – part of the flux of affects that he masters while
composing. And also in the more collective, improvisatory mode of recording: it
is well-known that, from his first albums, Dylan has written and rewritten
works in the studio – sometimes only ever performing them the one or several
times it takes to get them down on tape, whether the backing band has the
chords and changes fully down or not – and in No Direction Home he describes such a process as a spontaneous
enigma: “The mystery of being in a recording studio did something to me, and
those are the songs that came out.” It is not such a stretch to describe
Scorsese’s cinema (like Leos Carax’s or Emir Kusturica’s) in very similar
terms: as the outpourings of a memory and a sensibility immersed in cinema
history, to the point where specific citations of this or that film, scene,
shot or gesture are less significant as historic ‘intertexts’ than as a kind of
delirious, spontaneous process of all-purpose cinematic figuration: how would
Lang or Hitchcock or Godard have filmed this fight, this car, this girl smoking
a cigarette? How would Hank Williams have written and sung this line about
heartbreak, about drinking the last glass on the bar, about the dawn?
I
believe one should be careful, however, about attributing the entirety of No Direction Home to Scorsese as auteur.
Many accounts suggest a relatively circumscribed role for Scorsese in this
project – a shaping of pre-given fragments (clips, photos, audio recordings,
the central interviews given some years earlier to Dylan’s manager) rather than
a strong conceptual input of the kind that informed Scorsese’s previous
Dylan-associated doco, The Last Waltz (1978). Perhaps Scorsese had a decisive part to play in centring the film so
completely around the ‘lost’ Pennebaker colour footage of Dylan’s ‘electric’
tour of the UK – which sometimes seems rather too much like a good thing, in
the way it overdetermines the whole.
But
I do detect what is probably a special Scorsese touch in the use of obliquely
illustrative clips from avant-garde films of the ‘60s by Andy Warhol, Ken
Jacobs and Jonas Mekas. The last of these, the Mekas, comes just near the end
of No Direction Home – before the
narration of the legendary motorcycle accident that put Dylan off the road, out
of the hectic, pill-popping rock-star lifestyle, and into secluded family life
– and it carries, for once, the perfect Dylanesque mood-gesture: the bad times
a-comin’ signalled, called up, by a blur of inclement weather. This is, for me,
the one real sign of the kind of essay that No
Direction Home might have been if it were not so straitjacketed by the
‘American Masters’ TV/DVD format, and by the hagiographic inclinations of
Dylan’s management.
III.
I mentioned Pennebaker’s lost footage. But how lost was it? Any Dylan hardcore aficionado who has browsed the infinite kingdom of available bootlegs knows about Dylan’s own Eat the Document (the reference date on this clandestine work wanders from 1966 to 1972), co-edited with his friend Howard Alk out of this footage. (8) The absence of any reference to or acknowledgment of this remarkable, truly experimental film in Scorsese’s doco (and most of the writing on it) is troubling. Eat the Document is anti-Don’t Look Back, anti-cinéma-vérité – and not just in the inspired, fragmented montage but in the shooting itself, with Dylan and cohorts staging and hamming up supposedly casual, off-stage interactions. As seen in No Direction Home, such snippets are once again restored to the status of ‘live’ documentary reportage that they were meant to parody and explode. It is a weird mutilation, a taming of one of the most intriguing moments in Dylan’s career, and especially his on-off flirtations with cinema (and cinephilia too, judging from the scattered references to his personal film culture in interviews and in Chronicles). But Eat the Document set in motion the reality/fiction games that were the driving force of his ambitious Renaldo and Clara (1978), which has steadily built up, since its release, a loyal cult-intellectual following. (9)
By
now, it’s official: Bob Dylan is a multiple self. Long gone are the days when
fans and commentators worried and argued about the splits between electric and
folk Dylan, political and religious Dylan, disco and Americana Dylan,
over-produced and under-produced Dylan, Dylan the Chaplinesque Clown and Dylan
the spaced-out Rebel. All has been subsumed into the Grand Fiction of the
Multiple Self: the curious, Altmanesque Masked
and Anonymous (2003), directed by Larry Charles as an allegory of a
broken-down future America, continues Dylan’s game of constantly rearranging
his own tunes by redistributing his music to children, mariachi bands, ghetto
blasters, Italian rappers, gospel belters … while Todd Haynes’ Dylan-approved
biopic, I’m Not There, which casts
multiple actors (young, old, black, white, male, female) in the lead role,
originally boasted the conceptual working subtitle Suppositions on a Film Concerning Bob Dylan.
But
we can still suppose other, imaginary films by, for or with Dylan, made by
others, here or gone. Scorsese certainly qualifies as a Dylan obsessive – in
pre-Internet days, he once granted the Melbourne Cinémathèque permission to
screen some of his rare shorts on the strict condition that its organisers
immediately send him a Dylan record released only in Australia – but so does
Abel Ferrara, who used the Self Portrait-era
“Blue Moon” to such strange and haunting effect at the top and tail of Snake Eyes (aka Dangerous Game, 1993). Godard’s taste in folk-pop-ballads has
usually gone more towards Leo Ferré and Leonard Cohen, but quite recently one
commentator was surprised to find, looking back at Masculin Féminin (1966), that Dylan figures there as the sole,
saving link between the (male) children of Marx and the (female) children of
Coca Cola, between revolutionary rhetoric and the yé-yé sound. (10) And then there’s Robert Kramer, whose late ‘90s “Letter to Bob Dylan”, in the
hope of collaborating with him, went unanswered (11) –
Kramer, who once remarked that “everything
I’ve ever wanted to say was sung by Bob Dylan”, and whose CD player contained,
on the day of his death in 1999, Time Out
of Mind (1997). This was Kramer’s proposal to Big Bob:
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1. Interview with Kent in Fabrice Gaignault, Les égéries sixties (Paris: Fayard, 2006), p. 218 (my translation). back 2. Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). back 3. Ibid, pp. 149-151. back 4. See my “The Avatars of the Encounter” (2006), http://cinentransit.com/rendez-vous-el-cine-encuentra-a-la-filosofia/#v back 5. Harun Farocki and Kaja Silverman, Speaking About Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 208. back 6. Cf. for documentation of this ‘theft’, Chris Johnson, “Textual Sources to the ‘Love and Theft’ Songs”, http://dylanchords.info/41_lat/textual_sources.htm back 7. Dylan, Chronicles, p. 86. back 8. For a good account of this film and Dylan’s other cinema ventures, cf. C.P. Lee, Like a Bullet of Light: The Films of Bob Dylan (London: Helter Skelter, 2000). back 9. Supporters of Renaldo and Clara in print include the film critics David Sterritt (USA), Max Le Cain (Ireland) and Brad Stevens (UK) – whose collective tastes cover such (lateral) Dylan affinities as Beat cinema, Jacques Rivette and Abel Ferrara – as well as C.P. Lee. back 10. Nicole Brenez, in Bernard Benoliel (ed.), Le préjugé de la rampe: pour un cinéma déchaîné (Paris: Acor, 2004), p. 14. back 11. This letter appears in Rouge, no. 4 (2004), http://www.rouge.com.au/4/letter_dylan.html, with an introduction by Bobby Buechler. back |
© Adrian Martin September 2006 |
