I'm Not There reminded me of A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. All three of them were not written by the person whose life they describe. We looked at Seaver and Stein to better understand their works and the people whose biographies they wrote. So I thought it will help us better understand this movie and how much it is really about Dylan if we pay closer attention to Todd Haynes, its director.
Here is a link to an interview with Haynes that I found interesting and helpful - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/11/27/im-not-there-director-_n_69665.html
When we are thinking about the movie and how it is supposed to show us Dylan's real identities, it is important to remember that Haynes has never even met Dylan. He based the movie on "[Dylan's] published writings, his lyrics, all the records and unreleased material and all the biographies written about him", "his own creative influences, starting with folk music and traditional music, Woody Guthrie and his writings", "the symbolist poets and beat poetry", the Old Testament. So how much of Dylan do we see? I think all we see is Haynes and his own understanding of Dylan. That doesn't make the movie less worth of our attention but we should certainly have it in mind before as we are analyzing it.
Something on the side, the seventh character in the movie, according to Haynes, was supposed to be "a silent-screen, Chaplin-like Dylan, who performs these little feats of magic and whimsy in Greenwich Village and ultimately resolves the conflict between the Beats and the Folkies, a very Romeo-and-Juliet moment". Haynes decided not to include that personality though (he might have realized the movie was confusing enough with six identities :) ).
4 comments:
When Bob Dylan first gets to New York City, he lies about his past to Billy James, the head of publicity for a recording agency (8). Woody's character in "I'm not there" is based on what Dylan told others when he got to New York. Are the events portrayed in the movie based on lies? Are there aspects to Woody's character that do reflect Dylan?
A side point about the movie- I liked how the actors names at the beginning of the movie are connected by replacing one part of the name before replacing the other. This effect is only seen for the six characters that play Dylan.
I assumed that Dylan had at least met with the director while the movie was being made. I too noticed that Woody traveled on the freight train and I remembered reading that Dylan actually rode a car to New York, but I figured that a freight train was more interesting, and it was a good connecting scene for the movie. I think this movie is a great way to look at Dylan's reputation, and at what people think he is. This director took his writings, and his own thoughts about Dylan and put together a perplexing movie that does resemble the writing of Dylan.
That's very interesting that Tod Haynes had never even met Dylan. If you're making a movie about someone, it would follow that you should probably meet them. But this just emphasizes the fact that I'm Not There is all about the perceptions of Dylan. We see the 6 different sides of Dylan that were revealed to the public, see what people at the time would have seen. If we had had Dylan's true opinion on everything, then that would have removed some of the mystery of his existence. By deliberately leaving the story a bit vague, Haynes allows the viewer to decide for themselves who Bob Dylan is.
I am shocked that Todd Haynes never met Dylan. To create a movie about a single person without at least a hint of personal insight just shows how strong people's perceptions of Dylan are. Moreover, their perceptions did not even resemble each other. I assume that your perception just depended upon which side of Dylan you saw clearest. This emphasizes one of my favorite quotes in the book: "I was gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing" (p. 126)
Post a Comment