View image Jude Quinn. Bob Dylan. Mona Lisa. (Cate Blanchett.) Enlarge and see. The eyes, the mouth, the verge of a smile.
The message may not move me,
Or mean a great deal to me,
But hey! it feels so groovy to say...
-- Peter, Paul & Mary, "I Did Rock & Roll Music" (1967)
The sun's not yellow
It's chicken
-- Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues" (1965)
I listen to Bob Dylan for the music, not the words. I know: heresy. But it's the truth: I listen to him for the way he sounds, and that includes the sound of the words. The literal meaning of the lyrics, or what people used to call the "message" (if one can be found or deciphered), is secondary, just one dimension of his art. In his 1960s folk-pop-culture ascendance, Dylan's songs were scrutinized for coded messages -- supposedly embedded "between the lines," as die-hard folk-popsters PP&M put it in their satirical ditty about the superficiality and commerciality of rock 'n' roll music. That pop-culture illusion -- that Dylan and the Beatles were sending out encrypted signals into the collective consciousness, and especially to you -- is something Todd Haynes plays around with quite a bit in "I'm Not There" -- a pseudo-documentary/biopic not unlike his "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," but with six actors playing Dylan instead of Barbie dolls playing The Carpenters.
But before we get to that: No, I'm not at all knocking Dylan as a poet or a lyricist. (I read Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings for their music as much as anything else, too.) If Dylan's words weren't so satisfying to sing out loud, he wouldn't be much of a songwriter, would he? I mean, how does it feel to sing "How does it feel?" It feels fantastic, that's how. The black bile of those spleen-venting, "finger-pointing" songs ("Like a Rolling Stone," "Positively 4th Street," "Ballad of a Thin Man") can be so cathartic. All those playfully cryptic, electric-surrealistic rhymes in "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (cue cards, anyone?) can make you dizzy with delight. A simple couplet like, "They sat together in the park / As the evening sky grew dark," doesn't look like all that much on the page, but you hear Dylan sing it and you feel a spark tingle to your bones.
What I mean to say is that, even if Dylan were writing in a language no one else on Earth knew (and sometimes I think that's exactly what he means to do), his great songs would still be great songs. Take Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Do you need to know the meaning of the words in Schiller's "Ode to Joy" to appreciate the fusion of vocal and orchestral sounds in the last movement?
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!...Admit it! It feels so groovy to say! (Or sing.) I feel the same way about "My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums," and "Awop-bop-a-loo-mop alop bom bom" (by Dylan's idol Little Richard) and "Beat on the brat with a baseball bat" (The Ramones) and "A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido" (Nirvana).Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuer-trunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
In Jude Quinn's (Cate Blanchett) last scene in "I'm Not There," he's riding in the back of a limo, apparently giving an interview to an off-screen reporter. The words come from a 1966 Playboy interview with Nat Hentoff:
What I’m talking about is traditional music … with all these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels—they’re not going to die. … You’d think these traditional music people would gather that mystery is a traditional fact. These things are so full of mystery … contradictions … chaos, clocks, watermelons, it’s everything. People think I have some kind of fantastic imagination. It gets very lonesome. Traditional music … it’s too unreal to die. … And in that music is the only true valid death you can feel today off a record player. Like everything else in great demand people try to own it. … I think it’s the meaninglessness that’s holy."Everybody knows I'm not a folk-singer," Jude says, looks at the camera, and gives us a Mona Lisa smile.
Roses growing out of people's heads, swans turning into angels, Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet...
Bob Dylan appears in the last shot of the movie. He's not there in any of the others. In the first shot, adapted from "Don't Look Back," the camera is Dylan, as he makes his way on stage (see "This Is Spinal Tap"). Oh, but there I go again. I'm trying to emphasize the Dionysian side of a movie that's Apollonian in intelligence. It's worth mentioning (as many have) that Todd Haynes majored in art and semiotics at Brown University. Haynes did extensive research and has compared his filmmaking method to writing a doctoral dissertation.
But as Robert Sullivan wrote in a New York Times Magazine story about the film:
Haynes didn't want to make a movie that was about anything. He wanted to make a movie that is something.And, for everything else you can say about the film (and much can be said), what I believe he's made is an ode to joy. Yes, it's all about cultural references and signifiers and analysis and interpretation and image-manufacturing and PR. It's neither fish nor fowl: neither yellowtail nor chicken (see above). I laughed, I cried. Afterwards, I was elated, stoned, so happy just to be alive.
It's significant, I think, that the movie's most ecstatic musical moments -- ones that also signal turning points in the narrative -- are built around songs considered "lightweight" by some of Dylan's hardcore folkie fans: the electric machine-gun of "Maggie's Farm" (a straight-ahead blues) that scandalizes the "New England Jazz and Folk Festival"; the raunchy "Goin' to Acapulco" ("She puts it to me plain as day / And gives it to me for a song"), transformed into a haunting dirge for the surrealist town of Riddle by Jim James (in "Rolling Thunder Revue" whiteface) of My Morning Jacket, accompanied by Calexico as a funeral band; and, for a few glorious moments at the end, Dylan himself singing a pop song (and a No. 1 hit for The Byrds), "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- mostly the wail of his harmonica, like a midnight train whining low.
Although "I'm Not There" was co-written and directed by Haynes, and a title says it was "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan," one screen credit that shouldn't be overlooked is this one: "Story by Todd Haynes." Fragmented and kaleidoscopic as the movie's approach may be, there's a story (or, rather, stories) that's no more difficult to follow than "Traffic," "Babel" or any other "network narrative movie -- and, even for those who know next to nothing about Dylan, probably a whole lot easier than "Syriana" or "The Fountain." The primary difference, of course, is that the six main characters are all aspects of one character, although none of them is called "Bob Dylan."
Sure, "I'm Not There" is a phantasmagoria, riddled with historical, musical, cinematic, biographical and miscellaneous pop-cultural references and details, but it's also structured as a parody of ultra-familiar bio-pic formulas and clichés, so that you sense where the story beats are, even when the chronology is scrambled. The foreshadowing of The Motorcycle Accident under the single-shot Godardian title alone is a blast: just a motorcycle streaking across the 'Scope screen, black and white with some brown lettering. Whether you know there was a legendary Motorcycle Accident or not (you will), it's a delightful set-up for the autopsy scene that follows -- which is, among other things, a riff on the apocalyptic, Paul-Is-Dead-like speculation that swirled around the crash at the time. But you don't have to know that. Let me put it this way: If the flat-out spoof "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" can approach "I'm Not There" as a genre parody, we're in for another real good time.
Maybe "parody" isn't quite the right word. Is "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" a bio-documentary parody? Or the investigative doc and horror movie sections of "Poison"? Or the Sirkian melodrama of "Far From Heaven"? Todd Haynes' movies are all smart as a whip and sharp as a tack, but they make you laugh and they make you cry. And, sometimes, they make you sing.
So gather around
And see what the day brings
And see what makes you laugh
And see what makes you sing
And never, nevermind
The thing that people say
You'll never go away
You'll never go away
-- Brad, "The Day Brings" (1997)
The sun's not yellow, it's chicken has always been one of my favorite Dylan lyrics. Or any lyric period.
Radiohead's Thom Yorke feels the same way about the pleasurable sound of words before their "meaning." He sings "the rain drops" 47 times on one song, and it is a joy to join in.
I'll second Jonathan's comment. It might be the best single line ever.
***
I'm glad to read your post on this wonderful film. I felt a similar sense of elation after watching "I'm Not There"--a feeling similar to what I've felt watching all of Haynes's other films. What most struck me about this movie, though, was the unusual but awesome decision to render what is traditionally the subject of a biopic into an object.
Bob Dylan as "I"--the subject--is not there as the title succinctly tells us. But he--the object--is there. Most biopics try to confuse this fact--that the I is never there--I think. They strive for some interiority. Which is why Haynes equating this project as a dissertation is such a perfect analogue. The movie is Dylan as an object of study and scrutiny and not the subject of a motion picture. Or something.
***
I'm wondering about the title some more. Because I think it's playful, obviously. Dylan's not there, but he is there as much as he can be, anyway. Or rather as much as any individual human can be in any representational art form. And does the "I" refer to him? I continue to think that it might refer to Haynes himself. Of course this is tricky because I think he is very much there (in numerous echoes of his earlier films, for instance). Todd Haynes almost seems to be more of a presence than Dylan. Which is really what all biography amounts to, right? In some way isn't all biography about the author of the biography as much as if not more than the subject? I'll stop now. My head swims a little.
Schuyler: I think you've hit it when you ask (rhetorically): In some way isn't all biography about the author of the biography as much as if not more than the subject? I don't see how that could not be the case. (Artists always end up making autobiographies, no matter what else they're doing.)
"I'm Not There" (which takes its title from an early Dylan song) is a parody of a bio-pic (and a "Biography"-style biography), but I don't really think it's any more of a "biography" of Dylan than "Velvet Goldmine" was of Bowie.
The title also plays on a few famous quotes from Dylan that are used in the movie: "I'm so glad I'm not me" (reacting to something untrue he's read about himself in a paper or a magazine), and the line about not knowing who he is -- being somebody different when he wakes up in the morning than he may be when he goes to bed at night. Combine those things with the pop-culture images and incarnations of Dylan and you've got one kaleidoscopic "Self" Portrait.
An interesting take on "INT" appears at the AV Club. Don't miss the ever-present "Dylan Sucks" debate in the viewer comments section...
http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/im_not_there_either_thoughts_on
The title "I'm Not There" is also a play on Rimbaud's line "I is someone else", quoted by Claire in the movie.
Fascinating reading, Jim. I'm glad to see this magnificent movie getting the attention it so richly deserves.
I like your take on the film/Dylan as a poet/musician - focusing on his music and how Dylan felt about his music. I approached it from the aspect of an artist, only because I felt it became more about not even Dylan, but also perhaps about Haynes, or any artist whose fear of being caged into what the audience thinks you are send you down a career trajectory you may not want. Or whose anger at being trapped in a box of other's truths keeps you from exploring. It takes a brave soul like Dylan and Haynes to not be afraid and find new soil to plant yourself in, regardless of what the critics, reporters and fans think.
Also as an artist who understands that art can only thrive if there's a mythology behind the artist. I think Dylan understood that and I think Haynes understands that as a filmmaker, which is what makes the television special within the film about Dylan so devastating - some people can't leave well enough alone and search for what they think is truth, when the truth of the artist is already there, in his work. No questions need to be asked beyond that.
Jim: I agree completely. It's definitely no more of a biography of Bob Dylan than "VG" was one of Bowie and Iggy and Bryan and Marc and etc. That was more or less what I told my friend the day after I saw it. I believe I phrased it: "It's a music bio-pic like 'Velvet Goldmine' only instead of one alternate reality there're several more."
I'm not sure if other's have remarked upon it--that it occupies a universe remarkably similar to but definitely not our own--but it's the way in which I've thought about "INT." I have noticed the appropriate adjectives phantasmagoric and kaleidoscopic used in conjunction with this movie. In a way, though, I think it's more than that. It sorta deconstructs our "reality" and reconstructs it in a skewed manner; it presents an alternative and still wholly germane history. It's among the reasons why I love this film so much--and why his other pics mean so much to me too. It might be a little reductive, but all Haynes's films seem to do that. Everything looks normal but nevertheless feels a little off. It's what makes "INT" and "VG" so invigorating. And, I think, it's why "Safe" is so discomfiting (in the best way possible).
JE: The thing I like about "kaleidoscopic" in reference to this movie is that there is order to it -- like the geometrically opposed mirrors that create the kaleidoscope images. It's not random, but quite methodical... with some randomness rattling around inside the structure.
The most amazing thing to me about this movie is just how much of the music it contains. I didn't count the song credits but it felt like we heard maybe more than 50 songs at least in part? Born again Dylan was probably short-changed but I really liked Rimbaud Dylan (who is this Ben Whishaw?) and agree whole-heartedly with what you said, Jim, about the music of poets. I would add Wallace Stevens to your list. For pure musical language my pick would be "Sunday Morning" but "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" seems particularly relevent to Dylan, including this stanza: "I do not know which to prefer/The beauty of inflexions/Or the beauty of innuendos,/The blackbird whistling/Or just after."
"What I mean to say is that, even if Dylan were writing in a language no one else on Earth knew (and sometimes I think that's exactly what he means to do), his great songs would still be great songs."
This reminds me of my recent addiction to Plastic Bertrand's first record. I have absolutely no knowledge of French, but I've listened to the record about 20 times in the last couple of months. My brain kept replaying the phrasing and the chords on a daily basis. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the songs don't make much sense in French either.
It's out of print, but you can find it a couple of pages back at eggcityradio.com
That AV Club article perfectly summarized my exact reaction to the movie, right down to "Why wouldn't a Dylan fan just watch the far-superior (if equally pretentious) 'Masked and Anonymous' instead?"
Almost unrelated, the lead singer of the magnificent Sigur Ros sings in a fake language he calls Hopelandish. A voice as an instrument taken to an extreme.
I haven't seen I'm Not There and probably won't for about a year since I live overseas but it sounds amazing. I'm almost obsessed with it already.
BTW, didn't the working title sound a lot like a dissertation title? I think I like it better. _Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan_.
Sorry to be picky, but it's false that E.E. Cummings intended his name to be uncapitalized. Also, would you like to guess what I stuck up my butt last night?
I just want to say....that for someone who says he doesn't listen to the words, you picked up on quite a few of the references.
Sounds like you might like my new novel, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS.
It's a murder-mystery. But not just any rock superstar is knocking on heaven's door. The murdered rock legend is none other than Bob Dorian, an enigmatic, obtuse, inscrutable, well, you get the picture...
Suspects? Tons of them. The only problem is they're all characters in Bob's songs.
You can get a copy on Amazon.com or go "behind the tracks" at www.bloodonthetracksnovel.com to learn more about the book.
Great lyrics... I can tell you details with respect to the actual music (melody, harmony, rhythm...) that I hear, but the lyrics are always vague to me. Thanks for all the info and inspiring words in the posting.
uhh... mr tambourine was written by bob dylan and was not originally a pop song. duh. the byrds just made it more popular. i just want to make it clear that bob dylan was NOT singing a pop song. it was a folk song.
JE: Yes, my point was that a cover of the song was a big AM radio pop hit for the Byrds, and that it wasn't the kind of political/"protest" song Dylan had previously been identified with.
I think it's funny that people are trying to decipher the lyrics of "I'm Not There". It's not a studio recording, it's a basic run through at home of an unfinished song. It's pretty obvious to me that at times Dylan is singing nonsense lyrics just to get the phrasing right. A fantastic song, a true "lost gem", but only part finished. Pity he never completed it.