Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  Masked and Anonymous is undeniably a strange film. At its centre is a star who does a fine basilisk stare, but very little of what is otherwise known as acting. It seems we are supposed simply to know that this is Bob Dylan, one gigantic performance in his own right, and adjust our assumptions accordingly. If that was the idea, it doesn’t work. In the usual Hollywood parlance, Dylan is meant to carry the film. Instead, he too often resembles a diffident presence, the approximate locus for something or someone the real actors can talk at. In scene after scene, the cliché ‘less is more’ is taken to its illogical conclusion.

  Around Dylan/Jack Fate turns a plot that is not often detained by the need for exposition or explanations and a bunch of characters whose purpose, half the time, seems to be to engage the semi-absent hero in psychotic-Socratic exchanges. A lot of the dialogue is cryptic; much of it wears its presumed profundity like a ball and chain. Kinder critics and the distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, would attempt to suggest that part of the effect being attempted was to create dramatic correlatives to Dylan’s songs. No one seems to have thought that one through. Those songs are in essence monologues; the speaker is not interrogated. Most movies, in contrast, are driven by their dialogue, by interplay and exchange. The expedient of allowing Fate to address us in voice-over is a sign, as some film purists will always insist, of cinematic failure.

  That said, Masked and Anonymous is awash with ideas, good and bad. The picture offers a lot to talk about and analyse. Whether it returns the same investment in terms of viewing pleasure is, let’s say, disputable. The idea of Bob Dylan and what that might mean is much in evidence. There are countless jokes for fans and students of the music business. There is an entire character, Tom Friend (Bridges) – another blunt-edged joke of a name – whose purpose for much of the time is to illustrate Dylan’s misfortunes at the hands of dishonest journalists (especially those who are obsessed with the ’60s). This is supposed to lead us, it seems, into an argument over truth, reality and art. Instead, it gives the appearance of a star demanding attention by complaining about all the attention.

  And yet the thing is fascinating. It has levels the way an M.C. Escher architectural fantasy has levels. If the measure of a piece of art is that it repays attention, Masked and Anonymous is worth a lot of attention. Its effects are cumulative, its ambitions large. Les Enfants du Paradis it is not, but the contrast between a contained theatrical world and life’s bigger stage, between conscious performance and a world full of lies, disguises and political performances – masked and anonymous, in short – is very effective. Some of the music, if not all, is terrific.

  Uncle Sweetheart (Goodman) has pulled Fate from a Mexican jail for the sake of a TV benefit – supposedly for the poor and needy, as ever – with Sweetheart as the beneficiary. In a dilapidated, ramshackle America torn apart by economic failure and an incipient civil war, it’s every hustler, demagogue and thief for himself. On the way to the gig, Fate pauses to visit his dying father, who happens to be the dictatorial ‘President’, one who is about to be overthrown by Edmundo (Rourke), the next caudillo in line. Democracy is a thing of the past. Such is one subtext in search of a plot.

  In fact, it might be the most interesting theme of all. Dylan the scriptwriter has cast his eyes beyond the ‘Clinton wars’ and America’s sense of infinite entitlement to peace and prosperity. He has packed one corner of his film with allusions to one great Civil War – an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and the ghost of a blackface minstrel turn up, ‘Dixie’ is played – and asked himself why another conflagration is out of the question. Death squads roam the land; TV executives go armed; peonage has returned; corruption is commonplace. When a little girl (Tinashe Kachingwe) sings ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ for Fate’s sake, there is a world of poignancy in the moment. The truth is in the eyes of all the grown men who are listening: the times have changed, but for the hellish worst, not for the better.

  The film seems to say that the United States is deluding itself, that infernal forces are never far from its bright, complacent surface. All that’s required for understanding, as Fate explains before the closing titles, is an altered perspective. In short, though the country is never named, Dylan imagines the end of America. This time the prophet ventures a prophecy. Once he preached of apocalypse and end times; this is a glimpse of what he meant.

  Masked and Anonymous is not the typical all-American dystopia. It could be set in anyone’s future and is not, in any case, remotely ‘futuristic’. The misery of daily life could be unfolding in one of those Third World countries to which all ‘low intensity’ wars are supposed to be confined. But one memorable and moving slow panning shot offers a dismal vista of a recognisable contemporary Los Angeles. On the soundtrack Dylan sings his ‘Blind Willie McTell’: ‘See the arrow on the doorpost / Saying, “This land is condemned.”’ All ambiguities aside, the artist has not been as ‘political’ as this in many years.

  He also has something to say about religion, art, dreams, friendship, families and lies. What makes the film complicated – what makes it impossible as a Hollywood production – is that Dylan is not trying to say just one, two or half a dozen things. He also seems be insisting that the things he is trying to convey cannot be isolated, one from the other. As writing, the film is tightly woven. Contrary to what would be said by critics who understood only the standard Hollywood three-act brain-killer, it is not without structure. It is certainly not ‘formless’.

  Some of the allusions to Shakespeare make you wonder, for example, if Fate, Sweetheart, the TV producer Nina Veronica (Lange) and the rest are not just actors in a play within a play. Oscar Vogel, the ghost of the blackface minstrel who opened his mouth once too often – Vogel is the German word for bird – makes the obvious statement: ‘The whole world is a stage.’ The Bob Dylan we think we know is meanwhile both a performer and a performance. In one of its aspects that performance is mistaken for reality. In another sense it has been reality, one reality, ever since Robert Zimmerman adopted a fictitious name. In this stretch of celluloid, Bob Dylan plays a Bob Dylan figure. He plays himself as a character forever playing himself. If the movie confused some people, that was no accident.

  It is equally possible to ask whether the outside world of civil wars, death squads and murderous politicians in Masked and Anonymous is not just another of history’s hellish perpetual re-enactments. Edmundo, the President, the insurgents and counter-insurgents could as well be players in some Elizabethan drama of regicide and betrayal done in modern dress. You can have a third bite at the cherry by wondering how much of what is going on is happening in and through the mind of Fate. The film’s closing sequence sees him being driven back to his prison. Dylan’s immobile face is held for almost a minute and half, resigned or accepting, in essence disinterested, while the voice-over says, ‘I was always a singer and maybe no more than that.’ His last words are: ‘Seen from a fair garden, everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau, and you’ll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I tried to stop figuring everything out a long time ago.’ The film all but invites you to come up with your own guesses as to what it was he had once tried to understand.

  When it was released in July 2003, the film did not impress many reviewers. No one should have been too surprised. Yet again, Dylan had made a piece of cinema that required too much thought and too many explanations. His non-acting, even in a movie that justified passivity and a few non sequiturs, did not make for the kind of sense the critics wanted to understand. Most agreed that the star was a mumbler, wooden, taciturn to a fault – all too true, unfortunately – who had indulged in yet another of his well-known ego trips. Thanks to Renaldo and Clara, Dylan was never again going to catch a break in the world of movies. It was also said, reasonably enough, that too many of the big names who had queued for a chance to be in the picture had been reduced to cameo performances. So Val Kilmer turned up as an animal trainer apropos of nothing, it seemed, beyond an incoher
ent speech on the fate of species and because he was Val Kilmer. Equally, the possibility that tiny roles were sometimes crucial was not considered by busy reviewers. A common reaction to Ed Harris playing the ghost of Vogel the blackface minstrel was expressed by the San Francisco Chronicle’s man in the free seats. ‘Why? I don’t know,’ said the critic helpfully. ‘It’s best to not think about it.’1 The picture might have made a bit more sense had the cineaste bothered to do his job.

  A ‘lot of long-winded gobbledygook’, said the Los Angeles Times. Proof ‘that what is towering genius in one medium can go insanely wrong in another’, observed the Boston Globe. ‘An incomprehensible Bob Dylan vanity project that is not only nearly impossible to sit through, but embarrasses a long list of stars who lined up to work for scale opposite the legendary musician,’ judged the New York Post. ‘Simply painful to watch as the doomed vehicle … comes whistling toward a fiery crash landing,’ concluded the Washington Post. An ‘unholy, incoherent mess’, said the New York Times.

  The New Yorker made an effort, its critic deciding that the picture was ‘knowing without always being knowledgeable, darkly humorous, full of wisdom both faux and real, and genuinely mysterious’. Ann Hornaday gave the Washington Post’s second opinion on its own review, granting that Masked and Anonymous was ‘uneven’, but nevertheless judging the picture to be ‘a fascinating, vexing, indulgent, visionary, pretentious, mesmerising pop culture curio’.2 These pleas in mitigation did nothing to alter the damning verdict. As a commercial proposition, the movie was dead within days.

  What was interesting, in a ghoulish sort of way, was the extent to which Dylan was held in contempt or attacked just for being Bob Dylan. Some people had grown very weary of the legend. The Village Voice, for one example, warned those liable to be guided by its opinions that the movie was ‘first and foremost a trash-can monument’ to the ‘ageing coolness’ of this ‘pop Mahatma’.3 The hostile reviews had one other thing in common. The political content of Masked and Anonymous was dismissed or just ignored. Here was Dylan, for a miracle, addressing politics and a possible American future and no one wanted to know. It seems that radical views had gone out of style since his first adventures in ideology. Perhaps if he had made the picture a few years later, when the truth about warmongering conspiracies was known to all, when banks were brought to their knees and capitalism trembled, the critics might have been a little more attentive.

  *

  On 3 August 2002, of all the festivals in all the world, Dylan performed at Newport. The event at which he had made his name in 1963 and made some enemies in ’65 was as much a part of the received narrative of his career as the 1962 Fender Stratocaster with a three-tone sunburst finish that, back in olden times, had infuriated those with an inflexible idea of how folk music was supposed to sound. Thirty-seven years later, the organic-fruit-juice-vending sponsors were calling it the Apple & Eve Newport Folk Festival. In the late afternoon of a ferociously hot day, Dylan opened with a traditional song, ‘Roving Gambler’. He didn’t do so to make a point about ironies, but simply because it had become his habit. He had outlasted all the arguments.

  In fact, many of the critics and fans who had listened hard to Time Out of Mind and ‘Love and Theft’, who had pored over all the verses, unpicked the quotation-collages and tracked down every fragment of borrowed melody, said he had become the keeper of tradition’s flame, the archivist of the American experience. The idea was already in danger of becoming a cliché. Reviewing ‘Love and Theft’ in the New York Times, Greil Marcus had remarked that Dylan’s new music opened up a window in time.4 That was no more strictly true than the accusations of betrayal in 1965 had been wholly true. But it contained truth enough. Dylan was not quite the last person in his country still capable of remembering a few things about the republic’s history. He was hardly alone among performers in trying to pierce the veil of cultural amnesia. Americana, a term he would mistrust until he claimed it nonchalantly for his 2013 Americanarama tour, had been thriving without his help during the 1990s. Somehow, for all that, Dylan’s explorations hinted at a bigger statement than anything that could be contained in a revivalist pastiche. Walt Whitman was being invoked increasingly often by admirers. The artist, it was asserted, was finding a way to articulate a sense of the past in the present, alive and active. He too had become part of the American tradition, lodged in the collective memory he was mapping.

  Dylan returned to Newport less than a fortnight after the death of Alan Lomax, the left-wing folklorist who had been among those shouting loudest for less volume back in the middle of the ’60s. The artist had chosen to forget about that. On being ‘inducted’ to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York in January 1988, Dylan had picked out the folk-song collector – along with Little Richard, no less – for special thanks. During a show in Vienna, Virginia, in August 1997, Dylan had once more expressed his gratitude to the ‘father of world music’. The artist would also make respectful mentions of Lomax in the pages of Chronicles, as though all the fuss of 1965 had never happened.

  There was an odd sense in which that was almost true. By 2002, the three albums of rococo R&B and opaque verses that had forged Dylan’s reputation in the middle years of the ’60s looked increasingly like aberrations, however brilliant they might have been in conception and execution. Journalists writing about him were still talking of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde in terms of ‘rock and roll’. He had said often enough, correctly but in vain, that the term had never been descriptive of his music. The other truth was that those three monumental albums did not represent the dominant strains in his art. Strange as it sounds, they had been a phase.

  By the end of his life, Lomax had long since come to terms with popular music, though he never lost his contempt for homogenised mass culture. Dylan had travelled in the opposite direction. His thanks from the stage at the Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna in 1997, just after singing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, had included the following statement: ‘Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music. So if we’ve got anybody to thank, it’s Alan.’ That had been as explicit as the artist ever gets, even if it overlooked the fact that the Lomax version of love and theft had sometimes involved dubious methods, not least a tendency on the collector’s part to behave like a condescending patron towards black performers. Dylan had always talked of folk song in terms of mystery and secret knowledge. In thousands of field recordings, in Folk Song Style and Culture (1968), in The Land Where the Blues Began (1993) and in many other publications besides, Lomax had spent 70 years making the connections that had helped others to solve the riddles. He had helped white boys to sing the blues, at any rate. Dylan’s twenty-first-century approach was more sophisticated. As with borrowed words and phrases, he laid himself open to the charge that he had built a career by appropriating the creations of overlooked or anonymous artists. In his defence was the fact that he had, in essence, perpetuated tradition more surely than any other performer. So dominant was he in the art of American song, it was hard to say where tradition ended and Dylan began. His late recordings were meditations on that truth.

  Still, when he returned to the stage in Newport after 37 years it seemed to most members of a huge audience that he had been taking his ethnomusicological researches a little too far. Either that or he had landed a job playing third villain from the left in a particularly bad western. The big white Stetson was in place, but there the resemblance to any known Bob Dylan ended. His hair was shoulder length, straight and unkempt. He wore a beard that looked as though it had been drawn on by an impish child. What made this all the more bizarre was that some fans knew he had looked entirely different, which is to say more or less normal, during the previous night’s show in Worcester, Massachusetts. At Newport, Dylan made no attempt to explain himself. As was often the case, he said not a word to the crowd, but carried on as though nothing whatever was amiss. His eccentricities had long been proverbial; this �
� the weird hair like a stringy curtain around his head, the billy goat beard-thing – invited diagnosis. When photographs got out, a small frenzy would ensue among those who worry over What It All Means.

  It meant that Dylan had been shooting a video for a new song called ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’. The mystery lay in the fact that he had not bothered to take even ten minutes to remove a silly wig and a fake beard before going on stage. Perhaps it was his oblique comment on expectations and the return to Newport. Perhaps he thought it was funny. When a Rolling Stone journalist asked a couple of years later, ‘What was up with the wig and fake beard?’ Dylan’s answer almost gave the game away. ‘Is that me who you saw up there?’ he asked.5 Perhaps he just liked the look, or the idea that photographs of what seemed to be late-period Howard Hughes in a cowboy hat would certainly find their way around the world. He didn’t look much better in the video, but at least the get-up was appropriate to the subject.

  Behind all the nonsense, typically, lay one of his finest songs. That the piece would be relegated for better than five years to the soundtrack album for a failed Civil War movie called Gods and Generals is almost too predictable to be worth stating. It was the kind of perverse decision that had also become typical. ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’, a majestic threnody for those who fell in the war between the states, vindicated Dylan’s literary borrowing habit. It confirmed, too, that his attempts to address a century and a half of American history, to contain its strands and contradictions within his work, were not whims.