Photos by Jonathan Wenk
October 2008
In this autumn season of 2007, I can see that I’m going to be thinking a lot about the Bob Dylan song known as “I’m Not There (1956).” At least, that is the title given to it on most of its early, bootleg appearances. Now that it has finally been officially released, the sub-title date has been dropped -- which is a pity (since it added an element of mystery to the song) but also understandable (since no good explanation of the date has ever been given).
“I’m Not There” is perhaps the ultimate Dylan bootleg recording, and has long been a subject for cult idealization as the most obscure and inaccessible of Dylan’s “lost” songs: a major masterpiece that almost no one knew, and which indeed seemed to conspire actively against being known. Now, it has become the title of Todd Haynes’s movie I’m Not There, “inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan” -- “many” being the operative word. The film is already (in)famous for casting six different actors to play aspects of Dylan at different points in his career. If this strategy is a gimmick, it was a successful one: the film generated vast amounts of advance publicity, much of it based on photographs of Cate Blanchett looking, uncannily and androgynously, like 1966 Bob.
The film was not due for North American release until late November, though it had played in prestigious festivals like Toronto, New York, and Venice. I had the chance to see it at a special screening in Vancouver, organized by Hobo: but one viewing is far from enough to comprehend a film of this complexity and richness. I came out of the screening demanding “When can I see this movie again?” The answer was early December, once the film obtained theatrical release in at least the major cities of Canada. So the final version of this article is based on two viewings, though I’d already begun writing it well in advance, in early September, hoping to write my way through my pre-suppositions, both about the movie and about the song. I had also seen, on the internet, one brief clip from the film: a scene supposedly portraying the first meeting between Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. In less than two minutes of screen time, it contrives to commit about three dozen factual errors, placing this meeting at the wrong date, in the wrong place, in the wrong circumstances, with the wrong dialogue. So I was immediately alerted that the last thing to expect from this film would be factual accuracy: that, indeed, “factual accuracy” is a criterion which should pre-emptively be discarded as irrelevant, as completely beside the point of whatever the film is trying to achieve. Whoever else is “not there” in the film, one person who is certainly absent is the biographical Bob Dylan. Which is not to say that elements of fact do not persist in the film. There is a great deal of factual material, especially quotation from Dylan’s songs and interviews. But all these facts are wrenched from context, isolated, and then shuffled into new combinations. For someone who knows the biography well, part of the pleasure of the film resides in observing the intricate dance between fact and fiction, the re-placing of familiar words in new contexts; for someone who does not know the biography well, my only advice is to sit back and enjoy the flow of the images, but don’t believe a word. The internet also provided one other preview. The soundtrack CD for the film includes two versions of the song “I’m Not There.” One version is a new recording, by the band Sonic Youth (I wonder in advance what set of lyrics they will be authorized to use.) The other is a new, remixed version of the recording made by Dylan himself in 1967; it is this version which has found its way onto the internet, and which is, in and by itself, sufficient justification for the whole enterprise. The song was always already a masterpiece, though of a peculiarly muted kind; this remix, in greatly improved sound quality, removes a great deal of the equivocation. “I’m Not There” is there, and this new version should establish it as one of the great songs of the Dylan catalogue, that is, as one of the great songs of American music. “This is American music you’re hearing,” Bob Dylan / Jude Quinn / Cate Blanchett tells a hostile English audience in 1966, with (at the height of the Viet Nam war) a huge American flag draped across the back of the stage. “I don’t think you’ve ever heard American music before.” For what it’s worth, that is an actual quote, and the flag was there. Todd Haynes did not invent it.
