Who's Not Where?

Todd Haynes treats Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There” like a chameleon, a multifaceted singer/songwriter/poet/musician who changes colors and persona in different surroundings in a life that is circular, not linear. He trots out six personae that show and express the various sides of the Great Enigma of Pop Music who maintains a special niche in the pantheon of influential artists of the past 40 years. The film is a labor of love, a compulsive fantasy of a dedicated fan, his take on his talent and rich identity. At first blush the movie hit me as a bewildering circus of crisscrossing characters and confusing events. Some things seemed reasonably connected and poetically reflective of the Bob Dylan I know; but other things had me scratching my head, as more puzzling than revealing. But I kept reminding myself that this was one man’s fantasy about Dylan and I needed to respect his perspective and spin on the artist. Plus it was interesting as a movie, with a marvelous complexity that was a joy to watch and see how it unfolded over two intense hours.

Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girl friend in the early years in Greenwich Village, writes in her recently published memoir of that period, A FREEWHEELIN’ TIME, that by accident she found out that Bob Dylan was really Robert Allen Zimmerman. His draft card fell out of his wallet and she saw his name on it. It pissed her off that he couldn’t share that information with her. It points to a long-lasting sly evasiveness in him; there was a desire deep in his mature to keep a core-self in a private place, as it were, a kind of cockpit he enters for his creative vision-flights. This is why he has always rejected the notion of being the spokesman for his generation, while insisting he was just a songwriter doing his thing as best he knew how, thank you very much. The actor Bruce Greenwood played a journalist in the film who was constantly bugging Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) for some definitive answer about his work and vision. Dylan/Quinn was notorious for slipping out of those kinds of loops, which he never wanted to give a glib answer to.

The film opens with Woody Guthrie, which is fair enough; only in this case he is a pre-adolescent black kid, with guitar of course. He hops a freight train and rides along while talking to two tramps on board. Later on, in one of the more thrilling musical moments in the film, he sings “Tombstone Blues” with Richie Havens. Okay, we know Woody was a model for Dylan in his folk singing phase. But why a black kid? When Norman Mailer makes an appearance at a social gathering in the film, I thought of his famous essay from the fifties called “The White Negro,” in which he argues the hipster or beatnik was outside the white community, like black people were, and as a consequence he had more identification with them then he did the white world. Another factor could be the influence of the Blues on Dylan. As a teenager in Hibbing, Minnesota, he listened to black pop music from the south on the radio and that was big part of his early education.

Jude Quinn’s image as played by a moody, hunched over Cate Blanchett is the closest to what Dylan actually looked like during the late sixties. The last name comes from his song, “The Mighty Quinn,” which in turn might have come from the 1959 movie with Anthony Quinn called “The Savage Innocents,” about the mores of Eskimos in Alaska, which impressed Dylan when he saw it. A variant title for the song is, “Quinn the Eskimo. ”Since Dylan in those days deliberately assumed an androgynous image, slim, cool, and with a mop of curly hair, that’s why Haynes chose Blanchett to play him. The versatile actress did the he/she act beautifully. She also had to take the crap from the audiences when Dylan moved away from folk and embraced Rock Music. “Maggie’s Farm” is heard then, the anthem of that transformation and change of colors.

Dylan’s love life and marriage with kids is profiled in the episode with Robbie (Heath ledger) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg.) We see their ups and downs and the implication is he was somewhat hard to live with. It appears the image of Claire actually combines three women in his life, Sara, his wife and the mother of his children, plus Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez, three dark haired women. It basically is an image of the seventies.

Two smaller incarnations were Rambling Jack and Pastor John, Jack being another coffee house folk singer (Rambling Jack Elliot) and Pastor John Dylan’s brief encounter with Jesus. Christian Bale played both in a very limited part. The same was true of a character that talks to the audience in stark black and white. He gives his name as Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) one of Dylan’s favorite poets.

Finally, the sixth incarnation is Billy the Kid, played by Richard Gere, who hardly looks like a kid. He also has a female dog named Henry—androgyny again. He lives in a small town called Riddle, Missouri, a town populated with freaks, cowboys, and giraffes. It’s a kind of Fellini-esque Carnival that seems to relate to Sam Peckinpah’s movie, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” in which Dylan had a part: His character’s name was ‘Alias.’ Since Riddle is in Missouri I’d guess were dealing with Dylan’s identifying himself with outlaws, specifically, with the James Gang. This what he sings in his song ‘Outlaw Blues”: ‘Well, I might look like Robert Ford/but I feel just like Jesse James.”

Todd Haynes treats his hallucinations of Dylan as a secretive man with multiple personalities, an outlaw always on the move, even on the lam from people who want to know WHO ARE YOU? But he’s busy brushing away all footprints he leaves behind in the sand. His horse’s name is Mystery and if you ask his name don’t be surprised if he says Alias, smiles, and rides away blowing in the wind.