One could approach Todd Haynes' impressionistic biopic of Bob Dylan from several disparate and individually profound angles, which is one of the oft-cited successes of the film. The divergence from the traditional biopic formula, the reverence for French New Wave and avant guard cinema, the use of six different characters in order to render a whole Dylan greater than the sum of its parts, one that simultaneously deifies him while giving us a clearer vision of his humanity: these elements give the film the kind of depth that make it easy to come back to immediately, with time or again and again.
But what I'm Not There really succeeded in doing was giving the pop culture icon (in the sense of notoriety, not infamy) a portrayal that probably most closely mirrors his own sentiments, which I envision as being the constant struggle to challenge the very forces that try to enlist him as a sin-absolving voice for their own complacency. Ultimately, it seems the people that always felt as though they owned a piece of Dylan were the very people that misunderstood him the most.
It seems perpexling that the two other analogous stories I think of on this point are Sex and the City and Dave Chappelle, but allow me to explain.
As much as I would rather not expend valuable blogspace discussing the Sex and the City movie that came out last week, I have devoted a surprisingly large resource allocation of brainRAM to badmouthing the show, the film and its effect on my beloved New York in the last couple of weeks, all of which was an excessively long way of saying that I just didn't think it was funny. And don't worry, I will explain the relation to Dylan and I'm Not There in due time.
Essentially, my argument against SatC is that the show/movie is anything but banal fluff; that the show has had a visibly detrimental effect on the social fabric of New York. That every two months, the New York Times feels the need to profile yet another magazine editor on her perpetual journey to virtually re-enact all four women's superficiality in the span of a couple hours each day even though the show has been off the air for 2, 3, 4 years now (they have to keep changing the number each time they write it). And that yes, there is something wrong with that.
A friend of mine last night countered that I was missing the real triumph of SatC, which is the celebration of post-feminism. Not only was SatC a dramatic paradigm-shift in the way women were portrayed on TV domestically, but its reach across the globe has radically redefined women's self-perceptions around the world: you could wear heels and fight for equality, you could wear pink and go to Harvard Law, etc. Point well, well taken.
The argument against this I was unable to articulate in our limited time last night was that many of these sources of feminine beauty seem to have developed from a male-dominated media perspective. It wasn't too long ago that collectively, as a society, we complained about unfair expectations of women and double standards that let boys be boys and forced women into wonderbras. But if our solution to that problem was keeping the wonderbras and forcing boys into becoming the Mr. Bigs of the world, then I think we went about this all wrong.
Ultimately, the point was moot because she thought that the movie had undermined many of her points about the show's poignance. SPOILER ALERT: in the end, the girls did have to get married, were cheated on, and eventually caved into familial pressures.
It is here where we begin to see parallels between SatC and I'm Not There. I told my friend that I believed that many of the women profiled in those Times articles (however big or small a minority/majority they may be) failed to see beyond the blatant superficial absolution (there's that word again) of materialism, and took the show at its word, which justified the purchase of $500 pumps. This kind of rampant materialism affects both women and men, but it was such a integral part of marketing the show that it was hard not to pick on it for that very reason. Therefore, much like Bob Dylan, I feel like there are two camps of people who come away with vastly different views of the show that lead to fundamentally different schools of thought: the ladies who believe that the show's rampant materialism is grounds for justifying even the most lavish extravagance regardless of costs both financial or social, and the ladies who see the show's frank discussions of sexuality as the latest boon for women's lib by insinuating that being promiscuous or slutty and sleeping with a lot of men are not analogous. Basically, sin absolution versus greater profundity at the cost of simplicity.
Of course, much like Bob Dylan, the show takes money from both sides equally, so we will never have much of a definitive answer on what its true intentions were: feminism or shoes (or is it feminism and shoes). But maybe were can learn from old Mr. Zimmerman.
Dylan spent much of his time and money trying to avoid, subversively undermine or actively sabotage the very church of "right on" he founded in the first-place, mostly because he realized that his protest songs were doing little to lull people out of the very complacency they claimed to abhor. It is, perhaps, the only succinct theme in I'm Not There, and the point that is most fervently defended without question. They loved him but hated humanity, he hated them but loved humanity, eventually humanity lost. Dylan got into the game in order to question the rules, and found himself the beneficiary of some serious rule-bending, which is where Dave Chappelle enters the story.
Chappelle and Neal Brennan created Chappelle's Show with the expressed intent of making entertaining television, but there is no doubt concerning the broader social message it was broadcasting. Since Chris Rock's simmering on the comedy scene, there had been a large void of a black comic voice in the mainstream comedic circuits, and Chappelle was in the right time at the right place to assume the mantle.
Chappelle's Show was always way smarter than it had to be (as evidenced by its crude, Hispanic hell incarnate, Mind of Mencia which set Hispanic people back 516 years as of this writing). Even little shticks like Rick James and John Mayer and ?uestlove jamming in a black barber shop were somehow statements of sociopolitical importance. But as the popularity began to heat up, Chappelle started to notice the strange twinkle in the typical white frat boy's eye as he quoted the "Niggar family" sketch with a little too much emphasis on the word that isn't "family." He realized that maybe people were laughing for the wrong reasons, and he decided to pull the plug much to the chagrin of the corporate higher-ups. Chappelle retreated to his private life, and has since only reluctantly re-entered the public live mostly to poke fun at the whole thing and try to illuminate the truth. Ultimately, I find it sad how many people bought into the story of his "institutionalization" in South Africa, but I guess I'll never be able to conclusively disprove them.
I can only hope that Dave Chappelle or Sex and the City get a tome as morally justifying and complete as I'm Not There. The film almost serves as a press release for the more challenging Dylan years, when he often provided the only challenge to his knee-jerk supporters or joined in the chorus of those who were skeptical of his successes. Long ago, Dylan, much like Carrie or Dave Chappelle, realized that he could most help others by helping himself, which didn't necessarily mean making ungodly amounts of money and then hoping to do right by it. Hopefully we can eventually all understand Dylan as this kind of figure, but for those of us that didn't major in English just to write a thesis on "Subterranean Homesick Blues", I'm Not There is as good of a proxy of these struggles as any Dylan could have hoped for.
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