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Rocky Horror Dylan Show: Two Artifacts from a Life of Risk
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Thursday, December 06, 2007
Bob Dylan: The Other Side of the Mirror
Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965 (DVD)
Dir. Murray Lerner
Columbia Performance Series
Dylan (CD)
Bob Dylan
Columbia Records
Reviewed by Michael Helke
In a musical career spanning 40 years and change, Bob Dylan has lived to have everything concerning his life and work written about 10 times over. And so, in the spirit of “me too,” here goes:
We are currently in the midst of another spell of critical and popular adulation in one of the longest seasons any musician has thus far sustained — all the more remarkable a feat when you consider the object of celebration. It began in earnest 10 years ago, when the album Time Out of Mind, produced by Daniel Lanois, gave a kick-start to a career that, for the past 15 years, was distinguished largely by indifferent-sounding recordings, save for a couple that promised hints of past greatness and future possibilities but alone weren’t enough to dissuade the feeling he was succumbing to the anchor-pull of irrelevance. Four years later, along came Love and Theft. A self-produced effort that was lively and fleet-footed where the former was brooding and morose, the album helped reassure fans and critics that Dylan was still capable of greatness when he put his mind to it. And five years after that, there was Modern Times, which combined the best qualities of both preceding, and seemed to signal that, with his most recent collection of road-warrior musicians (a group that Dylan has praised as one of the best he has ever worked), he had, at long last, pulled a winning hand. To many of his fans, all he has to do from here on out is play those cards again and again and he could conceivably keep carrying on into his eighties. Those who have followed his career for many years, however, suspect that Dylan will eventually grow bored with the current set-up and look for ways to keep the game fresh. There’s always the chance his next shift might alienate a whole new generation of fans, who choose to convey their disdain by staying home in droves and leaving the gray ghost to perform opposite puppet shows and tractor pulls.
Not that, I suspect, it would matter much to him. Dylan, who has said he can’t imagine a life outside of playing music — and if he could, he’d happily go do that — is at the point in his career where he could risk everything and not have to pay for it. By lasting as long as he has, Dylan has acquired the one thing that all artists should envy: the freedom to fail. He may release a bad album, or make an incomprehensible film (Masked and Anonymous or Renaldo & Clara, anyone?), or piss off the Pope, but he’s not going to starve anytime soon: He can always make another, better album as it suits him, or move on to another medium entirely, or wait around until Benedict kicks off. Or just say screw it and go fly a kite.
That’s why I admire Todd Haynes, director of the new Dylan biopic I'm Not There: By refusing to stick to the time-tested musician-biopic template and choosing instead to pursue a more conceptually ambitious project — a film that isn’t so much about Dylan as the play of ideas his life and art, in their many facets, has inspired — Haynes has accepted a level of risk that most people in his position would find terrifying. Judging by some of the negative reviews I’m Not There has received so far, it may fail at the box office, and fail spectacularly. (If we are to believe the spate of negative reviews, even die-hard Dylan fans might be inclined to walk away from the film scratching their heads, wondering what happened to the man whose story they were expecting to watch.) Then again, the film might eventually garner interest on freak appeal alone, and draw curious audiences, and, like, say, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, become a classic that makes its money back a hundredfold. It may be Dylan’s story (or stories), but it’s Haynes’s risk more than anyone else’s. Whereas Dylan can bet the house but not lose the house, Haynes doesn’t own the house but can lose it all the same. If he succeeds, marvelous; if not, he’ll have an even more difficult time getting financing for his next film. Regardless of who says what about I’m Not There, it’s a film I feel obliged to see for one reason: to see one artist honor another artist and risk everything for the effort.