Nothing's There

The film "I'm Not There" reminded me of everything I hate about the sixties: faux-zen emptiness spouted as deep wisdom, self-absorption as folk religion, the fetishization of black people as markers of authenticity, the humourless preaching of a small-town church with even less prospect of redemption. Allegedly a film about Bob Dylan, he is portrayed at various stages in his life by superficial archetypes ranging from a black child to a white woman, each doppelganger more grating and hackneyed than the last. Cate Blanchett in particular is unwatchably successful in revealing the petulant twelve-year old girl in Dylan's psyche, whining for her cake while slovenly eating it too. Each characterization shows Dylan in various stages of a search for a model of authenticity to imitate, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud to James Dean to Billy the Kid to Jesus Christ to an earlier version of himself, increasingly contemptuous that no one calls him on his bluff. If this was an intentional attempt at character assassination, I applaud the filmmaker's sublimely subversive way of going about it under the cover of idol-worship; if not, perhaps this inadvertent defamation is all the more revealing of the dismal qualities we assign and expect of our cultural heroes. Their narcissism writ-large inspires awe in our culture of narcissism writ-small.

In case you didn't know, this film makes assuringly clear that: Dylan wears masks, takes on different identities, is enigmatic and open to interpretation. Besides this hammering of the nail of the obvious, there is no pathos to be found here, no insight to be attained into the reasons behind the masks or how they interacted with the flesh-and-blood person grafted beneath; he/she/it's greatest trouble seems to be dealing with the apparent soul-rendering difficulties of being almost universally adored. This is a common Hollywood trope, a recurrent sign of its self-mythologizing: that there is something noble and sad about being paid attention to the world over. That having scribes present to record your every vapid uttering, being photographed as if the most banal moments of your life had meaning and attending parties full of people eager to physically or socially give you fellatio is an endless horror-show. Unlike non-musical actors, Dylan actually had the talent to justify some of the attention. Yet this film, accurately or not I cannot say, shows him to be the prototypical celebrity narcissist: his legacy not the fulfillment of a rural American tradition of folksy crypto-meaning, but the unsettling disappointment of a charlatan who gets exactly what he wants.