I’m Not There: Deconstructing the myth

Ajitpaul Mangat, staff

I’m Not There is not simply about Bob Dylan. Melodious sundries of bluesy dins, folksy tones, and bucolic modulations orchestrate a sound tracked sonic landscape that echoes but never gives voice to Dylan: the musician and the poet. An assemblage of miming apparitions and imitating thespians portray an anonymous, mystifying protagonist that resonates but never personifies Dylan: the saviour, the Judas, or the born-again. And a capricious, kaleidoscope screenplay skeletally sketches a life-and-times narrative that hints at but never inspirits Dylan: the human being. The film is not about the flesh-and-bones Dylan that lived and breathed but rather the larger-than-life, mythical Dylan of pop culture and the collective unconscious. It is this society-fashioned myth that generates the disparate ghosts that inhabit the film. Thus, I’m Not There is, ultimately, as much about us as the personality depicted on the screen.

Todd Haynes’s (director and co-writer) film is a testament of the innate impious human desire to transform bread into flesh, wine into blood, and artists into gods. Bob Dylan proves to be an inspired choice to play: living cadaver. Few musicians represent idiosyncratic segments of the human psyche to more people than Dylan and are as uniformly brilliant and flawed. His voracious id: adulterant, misogynistic and usurious for drugs, alcohol and that omnipresent cigarette. His assured ego: writing inspired, peerless poetry, playing antagonistic music on no one else’s accord and singing nasally with nose pointed towards the heavens. His conscience’s superego: voice of a generation that broke down racial and political barriers before it turned vitriolic. The greedy transference between artist and audience, visible cinematically, is more about wish fulfillment than deconstructive psychotherapy. The blemishes are concealed, the gifts are aggrandized and the myth grows, as does the misconstruction. And therein lies the conflict: artist versus expectations, monikers, and a “Thin Man.” “Dylan the pugilist” begins this quarrel long before he is even himself, even there.

The film begins with a metaphorical rendering of Dylan (Marcus Carl Franklin) far removed from reality. A young, black boy is running towards an unknown future, armed with a guitar, a sly wit, and childlike imaginings. He is enamoured with everything fantastical — Woody Guthrie, Elvis Presley and Billy the Kid complexes all rolled into one, everything that is not truly himself. Only when he learns to live his times, to dream his dreams, and to create innately inspired art does he transform and grow into himself. Nurture is excised, and nature flourishes for every Dylan myth. The perennial actor — playing either the part of saviour (Christian Bale), romantic truth-teller (Ben Whishaw), outlaw (Richard Gere), or dressed in drag (Cate Blanchett) or literally performing as a vocation (Heath Ledger) — continually becomes the self-actualizing, introspective artist who excavates the convoluted layers of myth in order to discover the veiled truth by means of reinvention of character. This repeated deconstruction of myth and subsequent transformation of persona is at the centre of Dylan’s amorphous character and the desultory film. But the question still remains: is Bob Dylan ever there within the deconstructions and transformations of the erratic narrative?

I’m Not There ends as it begins, with Dylan as a fugitive. His creation, his art and his music have been misinterpreted and followed him like a taunting, oppressing ball and chain. Is the cycle starting anew? Ending? And if so, is that the real Dylan? The answers are not on the screen, in the music, or in Dylan. As Dylan, symbolized by Billy The Kid and played by Gere, says, “I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time.” His uncertainty arises because the actual identity of heroes and legends lies somewhere between them and us — in the union of fact and fiction, original and archetype, man and myth. The Bob Dylan that was will never again be here nor there, as he will forever exist somewhere else — somewhere personal for those who loved or hated him and somewhere in the unconscious for everyone else — because he now belongs to the folk tales of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and there is no telling what he will become.