- MINSTRELSY, MASCULINITY, AND "BOB DYLAN" AS TEXT IN I'M NOT THERE. By: McCOMBE, JOHN, Post Script, 02779897, , Vol. 31, Issue 1
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MINSTRELSY, MASCULINITY, AND "BOB DYLAN" AS TEXT IN I'M NOT THERE
Contents
Maggie comes fleet foot Face full of black
soot Talkin' that the heat put Plants in the bed but The phone's tapped
anyway Maggie says that many say They must bust in early May
--Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (1965)
In the song above that plays over the DVD menu of I'm
Not There (2007), the audience immediately encounters a "face full of
black soot." Given the various ways in which Dylan has performed race
for nearly five decades, the link here to blackface minstrelsy should
not be surprising--especially in a song that appears on Bringing it All
Back Home (1965), an album in which Dylan's acoustic folk past is
juxtaposed with an electric Chicago blues present. Since blackface
minstrelsy is a performance--one in which white entertainers frequently
"performed blackness"--Dylan can be linked in numerous ways to this
discourse. From his early 90s cover version of Stephen Foster's "Hard
Times" (a song by an artist whose dialect songs were central to the
minstrel show repertoire) to Dylan's decision to title his 2001 album
"Love and Theft"--itself "thieved" from Eric Lott's influential study of
minstrelsy and 19th-century American identity politics--Dylan clearly
understands how race, like gender, is constantly performed, and he
repeatedly acknowledges his debt to two centuries of African-American
musical culture.
In the present essay, I am interested in how
Dylan's career-long performance of race intersects with his performance
of masculinity. The primary vehicle for my analysis will be Todd Haynes' Dylan biopic I'm
Not There; in particular, I will focus on the character of Woody
(Marcus Carl Franklin), one of the film's seven Dylan surrogates.1 In
many ways, I'm Not There offers an alternative to the
traditional Hollywood biopic. After all, six different actors perform
the roles of these seven Dylan-like characters, and the film itself
announces almost immediately that it is "inspired by the music and many
lives of Bob Dylan." Haynes quite literally presents many lives for his audience to consider, and none of the characters is actually named "Bob Dylan." In Haynes'
film, a fixed conception of Dylan's identity is not there; instead,
what is there is ample evidence of a structure of feeling towards race
and masculinity that resonates throughout Dylan's songs and live
performances. Much like blackface minstrelsy signifies "a peculiarly
American structure of racial feeling" (Lott 18), I'm
Not There invokes Dylan's ties to minstrelsy to demonstrate how Dylan's
performances of race, gender, and sexuality are deeply interwoven. While
many works before Haynes' film have confirmed Dylan's
mercurial nature, especially in terms of his musical influences and the
constant re-invention of song arrangements, Haynes'
film highlights the shape-shifter whose sense of gender identity is
every bit as fluid. Just as blackface is a mask--one that has invited
numerous scholars to consider how it functions and what it means--gender
identity is also a mask or, better yet, a series of masks that I'm Not There encourages its audience to investigate.
I-PERFORMING BLACKNESS
In a 2007 Cineaste interview, Haynes clearly outlines one of his major agendas in I'm
Not There: the director describes the biopic as a "deceitful genre"
that "blend[s] fact and fiction in every scene" (Porton 20). Even though
Haynes pushes at the boundaries of the biopic, he also
acknowledges some of its key conventions, which means that dramatic
moments of Dylan's life structure the narrative, including his decision
to "go electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and his motorcycle
accident the following year. Nevertheless, the film's chronology is far
from linear, and many of the casting choices intentionally raise
questions, as Haynes, himself, emphasizes:
Take the choice of making "Woody" a little
black kid who calls himself "Woody Guthrie." We all know that's not true
to life. But you're forced to think about why that choice is being
made--as opposed to the traditional biopic where you're not allowed to
think about these choices because that would ruin the entire illusion. (Haynes qtd. In Porton 20)2
True to the spirit of his highly postmodern film, Haynes
never explicitly answers the question he poses: why is a "little black
kid" spouting phrases lifted from the voice and pen of Bob Dylan and
bearing Guthrie's name? Only when "Woody" is analyzed within the context
of the film's other Dylan-like characters do answers emerge. In
addition, in a film rejecting linear narrative development--and in which
the different versions of "Bob Dylan" are frequently intercut with
scenes where other actors perform Dylan at different stages of his
life--Haynes' choice to begin with Woody seems crucial to the film's aesthetic and ideological goals. I'm
Not There formally privileges Woody's story, and I believe that "the
little black kid" is the key to unpacking crucial linkages among the
other stories that follow.3
Before viewers meet Woody, a grainy black and
white POV shot leads Jude (Cate Blanchett) to the stage during what
appears to be a date on Dylan's chaotic 1966 British tour. This shot is
followed by a cut to a motorcycle speeding down a rural road and the
crash--literally and figuratively--that removed Dylan from public life
for several months at the height of his commercial success. The next
series of shots takes place at an autopsy and reveals the lifeless body
of Jude, followed by a series of still images of the actors cast as our
various Dylans. Although we do not yet know their names, each image
couples with a single word descriptor provided by a voice-over: "There
he lay. Poet. Prophet. Outlaw. Fake. Star of electricity." For example,
the "poet" is Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), who fields questions during a
McCarthy-like press conference/interrogation, while the "prophet" is
Pastor John (Christian Bale), the late-70s-era evangelical Christian who
rejects his classic, secular songs, much like Dylan did in 1979. What
is most striking in this sequence, at least for the purposes of this
essay, is that Woody's image accompanies the word "fake." I'm
Not There is a film structured on an authentic/inauthentic binary, and
the character deemed a "fake" surely possesses a formally privileged
role. The multiple layers with which that term fits the relationship
between Woody and the "real" Bob Dylan is what initiates the film's
treatment of Dylan and his links to minstrelsy and masculinity.
Woody sometimes sounds like Woody Guthrie
(e.g., the character's claim that "it only takes a fountain pen to rob a
man") but more often sounds like Bob Dylan in his late teens /early
twenties, even though Woody is depicted living in 1959, a period before
Dylan actually used many of the words that Woody speaks. Not only does
Woody sing songs in 1959 that Dylan would not release for several more
years (such as an acoustic front-porch romp through 1965's "Tombstone
Blues"), but Woody's lines are also frequently drawn from actual Dylan
interviews. When two hobos ask Woody why he rides the rails, the reply
derives from a 1966 Playboy interview in which Dylan explains his
initial attraction to rock 'n' roll: "Carelessness. I lost my one true
love. I started drinking. The first thing I know I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall […]" (qtd. in Hentoff 131). Haynes
emphasizes the notion of a black character prone to "performing white,"
but also performing a white character (Bob Dylan) who was himself fond
of performing black. What drives the racial performativity home is a
brief scene in which artifice is layered over artifice, as Woody
encounters another performer who produced a surprising real-life impact
on the young Bob Dylan. As Dylan reports in Chronicles Volume One
(2004), the tedious existence of life in Hibbing, Minnesota was once
enlivened by the arrival of wrestler Gorgeous George:
[George] roared in like the storm […] in all
his magnificent glory with all the lightning you'd expect. He had valets
and was surrounded by women carrying roses, wore a majestic fur-lined
gold cape and his long blonde curls were flowing […]. Gorgeous George. A
mighty spirit. People said that he was as great as his race. (44)
Both George and Woody have created
larger-than-life personas founded upon highly theatrical performances of
masculinity. George sports his ostensibly un-masculine capes and
flowing locks, while the eleven-year old Woody performs the role of a
Dust Bowl-era Okie troubadour far removed from his "real" existence: he
is a boy playing a hard-travelling man. The idea that Woody is also
performing race is confirmed by the manner in which Gorgeous George and
Woody first glimpse each other. Woody has just completed a musical
performance at the carnival--one greeted with audience hostility (a
recurring theme in Dylan's career)--and he is then thrown into the mud
outside of a performance tent. As Woody emerges from the ground, his
face is covered in mud: a black child literally donning blackface.
Viewers can hardly ignore the layers of artifice in this single shot:
black performing white but appearing in blackface, reminding us of
minstrels a century before performing a version of blackness for
receptive white audiences.
So how does an eleven-year old
Woody-in-blackface make this biopic less "deceitful"? Keep in mind that
Woody, living in 1959, is a child of the Eisenhower era, and the
oft-asserted conformity and homogeneity of the fifties is something that
Dylan knew well. As he once told biographer Robert Shelton, "You see, I
don't come from what you would call a 'Great Society middle-class
family in the suburbs.' Where I lived there aren't any suburbs. There's
no poor section and there's no rich section. There's no wrong side of
the tracks and right side of the tracks.… As far as I knew, where I
lived, nobody had anything that anybody else didn't have, really" (qtd.
in Shelton 25). While Dylan surely underreports the economic diversity
of Hibbing, Minnesota, where he lived from 1946-1959, it was indeed an
area largely populated by white European immigrants. So well before
Dylan began to reinvent himself by adopting the Woody persona, Dylan
reinvented himself in another significant way: performing blackness.
In his essay "'That Wild Mercury Sound': Bob
Dylan and the Illusion of American Culture" (2002), musicologist Barry
Shank discusses how Dylan's performance of "See That My Grave is Kept
Clean" (1961) is analogous to blackface, an act in which Dylan both
identifies with and distances himself from the Blind Lemon Jefferson
original. Shank also observes linkages to minstrelsy prior to the
beginning of Dylan's recording career. Citing Anthony Scaduto, Shank
points to Dylan's simultaneous identification with, and distancing from,
Little Richard while a student at Hibbing High. Dylan's 1959 senior
yearbook cites his ambition "To Join Little Richard" (Scaduto 35), and
we know that one of Dylan's high school rock and roll groups covered
Little Richard's "Jenny Jenny." However, as Shank points out, Dylan also
believed that Richard's "mistake was that [Richard] played down too
low" (Dylan qtd. in Shank 105). In the performances of both "See That My
Grave is Kept Clean" and "Jenny Jenny," Dylan's shift to a higher vocal
register (and harmonica accompaniment in the former), allows a
performance that is both authentic and autonomous: both black and not
black--a tension central to blackface. Which is why a black Woody
Guthrie--anachronistically riding the rails as a Depression-era hobo in
that very same 1959--begins to make more sense: Dylan's late 1950's
identity is a frequent assertion of his connection to, and distance
from, African-American culture.
As an extension of Shank's arguments, Dylan
did not merely sing Little Richard's songs in a higher register; Dylan
also adopted Richard's image in other significant ways. As Robert
Shelton reports, "Bob wore his hair in mounds around his forehead,
Little Richard-style" (43) and even "studied black jargon" (38).
Additionally, Dylan's sense of humor as a fifteen-year old carried with
it an element of racial performance. A Hibbing friend describes Dylan's
emerging "black humor": "the sort of put-on humor of a black person
toward a threatening white" (Bucklen qtd. in Shelton 44). That Dylan was
attuned to the practice of African-American performances of racial
tropes in the presence of whites was no doubt confirmed by another high
school acquaintance: a disc jockey named Jim Dandy who lived in
neighboring Virginia, Minnesota:
Jim Dandy and his wife and kids were the only
blacks among Virginia's twelve thousand residents. Bob heard him
broadcast on station WHLB in the summer of 1957, and searched for the
man behind the voice. He and John [Bucklen] were startled, but pleased,
to discover that the DJ was black. Seeing that he was with simpatico
lads, Jim dropped his radio "white voice" for hip black slang. The
meetings went on sporadically for months. (46)
Given Dylan's immersion in cross-racial
identification during his Minnesota years, the casting of a black Woody
seems logical. The many lives of Dylan prior to his so-called "folk" or
"protest" period--an era beginning in earnest with a brief residency at
the University of Minnesota--include Dylan's carefully cultivated (and
quickly discarded) personas as a rock 'n' roller (Little Richard), a
poet of the Grand OF Opry (Hank Williams) and several others: some black
and some white.4 Yet among these early influences, Woody Guthrie
exerted a particularly strong influence. Bonnie Beecher, a Minneapolis
friend, outlines the extent of the Guthrie identification:
Back in Minnesota he'd disappeared for a
couple of months, he went on a trip, then he came back, talking with a
real thick Oklahoma accent and wearing a cowboy hat and boots. He was
into Woody Guthrie in a big, big way […] . When he'd had too much to
drink you'd have to call him Woody to get a response […]. At the time it
seemed ludicrous and pretentious and foolish, but now I see it allowing
a greater Bob Dylan to come about, (qtd. in Bauldie 20)
Beecher's concluding point is one that Haynes'
film seems to emphasize, with one important qualification: the Guthrie
persona allowed several Bob Dylans to emerge. In addition, viewers of I'm
Not There should note that even the assumed Guthrie identity could
itself be a racial composite. Following Dylan's "conversion" to Woody in
1960--to invoke Robert Shelton's word (74)--Dylan's "Woody" was, in
part, a mixed race performance, as well. During parties in the bohemian
Dinkeytown neighborhood (near the of Minnesota campus) in 1959-1960,
Dylan, "became the first guy to put the guitar and harmonica together,
with that frame-holder around his neck. Nobody had ever seen this
before. As far as I know, he was the first white performer to combine
the Sonny Terry harmonica with the Woody Guthrie guitar" (Abrams qtd. in
Shelton 69). Since Terry was an African-American bluesman and frequent
Guthrie collaborator, Dylan's hybrid identity--one musical and
racial--constitutes another performance of blackness, a practice I'm Not There foregrounds repeatedly.
II--BLACKNESS AND MASCULINITY
Dylan did indeed fixate on Guthrie's lifestyle
and music, but not quite as early as the film's 1959 setting. Perhaps
the discrepancy relates to the over-simplified notion that Woody's
character "refers to Dylan's youthful obsession with folksinger Woody
Guthrie" ("I'm Not There"). I would argue instead that
Woody is a mask (upon a mask), one that certainly reflects Dylan's Woody
obsession but has even more to do with an exploration of Dylan's
evolving masculinity. Rather than make Woody nineteen years old, as
Dylan would have been during his Guthrie conversion, Woody is eleven and
simply performing an adult masculinity. Haynes
foregrounds this performance with one of the first phrases that Woody
utters: "My mind got mixed with ramblin' when I was oh so young." So an
eleven-year old Woody, who makes exaggerated claims about his life
experiences, is consistent with the nineteen-year old Dylan who
performed the death-obsessed "See That My Grave is Kept Clean" on his
debut album. But I suspect that there may be even more to this
particular casting decision.
As a "little black kid," Woody also reflects a
career-long interest of Dylan's: a focus on the African-American
body--in particular, as sites of violence and identification. Whether
the body belongs to boxer Davey Moore, who dies during a prizefight
("Who Killed Davey Moore"), or another boxer, Rubin Carter (depicted in
"Hurricane" as "Buddha in a ten-foot cell"), or Black Panther George
Jackson, who was shot and killed at San Quentin Prison in 1971, Dylan
writes frequently of "damaged" African Americans bodies. One other black
male body of interest to Dylan, and one who plays a role both
diagetically and nondiagetically in I'm Not There, is
Blind Willie McTell. Woody describes McTell as the "best blues singer
east of Cannery Row," as well as the source of his aesthetic credo: "If
you can sing these [traditional] songs and understand 'em, ain't no
place you can't go." McTell serves as Woody's mentor, a role fulfilled
for the real-life Dylan by Guthrie and another African American:
The first thing that turned me on to
folksinging was Odetta. I heard a record of hers in a record store, back
when you could listen to records in a store. That was in '58 or
something like that. Right then and there, I traded my electric guitar
and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson. [Her first
album] was just something vital and personal, (qtd. in Heylin 33)
By 1960 revered Guthrie above Odetta and all
others, but he felt unable to match his hero's life experiences, a
subject he broaches in "Song to Woody" (1961): "Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I
know that you know/ All the things that I'm a-sayin'
an' a-many times more" (Lyrics 5). Among other things, "Song to Woody"
is an acknowledgment of role-playing: i.e., that the speaker's "hard
travelin'" is merely a pose in comparison to the more authentic Guthrie.
In the film, Willie McTell serves an analogous
role for the film's young Woody: an image of black manhood imagined,
although not yet attained. Haynes skillfully reminds us
that the figure of McTell exerts a fascination for the adult Dylan, as
the soundtrack to Woody's narrative includes Dylan's 1983 song "Blind
Willie McTell." The placement of this selection is formally privileged,
as well; "Blind Willie McTell" plays as Woody's boxcar "ramblin"' ends,
and the boy arrives at the bedside of a Guthrie look-alike. Except for
brief glimpses of Woody in the "Billy the Kid" segments of I'm
Not There, this is the last that viewers see of Woody. At the time he
recorded "Blind Willie McTell," Dylan had renewed his interest in
Judaism; as such, the song speaks of a journey from New Orleans to
Jerusalem and invokes "tribes," "chain-gangs," and "the ghosts of
slavery's ships," all of which could apply equally to Dylan's and
McTell's ancestors. In this song, McTell functions for the adult Dylan
as Guthrie had in "Song to Woody" more than twenty years earlier: the
song's speaker still expresses feelings of inadequacy in the face of his
role model: "I know no one can sing the blues/ Like Blind Willie
McTell" (Lyrics 478). Of course, the Bob Dylan of 1961 and 1983, as well
as the Woody character, nevertheless sing out; if the speakers in
Dylan's songs and Woody are not yet the men they hope to be, then the
act of "singing the blues" at least allows the artist to engage in the
process of becoming a fellow artist, hard traveler and adult male.
Like other African-American bodies of interest
to Dylan, the eleven-year old Woody also becomes a victim of violence,
as he is menaced by three older hobos who resent his presence in the
boxcar. However, Haynes eschews gritty realism and,
instead, opts for the fantastical, undermining any potential connection
to Civil Rights-era violence. Unlike Emmett Till, a fourteen-year old
victim of a 1955 Mississippi hate crime and the subject of a
still-unreleased 1963 Dylan protest ballad, the film's Woody survives
his attack; Woody must survive, after all, since he represents a stage
in Dylan's emerging and shifting masculinity. If we recall that Woody is
a "fake," what is false, in part, is that this version of Dylan not
only borrows an identity as an artist, but also borrows an identity as
an adult male. Instead of perishing in that railcar attack, Woody leaps
into a river, where he encounters a whale. Although we never see Woody
swallowed (bringing to mind his Biblical counterpart, Jonah), he is
clearly thrown ashore (again, like the prophet who spent three days in
the belly of his own big fish) and eventually emerges with a new
resolve.5
After being rescued by a white, middleclass
couple (The Peacocks), Woody performs in their living room.6 Throughout
this scene, Woody's race carries multiple layers of meaning. For some
appropriate context, consider Sal Paradise's idealization of the
so-called "Jazz America" in On the Road (204). African-American cultural
forms--for Sal and Dean Moriarty the specific referents are Charlie
Parker, Wardell Gray, and Slim Galliard, among others--are idealized
because of their purported purity and authenticity. This discourse
pervades I'm Not There as well. In the middle of
Woody's rendition of "When the Ship Comes In," one the Peacocks' friends
exclaims, "…and no formal training--remarkable." "White hipsters," to
borrow Norman Mailer's familiar phrase, often adopted the language and
the look of African-American artists (such as Dylan's Little Richard
hairdo and linguistic affectations) and resorted to a discourse of black
authenticity: an act of both "love and theft," as Dylan would one day
admit indirectly via an album title.
Haynes also foregrounds
several tropes of racial performance in the Peacocks' well-appointed
living room. Woody's bow-tied attire and frequent recourse to "Yes, Sir"
and "Yes, Ma'am" carries more than a hint of Uncle Tom-ing. In
addition, Woody outlines his plan for commercial success: to be a "real
singer on television" by "head [ing] straight to Hollywood and mak[ing]
it big, just like… Elvis Presley," another artist well-versed in
performing black during this same Eisenhower decade. Like Dylan's
high-school coiffure, Elvis's "rockabilly" hairstyle emulated processed
African-American styles--another convoluted case of white performing
black performing white.7 As Woody delivers his own race performance for
the Peacocks, however, he is soon exposed as inauthentic in other ways,
when a Minnesota juvenile detention center calls the Peacocks to inquire
about its missing charge. At this point in I'm Not
There, Woody has no choice but to ramble again, this time for Greystone
Park, a New Jersey state hospital, and the bedside of the real Woody
Guthrie.
If Woody is a fake on many levels, his
connection here to Dylan has as much to do with gender as it does with
race. Woody is a fake insofar as he performs an advanced state of his
own masculinity: an additional level of his performance for the
Peacocks. Woody is not yet a man, but rather one attempting to perform a
series of codes regulating masculine behavior--at least as the young
man understands such codes. Woody clearly represents Dylan performing
black--as Dylan has done from "See That My Grave is Kept Clean" in 1961
to singing of "ladies down in Darktown […] doing the Darktown Strut"
("Sugar Baby"--2001). However, as Eric Lott writes, minstrelsy's appeal
extended beyond skin color and "depended in part on the momentary return
of its partisans to a state of arrested development" (53). For Haynes,
Dylan in 1959--who could channel Little Richard or Sorry Terry with
equal ease--temporarily revisits his adolescence at a time when he is
actually passing the threshold of adulthood. Haynes'
implied argument is that the nineteen-year-old Dylan merely reverts to
an earlier stage of his development--in other words, acting as if he is
"a little black kid."
When Eric Lott describes the appeal of
blackface in 19th-century America, his argument applies also to Dylan,
Kerouac, and Mailer a century later: "To put on the cultural forms of
blackness was to engage in a complex affair of manly mimicry […]. To
wear or even enjoy blackface was literally, for a time, to become black,
to inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon, or gaité de coeur
that were the prime components of white ideologies of black manhood"
(52). At the height of the Civil Rights era in 1963, Norman Podhoretz
describes something similar--a very particular "a negro problem" that I'm Not There also addresses:
[Just] as in childhood I envied Negroes for
what seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy them today for
what seems to be their superior physical grace and beauty. I have come
to value physical grace very highly and I am now capable of aching with
all my being when I watch a Negro couple on the dance floor, or a Negro
playing baseball or basketball. They are on the kind of terms with their
own bodies that I should like to be on with mine […]. (Podhoretz qtd.
in Ross 69).
This discomfort with the white, male
adolescent body described is, of course, part and parcel of a much
larger postwar discourse that illustrates how, in Lott's words "dominant
codes of masculinity in the United States [were] (and still [are])
partly negotiated through an imaginary black interlocutor" (53).8 One of
the arguments of Lott's book is that the popularity of minstrelsy
depends, in part, upon a return to an earlier stage of masculine
development.
The implications of this process of masculine identification for analyzing I'm
Not There in general, and Woody's function within the film, in
particular, lie in the ways in which "Woody" represents a state of
arrested development. Woody is our Dylan surrogate in 1959, when the
calendar tells us that Dylan was an adult male. However, Woody is also
eleven and about to enter the age when so many young men, in the words
of writer Willie Morris "went Negro" (qtd. in Lott 53). Or, as scholar
Leslie Fielder describes the process, "Born theoretically white, we are
permitted to pass our childhood as imaginary Indians, our adolescence as
imaginary Negroes, and only then are expected to settle down to being
what we really are: white once more" (qtd. in Lott 53). For all of these
writers--and I think this applies to Haynes'
conception of Dylan's fluid identity--imagining oneself as black, or
presenting oneself as such, is a chance to refashion an identity. What
occurs on screen in the transition from Woody to Jack Rollins, and then
from Robbie Clark to Jude and beyond, is analogous to a process explored
by another Eisenhower-era artist: John Berryman. In Dream Songs, the
poet's protagonist frequently reverts to blackface dialect, and scholar
Peter Maber offers the following explanation: "Berryman, I believe,
chose the minstrel show as a means both for self-exploration and for
racial exploration precisely because of its contradictions and
inauthenticity. The minstrel show figures as a site of inherent
instability which climaxes in the possibility of a complete reversal"
(134--emphasis mine). Again, we return to the inauthentic--or "fake" (to
invoke the film's first image of Woody)--as the blackface mask is
placed on and taken off as part of a very conscious process. The appeal
of performing black, as Maber indicates above, is that it functions as a
form of play--an act that can be dropped in an instant. So it should
come as no surprise that once Woody arrives in New Jersey, the film's
other versions of Dylan are, indeed, white once more. However, what
changes in addition to Woody's race is the shift to another stage of
masculine development. And yet, the possibility of performing black as
part of that evolving construction of the masculine remains an
ever-present option.
III--QUEERING THE BLACK AND THE MASCULINE
The story of the "fake" concludes as he
arrives at the other Woody's New Jersey bedside. And what follows
Woody's narrative is a shift to the "authentic": a documentary-style
account of the career of Jack Rollins (Christian Bale). Reflecting its
ostensibly more authentic mode, Jack's narrative is mediated in
different ways than Woody's. As a genre, documentary defines itself in
opposition to fiction films: "aim[ing] to present factual information
about the world" (Bordwell 338). The more "factual" narration in the
Rollins segments of I'm Not There offers viewers a rise
and fall; the "rise" occurs when a well-scrubbed interviewee lauds
Rollins as "honest," and the "fall" is his "betrayal" of folk ideals by
writing and performing songs more heavily indebted to the French
symbolist poets than to Guthrie or Odetta. However, before Jack moves
from the authentic to inauthentic, Haynes juxtaposes
found footage of violent Civil Rights-era protests with his own mock
interviews and recreations of historic Dylan performances. For example,
Jack performs "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"--another Dylan
narrative of a black body damaged--for a Student Non-Violence
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voter registration drive. Such an event
did take place in Greenwood, Mississippi in July 1963, and Dylan
performed on a makeshift concert stage very much like the one depicted
in the film. The extant footage of the event, an excerpt of which
appears in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967), includes a bizarre
and disorienting extreme close-up of Dylan's ear that Haynes carefully replicates.
What links Woody to Jack Rollins in this
scene--aside from the obvious play on the authentic/inauthentic
binary--is the way in which Jack's identity, visually speaking, is
constructed through its juxtaposition with the African-American body.
Although there are fewer attending the film's "Hattie Carroll"
performance, the audience is predominantly male and African-American. As
Mike Marqusee reports, the real-life media event was just as carefully
constructed, as Dylan debuted a song, "Only a Pawn in Their Game,"
concerning the recent murder of NAACP activist Medgar Evers:
At dusk, the visiting performers clambered
onto the back of a truck next to a cotton patch and performed for an
audience of some 300 black people. They were watched by police in patrol
cars and Klan members […]. By all accounts, the topicality of the song
gripped the audience--some of whom would have seen Evers himself in
recent months. (76)
Not only do black male bodies surround Jack
during the performance, but the song also provides an illustration of
how damage can be inflicted on the black male body and then
institutionally sanctioned. Although Haynes substitutes
"Hattie Carroll" for "Only a Pawn," the message in both is essentially
the same: the true villain is not the individual who takes a life, but
rather a justice system that tacitly condones the act through either an
insignificant sentence ("Hattie Carroll") or a failure to convict
despite overwhelming evidence ("Only a Pawn"). As I'm
Not There reveals, at this stage of his career Dylan is still using the
black body, albeit in more subtle ways, as a crucial way in which to
construct his own masculine identity.
Filmmaker Ed Emschwiller--who filmed the
actual Greenwood performance--was very conscious of the power of framing
the young, white Dylan surrounded by an African-American audience under
the surveillance of Klansmen and policemen. In Haynes'
re-creation of the event, Jack projects courage and virility: a white
Northerner unafraid to "speak out" in a potentially violent context.
And, of course, the Greenwood concert is a performance in two senses:
not only does Dylan / Rollins perform a new song for a receptive
audience, but he also conceals his "real" discomfort during this SNCC
event. According to Theodore Bikel, "Dylan admitted to the black farmers
that 'he hadn't met a colored person till he was nine years old, and he
apologized that he had so little to offer'" (qtd. in Marqusee 76). What
Haynes' film reminds us at many such moments is that
those "many lives of Bob Dylan" are a combination of Dylan's own efforts
at identity construction and the efforts of those who construct Dylan's
story for him (including filmmakers such as Ed Emschwiller and Todd Haynes).
Despite their obvious differences, Jack
Rollins is linked to Woody in several ways; among them, Jack is the
"troubadour of conscience" while Woody is referred to earlier by a
carnival barker as "the tiny troubadour." Haynes
provides many such threads that unite the film's Dylan surrogates.
Sometimes Woody encounters these other Dylans directly (as when he
wanders through the town of Riddle in a Charlie Chaplain-esque disguise
during Billy's narrative), while, at other times, the linkages are
thematic. One of the more clever instances of the latter involves Jude's
arrival onstage at the New England Jazz and Folk Festival, clearly
modeled after the infamous 1965 Newport Festival. As Jude and band
arrive on stage, they open their instrument cases and remove automatic
weapons. Not only does this symbolize the shock of Dylan "going
electric," but it also connects to a question Woody receives in the
boxcar: "Son, you wouldn't be stashing no weapons in that case of
yours?" Woody's response ("No sir, not in any literalized way")
foreshadows a subsequent stage in the film's exploration of masculinity.
Based on the very queer Jude segment of I'm Not There, asking a character if he is "carrying any weapons in there" takes on an entirely new meaning.
If Woody is a less-than-subtle performance of a
boy playing a man, then Jude is even more consciously performative.
Jude provides a site for Dylan's confrontation of the accepted
boundaries of masculinity altogether; Jude flamboyantly waves his hands,
with their long-nailed fingers, and nearly topples over in his Cuban
heels during casual conversations. Haynes clearly views
Dylan's mid-sixties masculinity as yet another performance, and one
connected to Dylan's aesthetic goals: "[The androgyny] was obviously
evident in the Warhol Factory world and this influenced how [Dylan]
dressed and behaved […]. Even if you weren't in a totally queer world,
you dressed and acted that way if you were going to be on the cutting
edge" (qtd. in Porton 20). As such, Haynes believes
that Dylan "had a total crush on Allen Ginsberg," even though he
qualifies it as a "love affair of the mind" (qtd. in Porton 20).
Regardless of Dylan's sexuality, what is inescapable in both the film
and Dylan's songs is that, more than ever before, Dylan's imagery (both
his own image as an artist and the images that fill these 1965-66 songs)
resembles no other version of masculinity that appeared previously in
his art. This is not to say, however, that there are no further links
between, say, Woody and Jude, since there are indeed elements of racial
performance in Jude's persona. A major character who helps to structure
Jude's narrative is "Mr. Jones," a composite modeled after the
journalists who shadowed Dylan during his 1965 British tour. Jones' name
obviously derives from Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" and its
well-known refrain: "Because something is happening here/ But you don't
know what it is/ Do you, Mister Jones" (Lyrics 174-76). However, unlike
the relatively oblivious Jones of the song, the character of this same
name is less hipster poseur and more of a prick (pun intended) to Jude's
social consciousness. During a program entitled Culture Beat, Jones
castigates Jude regarding his "sincerity," and Jude becomes defensive, a
response few reporters achieved with the young Dylan. However,
something about Jones, in particular, gets under Jude's skin.
In a film so invested in gender identity--and given that Mister Jones is a character in an incredibly queer song--Haynes
cannot resist the opportunity to once again explore performances of
gender and race. At one point, Jones asks Jude, "Does it matter to you
when songs you're writing now are being used as recruitment tools for
militant street gangs, like the all-Negro faction in the United States, a
group that promotes precisely the kinds of violence your earlier songs
oppose?" Jude re-directs the question and replies, "If you're asking me
if I'm a member of the Black Panther party, then the
answer is no." Nevertheless, Dylan was actually a part of the Panthers'
world. "Ballad of a Thin Man" was in heavy rotation at the San Francisco
house where Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and others first
created the Black Panther newspaper; for Newton, in particular, "Thin
Man" was "saying a hell of a lot about society" (qtd. in Marqusee 209).
In Dylan's song, the Panthers found a vehicle to express their
alienation, a process similar to the role that African-American
music-from Little Richard to Blind Willie McTell--had helped to shape
the ever-shifting identity of Bob Dylan. What I'm Not
There reminds us at such moments is that, in the late sixties (as well
as in the age of minstrelsy), cross-racial identification traveled in
both directions.
In order to underscore how white performs black and vice-versa, Haynes
includes "Ballad of a Thin Man" on the film's soundtrack, and it plays
during one of the film's most provocative fantasy sequences. Following
Jude's abrupt departure from Jones' limousine interview/interrogation, a
P.O.V. shot reveals Jude's hand opening a public restroom door and then
a naked image of Jones. When Jones receives a box labeled "Top Secret,"
he retreats to a study to examine its contents, only to find what looks
like Dylan's high school yearbook. My readers will recall that the text
accompanying Dylan's photo lists his ambition: "To join the band of
Little Richard." Although Haynes shows us the photo (when he was still "Jacob Edelstein"), the shot fails to reveal the text accompanying the image. Instead, Haynes
cuts to a shot of "militant Negroes" who are shown playing and
rewinding a reel-to-reel tape recording of…"Ballad of a Thin Man." In
one of the film's more humorous exchanges, Bobby (Rabbit Brown) and Huey
(Craig Thomas) discuss what the song's "geeks" might signify, with Huey
concluding that "Thin Man" says "a hell of a lot about society."
For many viewers, juxtaposing the Panthers and
Dylan may seem overly obscure, but the film does so not merely to
demonstrate the breadth of Dylan's cultural influence. Within this brief
sequence, I'm Not There reveals two very different
images of masculinity projected by Dylan's work. It may be a great
distance from the "sword swallowers" in "Ballad of a Thin Man" to the
machine-gun-toting, alpha-male Panthers, but Dylan's art somehow
encompasses both. As black-tied white patrons laugh uncontrollably at a
chicken-eating geek, Dylan's lyrics speak of someone handing Mister
Jones a bone, and Jude passes an incredibly phallic microphone through
the bars of Jones' cage. What Haynes suggests visually
is a point not always addressed in gender studies approaches to Dylan's
work: that Dylan could clearly foreground a playful queer sexuality, and
that the variety of constructions of masculinity presented through his
songs is much broader than is often assumed.
This is not to suggest that I'm
Not There entirely avoids representing more traditional modes of
masculinity. After all, the narrative of Robbie Clark illustrates a
misogynistic streak in Dylan's work identified by, among others, Pamela
Thurschwell, who describes how Dylan's art provokes a particular kind of
discomfort for her as, "simultaneously a feminist and a fan of some
wrenchingly misogynistic music" (264).9 Robbie manifests this particular
gender identity in Dylan, the one best captured in the film by a
conversation at a roadside cafe. When asked by a female friend if he is a
chauvinist, Robbie answers,
Why [am I a chauvinist]? 'Cause I think guys and chicks are different? C'mon that's all I'm
saying. And they are--they each have access to different kinds of pain.
Which is pretty much why chicks can never be poets […]. Guys and chicks
are different-I'm sorry.
Apparently, even when Dylan was channeling
Little Richard as part of his masculine identity--keeping in mind the
conspicuously queer elements of Richard's persona--there was always a
part of Dylan's gender identity linked to "Robbie," particularly in the
propensity for infidelity. For example, John Bucklen reports that Bob
dated multiple girls while also dating Echo Helstrom; all of which
contextualizes Clinton Heylin's claim that the "sixteen-year-old Bobby
Zimmerman was not intimidated by 'goyrls/ liked them with a bit on top,
and was a two-timer from the start"(19).
In the end, what complicates gender identity in I'm
Not There is that we often see Dylan's construction of his masculinity
seemingly at war with itself. Nowhere is this conflict more conspicuous
than in Jude's narrative. Despite the ways in which Jude represents
Dylan pushing at the boundaries of socially accepted definitions of
masculinity, the character is not immune to engaging in some hetero,
alpha-male competition with Sonny in the romantic struggle over Coco
Rivington (Michelle Williams). When Coco baits Jude, attacking his
masculinity by calling him "Jude-ee," Jude retorts by not really
referring to Coco's pet (and angering his also-smitten friend in the
process): "She has the sweetest little pussy--if you don't count the
teeth." Even as Jude races around London with his "intellectual crush"
Allen Ginsberg, a bit of Robbie (and Woody and others) expresses itself
through Jude. Bringing to mind the phrases that appear on screen prior
to the credits (I'm not her. I'm not here. I'm not there.), "Bob Dylan" is all of these people in all of these places. And all at the same time.
CONCLUSION
Throughout the present essay, I have analyzed one major character from I'm
Not There in some detail (Woody), and have at least scratched the
surface of three others (Jude, Jack and Robbie). Which means that three
other major characters (Arthur Rimbaud, Billy, and Pastor John) escape
analysis altogether. Clearly, a full-length monograph could be devoted
to the ways in which race, masculinity and aesthetics converge in this
fascinating film, and in the life and art of Bob Dylan. What is even
more remarkable is that Haynes' Dylan's narrative
concludes around 1980, meaning that Dylan's career as a performer and
songwriter extends for nearly thirty more years (at the time of the
film's release). Since 1980, Dylan has released more than a dozen studio
albums, and his "Never Ending Tour" has seen him perform as many as one
hundred concerts per year, every year, since 1988. In the three decades
since the story of "Pastor John," Dylan's personal life has seen no
shortage of drama: he has battled substance abuse, suffered a
potentially life-threatening heart infection in 1997, and become a
Madison Avenue icon, promoting brands ranging from Cadillac to
Victoria's Secret. There is even the matter of Dylan's ongoing romantic
dramas, including the possibility of "secret wives" following his
divorce from Sara Dylan in 1977 (Heylin 709-11). So there are clearly
far more than seven lives of Dylan to be explored by both filmmakers and
Dylan scholars alike.
Given the breadth of the possible "Bob Dylans" available, Todd Haynes accomplishes a great deal in the two and a quarter hours of I'm
Not There. Part of the film's success results from the ways in which it
narrows its focus, not only chronologically (covering the period from
1959-1979), but also thematically. Although it is difficult to select
one line from the film that captures its overarching thematic
preoccupations, Jude provides a possible candidate during one of his
amphetamine-fueled rants about possessing Coco Rivington. When an
unnamed woman admits to Jude, "People said you could be a real
cocksucker," Jude's reply speaks volumes about the film's insistence
that gender is always a performance: "It's not what goes into a man's
mouth that defines him." So many things come out of the mouth of the
characters playing the seven Dylan surrogates in I'm
Not There: often-contradictory messages about aesthetics, imitation,
authenticity, and the ways in which race and gender identities are
shaped through public discourses embedded in cultural and historical
moments. One such discourse is the one that surrounds racial
performance--how we all perform race, and how race performs us, in turn.
In his fifty-year career as a performing artist, Bob Dylan has been no
stranger to performing blackness, from "See That My Grave is Kept Clean"
to his 1990s adaptation of the African-American murder ballad "Stack a
Lee." What I'm Not There reminds us so skillfully,
then, is that Dylan's performances of race are never quite distinct from
his performances of masculinity, a lesson not lost upon scholars of
American minstrelsy, and hopefully apparent to anyone with an interest
in those many lives of Bob Dylan.
FOOTNOTES
1 Throughout the essay, I attribute authorship of the film to Haynes,
the director and co-writer of the screenplay. Because I also
acknowledge the contribution of co-screenwriter Oren Moverman, as well
as countless others who have contributed to the film's formal
construction and meaning, "Haynes" or "Haynes' film" is used merely to enhance the readability of the essay.
2 In order to avoid confusion, as a rule I use "Woody" to signify the character in Haynes' film and "Guthrie" or "Woody Guthrie" to signify the real-life person who so influenced the young Bob Dylan.
3
Although we briefly see other Dylan surrogates on screen prior to
Woody's introduction, the film's narrative development begins with
Woody. We also see glimpses of Woody appear within the diegetic world of
other our other Dylan surrogates, such as when Claire (Charlotte
Gainsbourg), the wife of the mid-70s-era Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger),
has a dream involving Woody, or when Billy (Richard Gere), the outlaw
persona that Dylan has regularly embraced, encounters Woody being thrown
from a saloon in the fictitious town of Riddle, Missouri.
4 In his liner notes to Joan Baez's In Concert, Part 2 (1963), Dylan writes, "my first idol was Hank Williams."
5
For a reading of Jonah as a kind of "fake," see The Oxford Companion to
the Bible (380-81). I should also point out that my former student,
Karl Gustafson, has reminded me that whales are mammals, not fish; that
said, the phrase "belly of his own big mammal" lacks alliteration, and
thus I have avoided it in the body of the essay. I would also like to
express my gratitude to Karl for his insightful response to an earlier
draft of this essay.
6
The song Woody performs for the Peacocks is "When the Ship Comes In."
As a song of prophecy, this connects Woody once again to the prophet
Jonah. It should be noted, too, that the song also bears a connection to
the 1963 "March on Washington," an event at which Dylan performed this
song and shared a stage with Martin Luther King, Jr.. So not only is
this a prophetic song, but also the kind of song that Dylan would tire
of performing not far into his career: if s the kind of
"finger-pointing" song that educated middle-class audiences like the
Peacocks would come to expect from Dylan, but that which he would
outgrow artistically by 1964-65.
7 See chapter 3, "The New Negro" in Nelson George's The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988).
8
For an extensive discussion of this subject, see Norman Mailer's "The
White Negro" (1957), a work that may help readers begin to make sense
of, for example, some of those puzzling moments in Jack Kerouac's On the
Road (1957) when narrator Sal Paradise considers himself among the
people of color of the Earth ("They thought I was a Mexican, of course;
and in a way I am"--98). The tendency among middle-class white males to
idealize African-American culture in the most general ways, and idealize
African-American artists in particular, can actually be traced back
well beyond the 1950s, as Andrew Ross makes clear in his essay "Hip, and
the Long Front of Color" (published in No Respect: Intellectuals and
Popular Culture--1989). However, Eisenhower America served as a mass
gathering place for cross-racial identification, particularly among
educated middle-class white men.
9
For every song Thurschwell cites as expressing Dylan's potential for
more enlightened gender views, such as "Up to Me" (1975) or "Highlands"
(1997), she can also offer a reading of "Sweetheart Like You" (1983) or
"Is Your Love in Vain?" (1978), the latter containing those oft-cited
(and cringe-inducing) lines, "Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow /
Do you understand my pain?" (Lyrics 389).
A Pensive Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) in I'm Not There (2007).
Woody Performs for the Peacock Family.
Jude (Cate Blanchett) as the "Electric" (and Androgynous) mid-60s Bob Dylan.
Woody Rides the Rails.
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~~~~~~~~
By JOHN McCOMBE
JOHN McCOMBE is Associate Director of the
University Honors Program and an associate professor of English at the
University of Dayton. His interests include twentieth-century British
literature, film, and popular music studies. He has published more than a
dozen articles in journals such as Cinema Journal, Journal of Modern
Literature, and the Henry James Review.
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Accession Number: 76183711
Accession Number: 76183711
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