There
is a new Bob Dylan album, it is a film called Masked And Anonymous.
And, like a new recording, the film is a statement from Dylan which
those of us who love his work will wrestle with and probe and question
and from which we will pick up new riches with each viewing.
An air of mystery surrounds the writing of the script - the two writers,
Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov, are unknowns and the script is supposed
to have been based on an unpublished short story by another unknown,
Enrique Morales. However, when Jessica Lange was asked what attracted
her to the project she replied that it was the chance to speak Bob Dylan’s
words. Whatever the truth is about the script, there can be no doubt
that the concerns of this film are Dylan’s concerns - concerns
that he has been writing and singing about throughout his career.
This film shows us the world through Dylan’s eyes as surely as
certain songs - ‘Highlands’ for example - can take us inside
his head and show us the intimate flow of his consciousness so that
we know what it’s like to wander into a restaurant with him or
look at young people in a park with him or think about how good it would
be to have a full-length leather coat. In the same way, like ‘Stuck
Inside of Mobile’ or ‘Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum’
or any of the dozens of songs in which Dylan gives us his take on this
crazy world, this film tells us how he feels when he looks at the madness
and perfidy and corruption of society.
In many ways the film actually operates like a song. Unlike the vast
majority of movies which are mainly concerned with telling stories and
showing character development, the plot of Masked And Anonymous
is virtually non-existent and the characters are more like personages
from a morality play with names which tell us what they represent or
which are used ironically: Jack Fate, Uncle Sweetheart, Bobby Cupid,
Tom Friend, Pagan Lace. This film does not, and is not meant to, operate
like most films. It has other methods and other intentions and it needs
to be viewed on its own terms - an audience that watches it wanting
it to be like the latest thriller or romance or comedy is going to hate
it because it is none of those things. The films that it most recalls
are Jean Luc-Godard’s movies in the 1960s such as Masculin
Féminin in which Godard used a kind of collage of 15 scenes
or sketches to examine the mood of young people in France at that time,
or Fellini’s La Dolce Vita which built up a picture of
the decadence of Italy through a series of loosely knit scenes. But
what this film is most like is Dylan’s songs.
Think of how we listen to ‘Idiot Wind’. Think of how we
let all those disparate images run through our brain and assemble themselves
into a greater picture. What is it about? Love? Betrayal? America? Dylan?
Us? It’s about all of those things and more - and so is Masked
And Anonymous if we let the words and the images run freely through
our brain in the same way.
Think of ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’. There’s
a vague sort of narrative there but what happens in the ‘plot’
isn’t what the song is about. We pick up its meaning by letting
all the pictures and ideas work on us. Footstool, plotted plain, roll
of tens, cold eyes, Paradise, Eternity, passing stranger, gambler, deceased
father, mouse, house/home, mission bells, faces in windows, four and
twenty, soulful, bounding, guilt, foam, neighbour boy, moral. Nothing
is revealed on the narrative level but we let all the elements of the
song cohere into something which, on a whole other level, we understand
entirely. And we understand Masked And Anonymous in the same
way when we watch it in the same spirit. It is The Ballad of Jack Fate.
I'll Search For Love Wherever I'm Welcome
...the
text of the songs both appealed and repulsed me at the same time!
I was drawn in by the passion of Dylan's belief, the elements of Jesus’
teaching he incorporated, the message of giving that he sometimes
was outlining, but I was turned off by the exclusive nature of it
all that sometimes rose to the surface. The 'I'm one of the lucky
ones, the rest of you can rot' feeling. I found less of this on Saved,
despite a line in one of my other favourite Saved songs 'What Can
I Do For You?’
…chosen me to be among the few
But much of Saved and 'Saving Grace' in particular left all
those things behind, and addressed what it meant to him and it cut
straight to the core. The song opens in such a humble way, I am drawn
straight in:
If You find it in Your heart, can I be forgiven?
Guess I owe You some kind of apology.
I've escaped death so many times, I know I'm only living
By the saving grace that's over me.
It seemed so personal in its description of avoiding death, and yet
so universal and we all have constant near misses with something that
we can never avoid. It also of course brings the image of spiritual
and moral death. It is such a tender opening, and the second line
is so Dylanesque to me, that he 'guesses' he owes 'some kind' of apology.
It is so shy, so humble. You might say ‘but why, if he is truly
humble, does he just not say that?’ It is easy to take the rambling
nature of that line as being a grudging half hearted apology. But
I don’t see it that way. I see it as part of Dylan’s ‘aw
shucks’ sort of act that we have seen before. He expresses the
line in an almost coy, shy way, which adds to his sense of embarrassment
at the actions he is asking forgiveness for. It adds to the feeling
of shame.
Death is everywhere in the song, yet it is so uplifting, so inspiring.
In the first verse he has escaped death, in the 2nd verse he refers
to this again:
By this time, I'd-a thought that I would be sleeping
In a pine box for all eternity
again, the image of Dylan's death which is bound to impact on the
listener, confronting your own and Dylan's mortality in such a stark
way. The image presented here is again so visual. The use of language
in describing the coffin as the 'pine box', and the pairing off of
images. Death is referred to twice with 'sleeping' which of course
he wouldn't be, and the 'pine box'. And time is dealt with both in
the very real present, 'by this time...' and in the dare we think
about it, let alone comprehend it, future, 'all eternity'.
Prophesizing With Pens
Often criticism itself becomes a source of contention between critics,
and we saw an example in the letters section of the second issue of
Judas! Clinton Heylin, enjoying but not agreeing with Nigel
Hinton’s review of “Love and Theft”, concluded
that Mr Hinton’s ‘critical faculties’ were ‘disturbingly
awry’. There’s an underlying assumption here that there
exists some kind of absolute standard of critical right-thinking,
according to which the Hinton view of things is somehow discredited.
Which leaves us asking: is that so?
Then again, how far should we go when we’re disappointed by
the work of an artist? Michael Gray’s infamous Stockholm review
came up for discussion in the interview in Judas! Issue 2,
and I found myself turning back to that review to remind myself of
the tone of some of its comments:
Dylan’s face...seems reduced to a handful of clumsy, self-parodic
grimaces...he plays safe and seems to have no reason to be there ...he
doesn’t care what the audience thinks because he thinks it’s
a gullible rabble... It surely has nothing to do with age and everything
to do with sourness, an exhaustion of his resources.
Would Bob Dylan find this insulting? Does it matter if he does?
Now clearly, in a magazine like Judas!, we can expect (and
surely hope) to see a wide variety of views expressed; but there is
huge scope for misunderstanding if the underlying critical assumptions
aren’t clear. Are there limits to the scorn that the disillusioned
critic may pour upon the artist whose work has displeased him? Should
we dismiss the critical acumen of a fellow commentator whose views
conflict with our own? And the most important question of all: what
really counts - the art? Or our criticism of it? For the truth is
that the fate of the critic through history is not a happy one. Fashions,
as well as times, change. The criticism of those who violently attacked
the paintings of the French Impressionists in the 1870s makes very
pitiful reading today.
I’d like to put forward a different basis for criticism - one
that may be more helpful to the reader (or listener), and more respectful
to the artist, than the usual ‘set ‘em up and I’ll
knock ‘em down’ type of stuff. It isn’t a new idea,
and it isn’t my own. It comes from a neglected little book by
C.S. Lewis called An Experiment in Criticism, published in
1961. He’s talking about literature, but the ideas are applicable
to the enjoyment of any art form including listening to Bob Dylan:
Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books.
Any judgement it implies about men’s reading of books is a corollary
from its judgement on the books themselves. Bad taste is, as it were
by definition, a taste for bad books. I want to find out what sort
of picture we shall get by reversing the process. ...Let us try to
discover how far it might be possible to define a good book as a book
which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in
another.
I’d like to see if this idea could be useful to us in our Dylan
listening. In other words, can we define a good performance as one
that can be listened to in one way, and a bad performance one that
is listened to in another? The idea shifts the focus of critical attention
in an interesting way, I think, homing in not exactly on the performance,
but on the kind of engagement with it that the performance permits
the listener to make. In his essay, C.S. Lewis distinguishes these
two kinds of approach to art by talking of the difference between
‘receiving’ art and ‘using’ it. It’s
worth looking more closely at what he means by these terms before
we go any further, for I think they have a good deal to do with our
Dylan-listening experiences.
