So again then, if I don't have a dad who cares about Bob Dylan and I sure don't know much about him either, what other than dogged completism would get me to watch a documentary like this? I'll re-up on Scorsese here for a moment: WOLF OF WALL STREET is a supreme and troubling work of American art. I watched it first as farce, alone in a theater except for two teenagers who seemed only to have come for McConaughey's chest-thumping, and then as something pretty near to a tragedy the second time. Does Marx have any words for that? Well, whatever Scorsese did to deepen his demented comedy (and it is, first and foremost, a comedy!) into something primal and horrific, it worked, and so I remain a fan. In the pantheon of safely canonized white male auteurs, Scorsese consistently surprises and innovates (big fan of HUGO too!), he has the way of a true artist about him in his eclecticism and assured experiments. NO DIRECTION HOME won't tell you much about that wily intelligence but it will tell you a lot about Bob Dylan, for which I suppose we should give Scorsese credit as an artist. Documentaries don't just build themselves, after all.
I'll confess to coming really close to disengaging right away, because hearing Dylan singing what I now know to be Like a Rolling Stone at the beginning was disorienting to me. His voice and vocal style seemed like a sharp dive over the edge of emotive rock singing, which at this point I still assumed was what Bob Dylan does. But then we take a look at Dylan's tiny childhood, and tiny is certainly the appropriate word in relation to the outsized mythical American titan Dylan grew up to become. You listen to him recount his days as a kid on the outskirts of small town America and watch the corresponding images and wonder where exactly does artistic ability come from? What on earth was there that could have created a mystic folk singer out of Robert Zimmerman? I can only conclude that Dylan's talents resided in him, ineffably, from the start. This will forever be a mystery to me, in the sense that there can be no true answer to what exactly separates artists from their peers. That there is a difference is indisputable. We can only look back in awe as unpromising beginnings lead to a great future. The elder Dylan flatly recounts his inspirations and influences, and then as we begin to get our first recorded images of the young Dylan in motion, a synchronicity emerges through what seems to be a lifetime of oddball charisma viewed, with hindsight, at opposite poles of the human lifespan. A unified Dylan eternally revealing himself throughout the ages. Which is to say that Dylan just is, and always has been. The present day interviews show him to be a bit less prickly than he was in his youth, but it still seems monumentally hard for Scorsese and co. to draw any substantial introspection out of him. He cooperates, but with a bare minimum of affect. I'M NOT THERE didn't leave much of an impact on me when I watched it a few years ago, but I certainly can see the rationale behind Todd Haynes' postmodern fragmentation when getting the actual man in a room with you doesn't tell you much more than his songs do.
And that's what everyone wants, it seems. And now would be a good time to say that my most direct engagement with this film was as a predictor of the Tricky dilemma three decades later. I can't say I have any kind of ear for classic rock, which I know wasn't what Dylan really was but you know what I mean, and though I did go on to find myself fairly engaged by Dylan's singing, my heart ultimately belongs to Tricky and his own musical styles (though I now think, thanks to this documentary, that Dylan and Pete Seeger would be a good primer to mid-century folk if I end up developing an interest in it years later). I've been developing thoughts lately on what social subjugation does to the way artists express themselves, and Dylan ended up serving as the negative image of what I'm coming to see in marginal art. People who grow up unsure of themselves and their place in their world are much more sensitive to failure and disapproval and misunderstanding, which we can surmise leads to many potential female/black/LGBT/mentally ill/poor artists never even becoming artists in the first place. It also creates unique reactions in socially marginal people who do become artists (Dave Chappelle, Lil Kim, Azealia Banks) as they find themselves facing an uncomprehending outside world. Despite being noticeably sensitive to the world around him, Dylan presents as basically unflappable. In the film there are a number of Dylan's very transparent emotional reactions to the general weirdness of people that I found pretty striking, but every time you think you've got him nailed to the floor, he seems to just completely reassemble and become a different Bob Dylan. His fragmented identity seems adaptively resistant to the trappings of fame (though in Dylan's case it comes from a position of social power rather than subordination). NO DIRECTION HOME touches on this several times but really I think I'M NOT THERE does a better job of trying to cinematically visualize the multiple Dylans, since that was its explicit focus after all. NO DIRECTION HOME is an attempt to document these shifts as they happened inside the historical Dylan, and the archival access Scorsese had does a pretty fair job of retroactively smoothing out what must have seemed inexplicable in the moment. Listening to the people who knew him, it seems the meta-narrative of Dylan the shapeshifter helped everyone look back and at least understand Dylan's constant slithering out of reach, if not quite accept it. I ended up feeling pretty bad for Joan Baez especially, who seemed to want nothing more than the Dylan behind the public charade and ended up iced out by his chilly evasion.
Dylan's preternatural coolness definitely reaches its most unfortunate iteration in hearing Baez recount her hurt feelings upon being ignored by him, but this shambling independence is something I think Dylan was socially enabled to do. Contrast Mavis Staples' impassioned account of her father's social marginality due to blackness and Dylan's respectful but somewhat glib nods to the earlier blues which shaped his music, and you start to get an idea of how Dylan seemed to just drift into national popularity without serious setbacks. With socially dominant confidence (/indifference?) comes the freedom to do whatever you want, and Bob Dylan certainly has always done whatever he wanted. Navigating the frenzy of national attention catches many gifted artists off guard, unless they can shrug it off as ably as Dylan. There's, of course, no doubt Dylan really believed in his music, but this film seems to suggest that it was his very belief that brought him such widespread admiration in the first place. He willed his soul into the world and found an audience looking for exactly such a gesture. That's all very flattering/inspiring/affirming if you buy into the cherished folk belief that people just want real authentic music played by real authentic musicians man, but Dylan's ease in transitioning from acoustic folk to LOUDD rock n' roll suggests that he bought that story less than most. Not to mention his own bemusement at the series of lucky breaks that guided him through his early years. You can see the specter of rockism animating the confused but disapproving reactions of fans and musicians alike as Dylan went electric (sample dialogue: "fake," "hypocrite," "sell-out," "commercial"), a sign that this phenomenon was as ideological as it was personal for many fans. Dylan's dismissal of the assumptions behind genre led to his shrugging disavowal of folk's purity, which for all the anger it provoked might as well have been an infidelity to a lover. Music superfans have a conservative clannishness to them, and the walls that everyone erected around Dylan seemed only to further tempt him into knocking them over. There is an element of self-made man mythology to Dylan's defiant career path, even as his natural humility reads more as understandable discomfort than pointed rage against the fame machine.
I can't help but think, then, how easy Dylan had it, in that he did not have any of the social status confusions that Tricky did when he become famous. I see now that Dylan really was one of a kind, and that the failure to understand him was almost inevitable when journalists could seem only to ask him questions such as "Do you prefer songs with an obvious message or a subtle one?" So I respect Scorsese's more or less authoritative account of Dylan's rise to superstardom and his gradual recession from it. I do wonder what we're supposed to do now that we know there are some people who are just mysteries. Tricky is a mystery to me still after two years of love and devotion, and he's only an artist I like. The people I see day to day are mysteries to me too, and I actually have to talk to them! So now that we're pretty sure we know who Bob Dylan isn't, what about who he is? And what about who Tricky is? If we can't rely on them to tell us, what are we supposed to do when faced with them? I'll beat the drum for Tricky all my life, but it's hard to see someone clearly when they don't even see themselves clearly. I imagine Scorsese enjoyed untangling the myth of Dylan in sturdy (though rather lifeless) documentary form, but Dylan doesn't seem to have any idea of what makes him tick anymore than we do. It's futile to think I can listen to a discography, even one as extensive as Dylan's, and see into someone like him. We make this mistake with our great artists over and over again, even the ones who aren't as unknowable as Bob Dylan and Tricky. Recognizing the ardor and artistry in art only tells us everything about the people who made it. Assumptions and projections are normal, expected even, but it sure gets annoying to realize that imposed celebrity only obscures our views of people who just want to share their art with us. My opinion of Dylan and his art is pretty favorable now after watching this documentary, and I thought I had no interest in this artist and time period based on all the breathless retrospective coverage. Turns out I didn't even know Dylan at all, oops.
