There was stupid Across the Universe released some weeks ago and now this.
Both Across the Universe and I'm Not There were made by people who were mere children in the 60s and gained generational consciousness only in the 70s and early 80s. But, I don't think that's the main problem; an artist need not to belong to the era he's expressing thru his art. Consider the great historical films about the distant past by modern filmmakers. And, there are plenty of bad movies about the 60s made by boomers. The real problem is sensibility, and the hyper postmodern sensibility that gained prevalence since the 80s is bad for creativity. These hyper postmodernist filmmakers are more DJs than original artists in their own right. Just look at Tarantino's Kill Bill 1 & 2. It's a pastiche of Asian popular culture--everything trashy anyway. Sure, all artists draw from previous achievements, but real artists also reach for the unique and personal. We don't get this with hyper postmodern artists, at least in popular entertainment. As most of popular entertainment is pretty superficial, bubblegum, trendy, and outdated fast, hyper postmodernists basically indulge in cut-and-paste jobs of superficial material. What is there to THINK about most popular art? Even great popular art--Beatles and Stones--aint much food for thought; their music was mainly about fun and pleasure. Of course, some popular art is more than fun and demands serious consideration and analysis--my Visions of Johanna or Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven which, even if lyrically nonsensical, is a towering musical achievement. The great thing about me is that I understood both the nature, possibilities, and limits of popular music. I knew it could be much more than boy-meets-girl, yet I also knew it had to speak to young folks and their dreams. Of course, as I've aged over the years--and my fans have aged with me--, I've added more mature themes to my music, but these works haven't gone very far as far as sales and media attention. So, when people talk of Dylan, they are talking of what I was in the 60s and maybe 70s. They are talking of Highway 61 Revisited to Blood on the Tracks. They aint talking about Empire Burlesque or World Gone Wrong.
Anyway, I was never no postmodernist. Yeah, I learned from old guys and started out imitating them and did mixing and matching of everything I'd seen and heard. And, I put on some funny acts because I wasn't sure what I was in the beginning. I was, in essence, a small town middle class Jewish boy. But, that was no fun. My pa was a hardworking man, but I didn't want to sell appliances. They say life imitates art, and that's 100x truer when it's popular art. Look at all those slutty little girls trying to be Britney Spears. When I was young, my 'Britney Spears' were singers and performers like Hank Williams and Blues musicians. Later, it was Elvis and early rock-n-rollers. And, movie guys like James Dean. They were cool, they were sexy. They got all the girls. Well, let's face it. I was no Clark Cable. Though I was smart, I knew I wasn't gonna get girls--the hot ones anyway--if I did humdrum stuff like accounting or even lawyering. And, not all the arts get you a lot of sexy babes. I doubt if people in ceramics or sculpture have babes kneeling at their feet, at least not in the second half of 20th century. If you want girls, you gotta make it as a movie actor or rock star. I was unfit to be a movie star, so I figured I'd go into music. And, I loved music more than anything so that made sense. Rock n Roll grabbed me, but in the late 50s it began to fade and folk music was on the rise--at least among 'sophisticated' urban folks whom I hung around. It was just as well since no one could take me seriously as a rocker. I didn't have the voice nor movements nor the looks of Presley, Berry, or Lewis. But, folk music was just right for a runty, scrawny, scrappy guy like me. And, I learned that though a folkie didn't get a lot of girls, there were some cuties who went for the politically conscious 'intellectual' type. So, I ran with it.
On the one hand, I played the authentic folkie--a hobo poet--, even though in fact my background was strictly middle class Jewish. I pretended that my biological parents were an accident and nuisance. I felt that my real spiritual parents were blues singing black folks and hillbilly country whites and rock n rollers and the like. (Of course, I felt very guilty about this when my pa died, and I realized that I was a Jew after all. Music was my passion but my parents gave me life and values, and I didn't feel too proud about my prodigal son act. This explains why I sobered up).
Anyway, the point is I love girls, and the only way I had any chance was by making it in pop music. Rock n roll required sexy studs, and I wasn't one of them.(I wonder what girls saw in Buddy Holly). So, I figured I'd go with folk. But, I would be more aggressive than others and gain attention. I'd be a bad boy folkie, rather like Guthrie mixed with Elvis and James Dean. It was no fun trying to be pure Guthrie because he was never no sexy. He was a tad too righteous and dull. His songs drone on and on. Heck, I loved his hobo image and adventures more than his music. I wanted to be different. I took from Guthrie the hobo-rebel image. But, i tacked on the hipsterishness of the Beats and the sexiness of the rocker. Though I sang about how nukes were gonna blow us up, I wanted them young girls to look up to me and feel, 'he's sooo cute'. And, I was cute doing that shit. This is why when I went electric, most of the complainers were men. Most women--except the fat and ugly ones hiding behind ideology which is all they had--understood the logic of it all; even when I'd been an ardent protest-folkie, astute girls picked up on my vibes and my true intentions--and I picked up on theirs. They thought I was cute, and they knew, deep down inside, that I wanted to steal them from their boyfriends. "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" had double-meaning as I had a hard missile inside my pants that was dying to go off.
Most of the people who got angry over my going electric pretended that their anger was moral or ethical or ideological or whatever. In truth, they were angry because I became a sexy guy and their girls were really digging me. They got jealous. When I was a folkie, they saw me as the patron saint of dopey losers and geeks who hiding behind ideology to have self-esteem in life. When I went electric, I was saying, " I'm a cool stud". This is what really got them geeks and loser all hissy; I was leaving them behind in the dust.
Now, what pisses me about Haynes's movie is it repeats the same shit I've heard and read over and over. For starters, Rosenbum says the movie makes me out to be some nasty misogynist. This is a pile of BS. It's true that I should have been nicer to Sara, but when it came to most women it wasn't my fault. You gotta understand the sexual outlook and advantages of a rock star versus those of so-called critics, intellectuals, and other geeks. A rock star is worshipped by women; even now, when I'm all old and crusty, there are women who wanna jump into my bed. So, OUR--rock stars--problem is we have too many women who loving us. At first, I thought This Is Cool. But, day after day, week after week, and year after year, when you have millions of women--smoking hot ones too--who wanna be your sex slave, you kinda lose interest and respect for women in general. Now, you take an average critic or even art film maker, and what is he? A geek. Girls don't go for that. Of course, if you're a geek and can sing, you can get lots of girls too. It's like Eddie Murphy said in "Delirious": 'Mick Jagger is an ugly motherf**** and women are crazy about him'.
Or, look at Billy Joel who's an ugly motherf_____; a supermodel married him in the 80s and why? Because he was a pop star; how many girls do you think he'd gotten had he been a rock critic? The truth is if any rock or movie critic could sing and switch careers, he'd get a lot of poon and have supermodels lining up to marry them too. Music does crazy shit to women. A lot of women prefer an ugly dude who can sing to a big stud who had no musical sense; it must some Dionysian instinct buried in female psychology. So, excuse me if I wasn't nice to every woman on this planet. But, it's not just me. It's all rock stars. All of them have hot sexy women swooning over them. Despite all this talk of feminism and equality and all, many women love a man who is a super sex god. If he can sing, he can even be short and ugly. Women go crazy when they hear music. I'll bet fat Pavarotti had lots of babes. And, it's equally true of Hollywood stars. They say Warren Beatty is a liberal, but look at his sex life; he was no different than an Ottoman sultan. But, can you blame him for being 'misogynistic'? What was he supposed to do when countless women wanna climb the walls to suck him and forgiving him for his lousy behavior and going back for more?
This is what guys in rock criticism and movie criticism cannot admit or understand. NO GIRL has the hots for a rock critic or movie critic. Remember that movie Almost Famous? The rock star in that movie was, by conventional moral standards, a narcissistic, arrogant prick and a jerk. But he sure could sing and rock n roll, and women loved him. In contrast, the rock critics--Lester Bangs and that runty little kid--were more sensitive human beings, but did they get any poon? Now, what do you think an average woman would prefer--a sexy arrogant rock star or a sensitive intellectual type? So much for dog-matic feminism. Despite all the equality bullshit, women prefer a man who makes them feel like women. This is why most women loved Elvis Presley but would never go to bed with a rock CRITIC. And, look at all the male pop stars today; they all act like thugs and pimps, and girls go crazy over them. But, how many girls would go crazy over Eugene getting his Ph.D in comparative lit studies? (To be sure, there are intellectual groupies who go for geeks on campuses, but even that goes to show that smart women prefer men who are smarter. Remember Simone de Beauvoir who was supposed to be smart but was happy to be nursemaid to Sartre?). So, don't accuse me of 'misogyny'. And rock and movie critics don't fool me. They are just like the complainers and whiners who got all prissy when I went electric. Them fellas are jealous. And, they are jealous because I am the most unlikely stud of all. It amazes them that girls dug me so. I aint no Cary Grant though I was cute. But, I learned from James Dean that women don't necessarily go for the biggest stud. There is a maternal side in all women, and they love a guy who's a bit vulnerable. Dean was a prick but girls felt it was because he didn't feel loved. So, when I acted like a prick in the 60s, all those girls were looking at me and thinking, 'oh, the poor baby needs MY love'. So many women felt for my schtick that I could never accept feminism for what it was. Don't get me wrong. I believe in equal rights and access to law and so on. But, that's a matter of social and political policy. But, there is another side to life, which is psychological and spiritual. And women psychologically and spiritually don't want equality. They want equality of law but not equality of feeling. They want the man to be masterful and studly; this is the daughter-looks-up-to-big-daddy complex. Women also want a man who needs their loving care; this is the mother-takes-care-of-baby-boy complex. And, I knew how to play both tunes. They looked up to me as a nasty aggressive sexy rebel stud and a baby boy in need of love and affection. And, I got my share of poon in the mid 60s. But, that stuff got tiresome soon enough. So, I finally decided to tie the knot and found a decent lovely woman in Sara Downes. But, I knew from all my experience that it couldn't be a partnership based on equality. Let's face it; she saw me as her intellectual and artistic superior. And, what I found appealing about her was her sad-eyed domesticity. I mean all that recording business, fame and notoriety and all that shit. That stuff was driving me crazy, and I needed a nice housewife waiting for me in a nice home. And, don't gimme this shit about how wonderful it is for women to be free and crazy. I met plenty of free and crazy women at Warhol's factory, and most of them were slaves to drugs and dead within a few yrs. In contrast, Sara is still alive and has millions of my money won thru lawsuit.
Anyway, the point is I hate people calling me a 'patriarchal' tyrant or 'misogynist'. Suppose some rock critic or movie critic had a million women who wanted to suck them. I'll bet their view of women would change. It's not my fault that many women love sexy pricks and despise nice geeks. There are countless novels and movies about women who go chasing after some studly sexy asshole while pushing away the tender affections of geek boys. And, it's not just women but some guys too who love crazy bitches. Remember Jules and Jim where sappy Jules was Catherine's slave. Or, what about Brian Epstein who lavished attention and money on some asshole gay lover. (It's all in the book by Bob Spitz who also wrote a good bio on me. He understood what I was about).
But, let's go back to rock/movie critics. You know them guys aint getting much poon. I'll bet most of them are still virgins. Since they have no sexual confidence and women don't pay them no attention, their only way of feeling sexually relevant is by adopting dogmatic feminism. And, it's not just on the Left. Roger Ebert said Ken Starr's prosecution of Bill Clinton was really about fat ugly Starr's sexual jealousy of sexy charismatic Clinton. By all accounts, Clinton was a sexual wildman and out of control. He was like that as governor and as president. But, can you blame the guy? He was like a rock star president. A lot of women couldn't resist him. He was like WarrenBeatty-JimMorrison-ElvisPresley-and Me combined all in one. Was he acting like a misogynist pig and taking advantage of a poor hapless intern? Maybe, but the fact is Monica loved it when he used the cigar and then came on her. Like Ebert said, I'll bet fat ugly Ken Starr was mighty jealous. I'll bet Starr never even got laid. So, Starr used all that puritanical Christian moralism to bring Clinton down. Similarly, this is why all them losers in rock and movie criticism wanna bring me down. They are jealous. Rightards lean on Christian Moralism, and Leftards lean on Dog-matic Feminism. Heck, even the feminist movement is largely about dogs getting all jealous over sexy women. Ideology is the last refuge of sexual losers.
The truest scene as to the nature of woman is in "Blues Brothers" where Carrie Fisher is about to blow Belushi to smithereens. But, the studly charmer--women are crazy about singers--arches his brows and flashes a smile and she becomes his happy slave again. Don't blame Belushi or myself. I didn't make women this way. They are this way and will always be so despite all the ideological blabber. Look, two thousand yrs of christian ideology didn't turn men into peace-loving saints and women into madonnas. We are still creatures who love violent entertainment and feel horny as hell. Similarly, no amount of feminism is gonna change our genes which govern our thoughts and feelings. And what women seek in sexual relationship is different than what men seek. Women want men to be manly, and it means men taking control. Women want their equal social rights--and they should have it--but they also want to be in the arms of a stud or a cool cat. They don't want geeks.
Now, I'm not saying that we should be sexual brutes. All I'm saying is ideological folks have yet to grapple with the female psychology of Presley-ism. So many rock critics say rock music is about liberation and equality and so on. To an extent it is. It brought the races together--though much of the musical scene was racially separate(there weren't too many blacks at Dead or Who concerts and not too many whites at Luther Vandross shows)--and allowed young people to be wild and free with their parents' allowance. But, rock music is also about hierarchy. The rock star filling an entire concert stadium isn't regarded in the same way as a folkie playing for nickels and dimes in a cafe would be; folkie is seen as 'the little guy' while rock star is seen as a golden god. Just look at rock concerts where the crowd worship the rock star. The rock star is like a pharaoh and his fans are like his minions. Just look at how women reacted to Elvis. They cried, screamed, and shivered. They were under his sexual spell and were peeing in their pants in orgasmic submission. And, look at Beatlemania. Those girls would have jumped off a cliff if Ringo told them to.(Of course, things have changed since. My theory is that girls went crazy over Elvis and Beatles because they'd been unprepared for such sexual energy in the more repressed 50s and early 60s. So, they completely fell under the spell and domination of studly rockers. But, girls today are so 'sexually liberated' that even when they hear much sexier and studlier music, they don't lose control in orgasmic panic but groove and move their butts to the male groins that bump and grind from their behinds). And, just look at the sexual dynamics of Rock culture and community; let's face it, 99% of it has been male studs and female groupies. It's even more astounding when you realize that the biggest female rock star since the 80s--Madonna--remained a groupie to athletes and the like. Also, look at the economics of rockdom. Few people make millions, even billions, of dollars while all those teen suckers flipping burgers eagerly await the next album or cd; so, where is the economic equality in rock? To be sure, tide has turned with free downloading off the internet; but the internet is also about few people in Silicon Valley making most of the money while many more losers waste their time surfing for pictures of naked women.
Also, rock music hasn't promoted cultural equality around the world. Like Hollywood movies, it has driven out indigenous music in many nations. Everyone listens to American pop music. I was watching La Haine and was surprised by how Americanized French youth have become. But, are Americans listening to French music or German music or Japanese music? No, nothing is more nationalist/imperialist than American Pop Music--even more so than Hollywood. Also, music has a deeper impact than movies for young people. I'll bet there are more French rappers than French Trekkies or French Star Warriors.
Also, rock music isn't racially equal. Because it is about sexual domination and aggressiveness, certain races are favored over others. At the top are the blacks who have stronger voices and faster movements and bigger muscles. (Notice that blacks generally don't listen to white music while many many whites listen to black music. Blacks feel that whites have no rhythm and soul just as much as whites think Mexicans have no rhythm and soul. American whites find Mexican mariachi stuff to be lame, but blacks feel the same about white music. Blacks never cared for my music though I cared alot about their music). This mattered less in the 60s and 70s when much of rock music was about serious themes, love and peace, and introspection as well as sexiness and funkiness. But, as our culture has gotten dumber and dumber, rock or popular music has become more purified in its sexual essentialism. This is why rap and hip-hop came to dominate in the 90s. In the 60s, there was much idealism and intellectualism as well as sexualism. But, subsequent generations grew up with only popular music--where high brow/low brow was no longer relevant--, and all that matters with them is who is tougher, sexier, and meatier.
Of course, there was always an element of this in the 60s as well. Heck, I knew I was no big stud or muscle man or badass singer--which explains why I had to compensate with my 'asshole' persona. I looked kinda like Adam Sandler, sounded like a cat getting its claws clipped, and was rather scrawny. I couldn't compete with no black man or even an hillbilly. So, I had to find my way into popular music thru folk which accepted the down-n-out hobo type. It was as a folkie that I won over the 'intellectual' youth crowd and gained attention--no publicity is bad publicity; they especially loved my role as vicious pit-bull of the radical agenda; if most folkies sounded too bland and nice, I was the one to blow smoke in the face of the Establishment; so even as a folkie I was using my bad boy rock n roll instincts. . And, as rock culture grew more sophisticated, it needed someone who could bridge populism with seriousness, and that was me. Some people were born to be rock stars. I knew I had to find a roundabout way to enter the scene. If I'd appeared out of the blue and said 'I wanna be a rock star', they would have laughed at my face. So, I became a folkie. Then, I was a militant folkie. Then, I was hipster folkie. Then, I was a wildman folkie. That's when I knew I could go from folkiedom to rockdom. In a way, I understand why some folkies felt that I used them and their movement, and in a way, I did. It's like Michael Bloomberg used the GOP to win mayorship of NY and then ditched the party. Neither Bloomberg nor I am very ideological, but we understand that sometimes you gotta use people to get ahead. But, they used me too. Folkie movement wanted to turn me into mouthpiece of all their agendas and so on; I played along for awhile, but I wanted to be me after I had enough of singing next to Joan Baez--man, her syrupy shit made me wanna puke. I had big ideas and didn't wanna be trapped by any group or agenda or expectations. Besides, I thought I could get more poon as a rocker. Rosenbaum says the sixties was a lot more pre-feminist than we think. But, is today all that different? Aren't we living in a post-feminist world? In the 60s, Joan Baez who was supposedly so progressive and egalitarian, followed me like a dog and would have settled for housewivery had I married her. And, today, you have so many girls who wanna be skanky sluts to hunky studs. What's the difference except that today's taste is much worse? I'm better than Kevin Federline.
It's bad for a guy like me these days. The only thing that girls want today are muscle and thuggery. In the 60s, intellect and poetry mattered too in popular music. But, can you imagine guys like me, Simon & Garfunkel, and Buffalo Springfield being big stars today? Today, you gotta shake your butt fast and fist hard. In the 60s, you could be either sexy/tough(Motown or Jim Morrison) or poetic/sensitive(Simon and Garfunkel or Joan Mitchell) or both, like myself. Today, it's all cartoonish power-flexing. Same is true with movies. Compare action heroes of old movies to today's musclebound heroes who blow up entire cities with a single punch. What was Matrix but Rave meets the Terminator? And, I can't stand all those movie previews with his booming sound as though an airplane is crashing through the wall.
Anyway, the point is I understood my advantages and disadvantages. I knew I was no Marvin Gaye and no Paul McCartney. I wasn't naturally sexual nor the romantic heartthrob type. I was runty and my personality wasn't slick or smooth. So, I had no choice but to put on the aggressive James Cagney act. And, I knew I had brains. I knew I could write great songs that were light yrs ahead of what others were doing. I knew I could win with my brains, and 60s was an intellectual--and pretentious--enough time for a guy like me to grab the limelight. 60s was a time when movie studios took chances with stuff like 2001. Would any today? Kids today have no patience and all suffer from ADD.
And, let's face it. What really made me was my talent. I prize humility, but the truth is the truth. I was a genius, at least from 1965 to 1968, and then again in 1975 with Blood on the Tracks. This Haynes movie plays around with notions of my public persona and so on; well, that approach is boring. If I didn't have the talent, all those posturing and other antics wouldn't have added up to a plate of beans. People still love me because of my music. My music still stands up, and that's what counts. And, I was not the only poseur in the 60s or later. EVERYONE was doing it, much more than me, in fact. And, I wasn't entirely posing. During my hipster-jerk phase, I really was confused, angry, and pissed. Sure, I wanted the fame, attention, money, the girls, the drugs, and so on. And, I knew that my jerk-asshole persona was a winning formula so I played it up. But, in some ways, there was too much pressure--from women, drugs, hangers on, crazy fans, moron reporters asking dumbass questions, my agents, etc. In a way, I relished the notion of the spokesman of a generation as it got me attention, but I really hated it most of the time. I gave up speaking for others; why should I speak for them? Were people of my generation such losers that they couldn't speak for themselves and needed some scrawny Jewish kid to speak for them? What could I say in the name of some kid in Los Angeles, Atlanta, NY, Chicago, or the tens of thousands of small towns? I wanted to speak for and of myself--especially my favorite themes--girls and more girls. Take my greatest album Blonde on Blonde. What is it about? Girls, love, and sex. That's what I was really into. But, it wasn't only about boy-meets-girl, or hey-suck-my-dick. I wanted to explore and express the hidden depths of love and romance. I wanted to show the poetic, spiritual, cynical, and tragic side of love. And, I did one helluva job. That's what made me. I was genuninely confused and searching for meaning; I wasn't only posing. I was really being my true self.
Now, consider Donovan who was truly a poseur, but who cares about him today? Anyone still listening to Sunrise Batman or Jelly Melly? He was fashionable in the 60s but disappeared with the fashion. I was above fashion. I was for all time. I had depth and vision. Yet, this stupid movie doesn't care about any of that. Instead, at least if Rosenbaum is right, the movie reduces me to a series of signifiers or semiotics or whatever; and all these smartass people who claim to be my fans are digging this movie because they think I'm all about kaleidoscope conmanship and hall-of-mirrors convict-on-the-run. That's all crap.
What really matters is my great accomplishment in the mid 60s and 1975(Blood on the Tracks). I stopped being relevant after that. No one--except diehard Dylan fans--cared if I turned Chrisitan, back to a Jew, or whatever. The reason I'm continually discussed in a mythic and misleading manner is because the Boomer generation took over the media and academia and wanna use me as the symbol of their generation's continuing relevance. Now, I appreciate this to some extent because it means Dylan products still keep selling and I have a cash flow. But, I resent how everyone try to make me into HIS or HER Dylan, even today. I hated it when Folkies tried to cast me as their spokesman. And, I left Chrstian bullshit because of its dogmatism. But, boomer media goons are no better.
What really matters is, WAS DYLAN ANY GOOD? And the fact is that I released several albums what have withstood the test of time. But, Haynes doesn't care about my art or my music except as 'signifiers and texts'. He just used me to state HIS thesis on our culture as a whole. He used me like them folkies and fundie christians tried to use me. I got conned by an hyper postmodernist... but, in a way, I'm using him too, I guess. Thru his movie, many young people will become interested in me. Or maybe not. I've never been lucky with movies. No one liked Renaldo and Clara. And, critics generally crapped on my performance in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. And, everyone crapped on Heart like a Fire. And Masked and Anonymous got mostly mixed reviews and no one saw it.
Now, why couldn't someone have made a movie like Ray or Walk The Line about my life and career--or even like the Doors by Stone? That would have gotten me far more attention, but maybe a movie about me needs to be odd and eccentric because I was so odd and eccentric. But, there is organic oddity and eccentricity and bogus oddity and eccentricity. I was organic while Haynes is bogus. I left college and worked my way up. I paid my dues. Haynes got himself some fancyass college degree and has been posing as an intellectual film auteur ever since. Ever see Far From Heaven? What crap. What is that? A Douglas Sirk 50s movie made in the post modern 90s, or a post modern 90s movie made in the censorious 50s? Little bit of both? How precious. How innocent and cynical at the same time. How earnest and ironic both. Look at the earnestness wrapped in irony wrapped in earnestness and so on. What with so many movie critics being the products of fancy ass college education themselves, of course they go for this achingly bogus pseudo-intellectual crap. It's the kind of stuff that 'challenges movie going habits'. As far as I can tell, it's movie-stupid mix of flaky cultural eclecticism and arch intellectual puritanism. This was not my approach with music. I wasn't eclectic for eclectic-sake. I really loved the stuff I loved. I wasn't doing the bogus David Byrne 'world music' shit. I wasn't slinging and flinging far and wide. I was digging deeper and deeper. My approach was vertical than horizontal. That is why my art is deep while Byrne's is shallow--even when brilliant. Byrne takes from this and that, from here and there but he has no deep understanding of the source of his music. Instead, he's just a trendy fusion chef. I dug deep. Every culture has its own deep unique roots. Over time, different cultures and traditions intertwine, but this process must be organic, not forced or contrived. Rock n roll was an organic development. It was like when someone accidentally dropped his chocolate bar into peanut butter and came up with Reese's candy bar.
Much of this organic stuff happens subconsciously. It's like when Chuck Berry listened to country music and was inspired blend it with rhythm and blues. It's like when Elvis the hillbilly instinctively understood how country and blues could work side by side, creating a new candy bar. There was nothing postmodern about this. It was organic and natural. But, postmodernism is artificial, strained, intellectual, geeky, and contrived. It is all too conscious of what it is doing. It has an underlying intellectual conceit or agenda. I didn't work like this. (Okay, I did once with Self-Portrait and got panned by everyone). The artistic soul is like the stomach. The stomach doesn't think of what it's digesting. It just does it. Suppose the stomach consciously became aware of every morsel of food and tried to digest it intellectually; there'd just be stomach ache.
Anyway, this Haynes doesn't understand what is the essential thing about me and my life: my great music. Or, maybe he's intimidated by my genius. Since he has no means of finding the visual equivalent of my great music, he decided to go after my persona and image; he decided to do an Andy Warhol style portrait of me--you know, like Monroe and Mao. Such superficial approach dispenses with the true meaning of my life. Similarly, Warhol's Mao painting didn't have to take into account of real or even the mythic Mao. It was just Mao as lipstick traces. (Let me say here that just as I appreciate Greil Marcus's efforts and intellect, reading his stuff has made me too self-conscious of what I've been doing. I wish I'd never read him; it's like when Genet read Satre's long essay about Genet-as-Black-Saint and developed a writer's block for many yrs. All such appreciations are both flattering and flattening. It casts you stiffly into a mold).
Now, I was never like Andy Warhol. Sure, I was a self-promoter but I was really a deep soulful, searching artist--the organic kind. Warhol was nothing but surface, shallowness, conceit, and bullshit. He had no personal life. I had a wife, kids, and religion and all that stuff. I soon got to see popular culture for what it was; whatever it was, it was no good for family life, so I went and found refuge in some rural area... before all them lousy hippies tried to climb over the walls and demand that I speak FOR THEM. What a bunch of losers. Why not speak for themselves? I just wanted to be singer songwriter, a song and dance man, and these fools were demanding that I be their Moses or Jesus. Jesus was crucified because he said too much and I was being crucified because I said too little of what they wanted me to say.
Rosenbaum's review is also whanky because the man doesn't appreciate my music. And, his insult is worse than the usual kind. If someone said, 'hey Dylan, you suck', I could say, 'yeah, and your daddy too'. But, Rosenbaum says while he's no fan of my art, he clung to Don't Look Back and Nashville Skyline. Why the sonabitch, he's damning me with faint praise. First of all, Don't Look Back isn't my movie but Pennebaker's. And, it doesn't even have my best stuff except for 'It's all over now baby blue'. As for Nashville Skyline, it's one of my weaker albums. It's got the great Lay Lady Lay, but the rest isn't much. Now, Rosenbaum may have liked it because he's a Southern boy, but I suspect he's insinuating something else. He's suggesting that I was at my best when I was doing the simple hick shit but sucked when I tried to create great art. It's like saying Lennon's 'I wanna be Your Man' is better than 'Day in the Life' or 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. In other words, 'don't be a pompous ass and just do simple stuff which is all you're good at'. It's like saying Fellini's 8 1/2 is pseudo-intellectual crap while 'Variety Lights' is the best thing he ever made. Rosenbaum seems to think I was good when being simple minded but 'skirted the edge of incoherence' when I 'mixed metaphors and combined images'. Rosenbaum should talk. His reviews skirt not only incoherence but insanity when he mixes ideology with aesthetics and personal vindictiveness. Also, speaking of 'incoherence', he seems to have no problems with all those avant garde movies that make no sense. He can sit thru a 7 1/2 movie with couple of hungarians walking in the rain, but my 6 minute songs are too incoherent for him. And, if you really want incoherence, try Pistol Opera which Rosenbaum loves so much; he even said one doesn't have to understand a movie to consider it great. Yet, he has no proper respect for my music.
First of all, he doesn't take into account that I was on some heavy drugs when I did my two greatest albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Metaphors and imagery all melt into one under that shit. Only a fool would complain that Magritte or Dali's works are incoherent. We are talking of dream imagery where everything is possible. It's like Un Chien Andalou. Also, doesn't Rosenbaum promote being challenged in his movie-going habits? Yet, he sounds like some fussy literary professor when it comes to my music. I was challenging the listener's notions of lyrical possibilities, yet Rosenbaum complains that I 'mixed metaphors' and was near 'incoherent'. Why is it he can sit thru a 10 hour French movie that violates all conventions yet puts me down for something as English 101 as 'mixing metaphors'?
Also, only a fool listens to my lyrics for meaning. My lyrics aint literary but the very stuff of music itself. They are textural than descriptive or even symoblic; I was doing the musical equivalent of Tarkovskyesque water imagery in stuff like Andrei Rublev and later in Stalker. What David Lynch did in Eraserhead was merely a movie equivalent of what I did in Blonde on Blonde. Eraserhead is Visions of Johanna meets Father Knows Best.
What is the essence of music? Music expresses emotions thru aural textures and shadings. Poetry can be musical in its intimations and suggestiveness but I wanted to go even beyond that. I didn't want the lyrics to merely aid the music or be musical. I wanted the lyrics to be the very music itself. The so-called 'incoherence' was the very process whereby my lyrics melted INTO music than merely welded WITH music. I was breaking down logic within the lyrics and within the barrier between lyrics and instrumentation so that the whole thing could coalesce into a new form of molten metallic music. Maybe, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands collapsed from its own weight, but who can deny Visions of Johanna is one of the greatest songs of all time? Now, this Rosenbaum who says he's into "new" stuff that challenges conventions complain about my songs because they don't conform to the established literary standards of fuddy duddy professors of the Old School; he sounds like Hilton Kramer dissing Ginsburg. Guys like Ginsburg and I were doing some massive heavy drugs and we went beyond all that stuffy fixed-rules crap officiated by academics. Of course, the drugs were soon melting my brains as well so I quit that--mostly anyway--and got into making more logical songs with simpler lyrics. But, my towering achievements are Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde and too bad if people don't understand them. 'Nashville Skyline' and 'Dont Look Back' indeed. Well, I say I wasn't no diehard Rosenbaum fan but I did enjoy his review of Ace Ventura and Pynchon's novel. I'll stick to simple country songs and posing in front of a camera, and Rosenbaum can stick to stupid Hollywood movies and book reviewing.
Anyway, I just wanna reiterate the fact that what mattered with me was the music, not my posings. If posing's what mattered most, people would be just as fascinated with Grace Slick who was a bigger self-promoting hog than I ever was. Or, what about Harrison with all that heavy hindu eastern mystical bs? Now, why do people care more about Lennon than Harrison? It's because Lennon was a musical genius and Harrison wasn't--though he wrote a few great songs. If Harrison had been musically better, there would have been more written about his life than Lennon's. So, the crucial element is the talent and the art. Suppose I had been everthing I was but sucked at music. Who would give a crap about me? Would there be all these books and movies? NO. The only reason people paid attention to my life was because of my art and genius. So, it's a pisser that a movie about me focuses on a series of my posturing but distracts the viewer from what is really crucial--my art. I mean how would Orson Welles feel if some postmodern director made a movie where he was portrayed by Gary Coleman, Naomi Watts, Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and Paul Reuben? And suppose this movie 'intellectually' toyed with the notion of Welles-in-the-public-consciousness without coming to terms with the fatman's genius--like the bogus hypothetical Welles in Ed Wood? Orson Welles would have shat. Haynes done me worse than what Ken Russell did to Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler.
Finally, some guy gets to make a movie about me, and it's a flaky remake of Solondnz's Palindromes. Rosenbaum is right in one respect. The movie is an insult and hardly a tribute. I wouldn't have minded something like the Glenn Gould movie which was kinda cool. But, pretentious Haynes goes for That Obscure Object of Dylan.
Now, why am I played by a woman? Is this Hayne's idea of gay sensiblity? Is he saying I was feminine because of my feline, cat-like quality in the mid 60s? Is he saying that my subsequent 'patriarchal' persona was a reaction to my earlier semi-gay persona? Is Haynes saying I was into the transexual stuff before Jagger and Bowie? Or, is Haynes the gay dude inserting his feminine side into my soul?
I dunno, but being a cool cat doesn't mean one's acting feminine. Or, maybe Haynes is saying that I was so into women AND drugs that I hallucinatorilly merged with womenfolk psychologically under the influence. Maybe, that's what Haynes got from the songs One of Us Must Know and Fourth Time Around where the male and the female are at loggerheads and then come to some kind of Bergman-Persona like fusion.
But, I don't want to see me played by Cate Blanchett. She aint much of a looker.
And, those guys.... First of all, it's wrong to have a black-kid-as-Guthrie play me as a child. I got into black music later in my teens. And, I got into Guthrie even later. My first passion was country music. Then it was the blues. Then it was rock n roll. So, how silly to have my childhood yrs be represented by a black kid as Guthrie. What's really funny is no black man or child ever cared about Guthrie's music. How can blacks sing and dance to that slow white boy shit? Blacks didn't much care for me nor even for Elvis nor Bruce Springsteen. Blacks saw us as lame white boys stealing from blacks. So, the idea of a black kid as Woody Guthrie is ridiculous. Of course, Haynes could have based this image of my youth on my tall tales where I said I was born of gypsy parents, member of a circus, or raised by blacks like Steve Martin in The Jerk. But, no one believed any of this and it was all seen as a joke. Everyone soon knew I was some Jew kid from Minnesota trying to make a name for myself.
As for the other actors, I must ask, where is the Jew? Christian Bale? Richard Gere? What is this? Is Haynes saying that my fame and importance grew so large that all those gentile folks out there became Zelig-like clones of myself? That I Jewified the gentile community? How precious and retarded.
Now, the real fact is no one can understand me without acknowledging my Jewish roots and Jewishness. I look Jewish, feel Jewish, and think Jewish. Even when I wasn't religiously Jewish, I was Jewish. Even as a Christian, I was Jewishistic and not like other Christians of other ethnic groups. It's like one cannot discuss Norman Mailer without taking his Jewishness into account. Same goes for me. And, this movie is bogus when everyone who plays me is a lame gentile who can't even act. I was hoping Adam Sandler would play me. Or, Paul Newman if he could go back in time. But, what do I get? A Dalai groupie and Batman.
The fact is I really did have a life and a career, and those are 1000x more interesting and fascinating than all this precious pseudo-intellectual theorizing. Look, I did my share of intellectual clowning--stuff like Tarantula book and Renaldo and Clara. But, I realized I was no writer or thinker or moviemaker. I was a songwriter and performer, and I was unique and great. So, that's what really matters. But, Haynes isn't interested in that. He's been corrupted by all that fancy academic learning. Haynes isn't interested in me or my music but all the stuff that comes between myself AND the public. Haynes is saying a celebrity is the myth--signs and texts--that the media and hype make him to be. Well, duh. Sure, there's a lot of obfuscation and mythologizing. So, it's the job of an artist to push aside the myths and bring us closer to the real truth, especially when all those myths about me have all been forgotten, disproven, and were never even interesting. Of course, there is no total or absolute truth as the past is hidden and lost in time. But, getting nearer to the truth is more interesting than toying with all the obfuscation which no one even cares about anymore--especially after Chronicles set much of the record straight--unless you insist that was simply more mythmaking. For example, I'd prefer to see a WWII movie based on real research than a smarmy art house film which plays with all the myths created from endless Hollywood movies; that is so easy and clever. I liked Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima because Eastwood was trying to get at the truth, no matter how elusive or buried in time such may be. Haynes is simply content to allow myths to have a life of their own because he can mold them into whatever to feed his own intellectual narcissism. Haynes is saying, 'hey look, I can do Warhol, I can do Godard, I can do Monty Python and SNL'. This is about as phony as that book 'Dutch' on Ronald Reagan which was more about the author's huge ego than about the subject.
The important truth is I was not a chameleon toying with fictional personas nor a zelig eager to conform to others. Sure, I did my share of clowning around to confound the squares and mislead Dylan fanatics whom I loathed. The squares' problem was they didn't understand my art. Still, they left me alone. But, the diehard Dylan fanatics scrounged thru my garbage, tried to remake me in their image, wanted me to lead them to the Promised Land, wanted me to legitimize their passions and ideals, or wanted me to appreciate their love and devotion. Trust me, I had people scarier than David Chapman stalking my ass. Unlike Lennon, I got myself a rifle to protect my hearth and home. These people were pathetic losers who wanted to live thru my fame and fortune. They were worse than Rupert Pupkin in King of Comedy. But, I kinda understand them because maybe I would have been like them too if I hadn't been so talented; at one time, maybe I was like them. After all, I was obsessed enough to make the trip all the way to NY to meet Woody Guthrie. And, I had my big heroes and obsessions and so on. But, I also had big balls. I was gonna make a name for myself and I was gonna guard my name, and not just go on leeching off others forever. It was gonna be my name and fame; other people could buy my records and admire me but I didn't want them to live through me or make demands on me. I hated them folkies trying to turn me into some radical clone mouthing off the umpteenth crap about 'nukes are gonna kill us all'. That shit got boring. What I really wanted were all these women, all these gorgeous women. This is why I hate it when people call me a 'misogynist'. A misogynist is someone who hates women. Do I hate women? No. Sure, I've been a dick around women and wasn't always nice. But, this had nothing to do with any feelings of hatred toward women because I simply did not hate them; I loved them. But, relationships are always funny and entangled, and there are bad feelings along with the good. You can ask my male friends and colleagues, and they'll all say I was as tough and asshol-like to them as I was toward women. No, I don't have the nicest personality in the world. I can be selfish, mean, cruel, and so on. And, it's too bad that my girlfriends and wives had to suffer. But, had I been gay and had a gay lover, I would have been nasty to him just the same. It's just my nature. Did you see how I treated that square Time reporter in Don't Look Back? So, what does that make me? A journagynist? I sometimes treated everyone like shit. I don't know why. In a way, it was the nature of the business. Too much pressure, too much tension, too many hangers on of both sexes, too many dummies. But, don't say I was a misogynist. Call be a bad husband, but love women I did. My nastiness had nothing to do with hatred toward women. So many people have the wrong idea because the meaning of 'misogynist' has been distorted by feminists and culture critics who are mostly loser men hiding behind ideology. According to them, a guy who wants his wife to be a stay-at-home mother is a misogynist. Supposedly, he wants to enslave women and keep them all locked up because he hates women. Bull. I wanted a stay-at-home wife/mother because I wanted a family life after leaving my childhood home long ago and playing the homeless drifter. I got lonely. Also, as my life was pretty crazy, I needed to balance it with domesticity. Also, Sara was happy to be a wife and mother. Just listen to songs Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and Sara(on Desire). Does that sound like hate to you? Sure, some of my songs are nasty about women, but many women have written nasty songs about men. Just listen to the likes of Liz Phair and Alanus Morrisette. They bitch and whine but no one calls them ball-busters. Well, lemme tell you, they are bigger ballbusters than I ever was a woman-hater; and I wasn't no woman hater at all. And, I'm not the only nasty guy in the business. Lennon was pretty nasty, especially about Paul. And many rockers were even worse--and some of them were truly brutal to their women. And, those Hollywood shitters are much worse in the way they treat women. I was no misogynist. If you want misogyny, listen to some of today's rap music. Or, look at how women like to dress up like whores. That is really bad stuff, but instead, I keep getting labeled as a misogynist.
Anyway, though I clowned around, I essentially tried to be true to myself. Sure, I changed over time, but the changes were real. For example, I was once really a folkie. But, I really got tired of it; I also got jealous of all those rock stars who were grabbing all the attention. So, I really wanted to be a rocker. And, I took made that bold decision despite all the opposition and resistance and slurs tossed at me. You think I did this just to be some poseur? No, I did it because I really believed in my passions. Later, I took too much drugs and was feeling real sick. And, my life was all messed up. And, my pa was getting more ill. And, I had to clean up my act if I didn't want to end up like how Janis Joplin and Hendrix later ended up. So, I withdrew. That was for real. It was no bullshit act. So, you see, I was less of a poseur than other 60s people. This is why Haynes's movie got me all wrong. His gay sensibility and its obsession with masks and confused identities are more suitable for a movie on someone like David Bowie or Frank Zappa or even the Stones(notice Stones even went disco when that was fashionable, but was there a disco Dylan?). Bowie and Zappa--fine artists--were really into playing fictional roles and doing all that shit. In my case, though I was confused about my life, I really did try to come to terms with 'what am I?' and 'what is the meaning of my art?'. The latter question led me to what later came to be known as Basement Tapes. Along with the members of the Band, I was digging into the roots of the music, tradition, and stuff that made me do what I done. Basement Tapes is like my O Brother Where Art Thou. It's my way of getting to the authentic source material and touching it with my own hands. It was my way of getting my hands on the fecund soil of American culture outside all the hype and mass marketing. This isn't to say that I was pure and authentic. I was, in social terms, a middle class Jew kid. And Coens started out as middle class Jew kids too. So, how could we say claim to be the authentic heirs of American culture? But, culture is an ongoing process, and what I did with Basement Tapes and what Coens did with O Brother was to find new ways to play with those traditions and ideas and make them live anew with the creativity, wit, inventivenss, and such of the Jewish brain. Now, real authentic hillbillies and blacks might listen to Basement Tapes and say, 'this aint our music'. Sure enough. It aint their music. It is a reverent and creative twist on their music. And, Coens movie is a loving and creative twist on Southern culture. Anyone who expects realism or literal truth-ism from Basement Tapes or O Brother is a fool.
Anyway, I never pulled no stunt like Ziggy Stardust persona. I never ever pulled something like Beatles pretending to be Sgt Pepper Band. I was straight when compared to most other sixties act. It wasn't me that came up with the bogus concept of Tommy--great music though. Indeed, I was as much an anti-sixties figure as a sixties figure. Or, maybe a better way of putting it was I was counter-counter-culture. I always wanted to be true to my feelings. I left the folkie movement when I lost the knack for it. And, I left the sixties zeitgeist just when it was rising to its peak with Summer of Love in 1967. Heck, I was through with that shit by 1966 even before most kids were into psychedelia. I had my fill of utopian delusions, drugs, proto-psychedelia, free love, and so on and on. Just when the whole country was listening to Timothy Leary and beginning to Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out, I was out of the Movment; actually, I was never a part of it, but the media made me 'the spokesman of my generation' which I never was. Anyway, when 1967 came around with everyone into Love, Hair, Drugs, and Peace, I was in my house with my wife raising kids and learning how to paint; it was more like 19th century living. I didn't want any of that Monterey Pop shit and later Woodstock and Altamont shit. What I can't stand is groupthink and conformism. I didn't like the square middle class conformism of my parents, and I didn't care for the groupthink and conformism of the counterculture. All these fools were saying they were all free, but they were all sheep shouting tiresome mantras about peace, love, hair, drugs, and so on. Many of these kids were just losers who wanted to escape from life and foolishly thought a new world could be founded on orgies, drug use, and taking a crap behind the bushes at a rock concert.
I suppose I was partly to blame for this because my albums Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde were pretty intense, rebellious, weird, and even a bit trippy. It's true enough that the Grateful Dead, Byrds, Beatles, Stones, Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and many many others were into my music. Lennon sure as hell was jealous of me. They all wanted to be like me, and they spread the false notion that I was the leader of the hippie or Love-n-Hair movement. But, I was just being myself. I never imitated anyone once I understood what I was about. As a kid, I used to imitate Hank Williams, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Later, I imitated Woody Guthrie. But, I came to forge my own identity and my own vision. After that, I was I. I wasn't trying to be the Beatles, Beach Boys, Motown, Stones, and so on. I was trying to be myself. The reason why I'm the greatest rocker of the 60s is that everyone followed me but I followed no one. Only in 1964 were they ahead of me, but that was because I was stuck in the rut of folk. But, by 1965, I came out with Highway 61 and blew everyone away. If Elvis was the king of rock n roll, I was the king of rock--an higher and more complex form.
But, I got tired of both my detractors and my fans. My detractors were mostly dreary folkies who said I should sing more songs about how the Bomb wanna gonna wipe us out or why whites should hug black people. At every concert, these losers would call me Judas because I didn't goose step to their cause. And, then you got the fans who saw me as a messiah. They wanna touch you and worship you and love you and other icky stuff. Hey, thanks for buying my albums, but get a life.
During the height of summer of love, I was nowhere to be seen. And when rock music was getting all loud, wild, furious, and drugged out, I came out with John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. So, how stereotypically 60s was I? Not really. You know how Peckinpah followed up his Wild Bunch with Ballad of Cable Hogue. Well, Blonde on Blonde was my Wild Bunch, and I figured it's time for some peace and quiet and some thoughtfulness. So, you see, from late 1966 to the early 70s, I had little in common with the 60s zeitgeist. So, I find it odd that Haynes would obsess about me as a sixties icon when I was just me. I was neither for old culture nor new culture. I was for my culture, and I think everyone should be for their own little personal culture. Personal culture is what's most interesting and important. This is why I love artists like Bergman and Bresson. They made movies about very private realities with more truth than all the we-are-brothers-and-let's-all-march-together crap. To be sure, when my career was on the skids in the 80s and I needed some publicity, I jumped on the Live Aid bandwagon but that was pretty bogus.
I always insisted on me being me. But, why was I a confused cat unable to decide to stay inside or go out? Maybe it's because I grew up as a small town Jew. This is kinda funny for a Jew. When we think of Jews in America, we generally think of big cities, especially NY and Los Angeles where Hollywood is. Most famous Jews are NY Jews. They grew up in NY amidst all the hustle and bustle. They grew up Jewish, lived Jewish, thought Jewish, acted Jewish, and had always been around Jews.
They were open to more high culture and sophistication than I, but they only really knew and saw one side of America or Jewish life.
It wasn't so simple for me. I grew up in Hibbing Minnesota which wasn't what you'd call a typically Jewish environment. I guess my move to NY was a way to get away from such a place and be where I though all the real action was. But, we cannot leave our childhood experiences and complexes behind. What I mean to say is I felt wrong in Hibbing Minnesota or Midwest in general, so I had to leave. But, that place became a part of me so that when I arrived in NY I felt kinda alienated from NYers. I loved NY and its huge number of Jews like me. But, I also felt different. They had only known Jewish and/or urban life all along. I knew a different America. The big difference between NY folkies and me was that I was closer to the roots of little folks. Ironically, urban folkies--as most folkies were--had no direct experience with the little people of small towns and rural areas. I came from such place. For me, it wasn't just about the music or its values. I had a heart-n-soul connection to the music and where it came from. This is why I cared for more raw and authentic folkie guys while a lot of urban types preferred Kinston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, and Brothers Four which were all just urbaners pretending to be folkish.
(You may say I suffered from a Napoleon complex due to my small town Jewish roots. Such makes you more ambitious and even ruthless. You wanna be with sophisticated people where the action is, yet this sense of inferiority is mixed with a compensatory sense of superiority. You feel they are more cultured and urbane, but you feel more in touch with the real people, the little people. Consider that the most ambitious tyrants were outsiders. Napoleon came from Corsica, Stalin from Georgia, Hitler from Austria, Mao from some southern province. It's likely that had I been born and raised in NY, I wouldn't have been as hungry, ambitious, contradictory, and ruthless, and filled with both envy and contempt for city folks).
It's ironic too that I'd been so eager to leave the small town and rural areas of Minnesota, yet the kind of music I took up in big NY was folk music of rural areas and little people. You'd think I went to the big city to do big city things, yet I was peddling rural-originated picaresque folk music. I may well ask, if I cared so much about folk music, why didn't I live amongst the little people, the simple folks from which the music came from? This could have been asked of anyone in the folk community. If we were so much into folkie stuff and the little people, what were they doing in Big Megapolis NY and singing to city slickers and tourists? I guess it was like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy; the thing is I was both Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo; I had a natural affinity and sense for urban things but another side of me was rooted in small-town hickishness. You gotta understand that a young man is awful ambitious and wants to see big things, and everything in NY was big alright. It was several yrs later that I had my fill and settled back in rural Woodstock. And, then I got sick of that too and moved back to the city. Yeah, my feelings have changed over the years, but my life was NOT a series of bogus Warholesque posings. They were my genuine feelings at the time; I was more like Chagall than Warhol. Just listen to Lay Lady Lay; that's dreamy and soulful like Chagall imagery. So, I resent Haynes portraying me as some chronic poseur who's just playing games. There was some of that, but I quit that shit before most other rock stars because I saw the bogusness of it all. Does it mean I became an honest person? No, I like to play games and tricks, and there was some clowning later too. But, it's not like an actor playing different roles. It's more like a writer or composer or painter trying to express himself in different ways. An actor loses himself in the role he's playing; he's playing someone else. An artist such as myself always expresses himself. Actor wears a mask; the artist breaks thru the mask of his own making.
Let me say one more thing though I'm no expert on movie stuff. Rosenbaum says Haynes, having being born in 1961, doesn't understand the real significance of several sixties films alluded to in the movie. Haynes didn't see them chronologically--as they were released--in relation to the evolution of the sixties; Haynes's perspective is hyper post-modern, hapharzardly jumbling these movies as interchangeable. But, couldn't one argue that this is, in some ways, in the spirit of the 60s? Rock bands jumbled together influences from blues, country, classical, eastern music, movies, books, and so on and on without really bothering to digest their true meaning. And, what was Magical Mystery Tour the movie but a mix of Broadway, Fellini, Avant Gardism, Children's Program, and pure idiocy? One thing for sure, sixties was not a clearly demarcated in terms of cultural meaning. There was a sense that everything was possible, and the hell with Proper meaning. You should just mix everything and hope for the best. Did freaks really think about the meaning of Mao or Che when they hung posters on their hippie communes? People found their own meaning and significances thru their own drug addled imagination. The seeds of postmodernism were already there though it was more organic than contrived. Too much was changing, too much being challenged, too much was trying to be done. And, things got stranger and stranger. Remember my song 'Times they are a Changing"? Well, that was rather optimistic. But, not long after, I wrote "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" which drew a more apocalyptic picture. The thing is no one really knew where we were headed; we were making stuff up as we went along. So, it misses the point to say this here has this significance while that there has that significance. Mike Nichols's intended meaning for the ending of The Graduate was not how kids saw it. Nichols saw Braddock to become like his parents; kids saw a new beginning.
Also, in regards to cinema I'm not sure if 60s cinema was really '60s' cinema. 'the 60s' has connotations of youthful exuberance, idealism, sexual intensity, drug use, being wild and free. While most of the popular musical artists of the 60s were of that very generation, this was not the case of moviemakers--not least because moviemaking is so expensive and always been a closed elitist club where you gotta pay your dues for yrs and yrs before you get to make a movie. If by 'the 60s', we mean the formative and generative youthful stage in one's life, 'the 60s' for most filmmaker took place in the 50s or 40s--or even the 30s or 20s! There was almost no one in their late teens or in their 20s making films in the 60s--though exceptions are Bertolucci and few others; in contrast, the bulk of rock stars who inspired that generation were of that generation. In rock music, the artists and the fans were of the same age group. Not so with what came to be known as 60s cinema.
Renais was born in 1922, which makes him 40 in 1962. Bunuel was born in 1900.
Bresson was born in 1907. Bergman was born in 1918. Fellini was born in 1920. Leone was born in 1921. Antonioni was born in 1912. Melville was born in 1917. Dreyer was born in 1889! Kurosawa was born in 1910. Hitchcock was born in 1899. These were major players in 60s cinema yet can they really be said to be part of 60s culture if by 'the 60s' we mean youth culture and rebellion? Even the younger directors were considerably older than the rockers who defined the age. Truffaut was 30 in 1962. Demy was 31 in 1962. Godard was 32. So was Chabrol. Rohmer was 42. Chris Marker was 41. Imamura was born in 1926. Mike Nichols was born in 1931. And so on and on. Also, for most of these people, American or British rock culture meant little or nothing. (Bresson especially didnt care for youth rebels as one can see from Balthasar and Devil Probably) So, we must not confuse 60s rock culture with 60s movie culture and see them as part of the same cultural stream and zeitgeist. The moviemakers and rockers didn't have much in common. The rockers were forging a sensibiltity yet to be forged while filmmakers were expressing ideas they'd absorbed up in earlier decades. (Also, 60s cinema was international in scope and broke all language barriers. Also, it was heavily European and partly Japanese. It was intellectual and philosophical and for mature sensibilties--even with Godard who wasn't easy to understand; as for Demy, his musical sensibility was more 50s than 60s. In contrast, rock music was essentially American--even when Brits are taken into account--, Black and Hillbilly based, sensual, anti-intellectual, and centered around hormones of teenagers and young adults. The filmmakers of the 60s had experienced WWII and even WWI. All rockers of the 60s were born during or after WWII and only knew peace and/or relative prosperity firsthand).
It's true that many filmmakers only got a chance to express themselves fully in the 60s but their points of reference were very different from that of 60s rockers. Most rockers in the 60s were in the early or mid 20s. Resnais was 23 in 1945. In other words, 'the 60s'--if it means the formative youthful stage in one's life--for Resnais was either the late 1930s or the 1940s. One of the reasons why people don't understand why serious film culture of the 60s and early 70s waned and disappeared is because they tend to confuse 60s cinema with rock music; why did the rock music live on but art cinema die out in relevance to mass culture? 60s rock mentality was about youth and more youth. Yet, the important filmmakers of the 60s were not very young, and they didn't really understand what young people of tomorrow wanted. That was understood by Spielberg and Lucas who came later, so in a way, cinema as 60s sensibility--if we define 60s as youth-is-king--only came to be with the release of Jaws and Star Wars. It was only then that the 60s generation finally got to make movies with their own youth-centered sensibility. In the 60s, their counterparts in music got to make the music, but the movies were still in control of by older generation--including New Wavers. As movie making was expensive and difficult, young aspiring moviemakers of the 60s couldn't just crank out a movie like the Beatles, Stones, or I could crank out a tune. Even an independent film requires great deal of money and work; they had to wait til the 70s or 80s.
Still, the new cinema of the 60s was new and different enough to win over a lot of people and lull them into thinking it was all part of 60s culture just as much as the Beatles, Stones, and The Doors. But, rock music was essentially about orgasmic power, immediate gratification, loudness, aggression, and brashness. And most 60s films didn't offer that rocking feeling. Kids had to wait til Jaws and Star Wars to get that stuff. Of course today, most movies are like visual rock whether it's Bourne Trilogy or Matrix Trilogy. Today's moviemakers are boomers or younger and they all share the sensibility that took hold since the 60s--or even late 50s--which says Youth-Is-King. The pre-boomer generations were not allowed to fixate on youth alone and were pressured to grow up and become adults. Hitchcock grew into an old master, but do you think Tarantino will be any different when he's 60 or 70?
Remember that book by Ray Manzerek about his career with the Doors? He says his generation was into intellectual cinema and art films from France, Italy, and Japan, and I'm sure he had interest in them stuff. But, he fails to understand that the culture that he pushed--rock music--was at odds with what he admired in 60s cinema. Intellectual seriousness rooted mainly in European continental tradition couldn't coexist for long with Hillbilly-n-Negro foundations of 60s youth culture. Sure, rock music tried to be philosophical, heavy, and arty but most highly educated people did NOT take Tommy, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Pink Floyd The Wall seriously as works of philosophy or intellect; sure, they are taken seriously as great popular music or even as great music, but not as heavy intellectual stuff despite their pretensions. Tommy is not The Waste Land, and The Wall is not Magic Mountain. The ONLY rock artist of the 60s who truly plumbed the depths of human soul and psychology is me. This is why I was most admired but also least popular among the Big Names of the era. More has been written about me, but I sold far fewer albums than the Beatles or Stones or Beach Boys. But, I was more than a rock star. I was a rock artist. And, when I turned away from rock in stuff like John Wesley Harding, I was a musical artist than just a rock artist.
This may explain why I'm so desperately revered by so many culture critics of and since the 60s. They wanted to have it both ways; they wanted to be populist & youthful AND serious & intellectual. My persona and music provided them with both. Since the 60s, they've seen how youth populism totally blew away mature intellectual stuff, and they feel kinda sad; but, the boomers don't wanna take any blame for this; they don't wanna admit that what they embraced and pushed--youth culture--drove out serious culture. They hold me up as an ideal because I proved that one could be popular AND serious. But, let's face facts. Most young kids today aint into me or my music. Without the boomers dominating the media and pushing me down everyone's throat, most kids would not even know about me.
Anyway, what I'm saying is that eventually one had to go--either rock culture or serious intellectual culture. As rock culture was more populist, accessible, and appealing, it won hands down. In time, Spielberg and Lucas created a cinema that conformed to standards of rock culture: loudness, speed, mind-blowing effects, and a feeling of WOW. Even I must admit that when I saw Close Encounters, it was like a super acid trip to loud music. Of course, Lucas and Spielberg were clever enough to blend youth sensibility with family values. Star Wars was like a Who Concert reformulated by Walt Disney. It was for rowdy teens, little kids, and the parents. Jaws is like Spring Break rowdiness for the whole family.
Maybe, 60s was a special time because there was an interesting interplay between the generations. Even as kids said, 'dont trust anyone over 30', they were trusting people over 30--or ever 40, 50, or even 60 or more--in cinematic culture. The more mature and experienced visions of filmmakers had a sobering effect on the rock-n-drug youth. So, one could go to a brash Doors concert, use drugs, and then sober up at a Bresson or Antonioni movie. And, it was good for filmmakes too. As they knew that the market was becoming more dominated by young people, filmmakers--though considerably older than 60s youth--tried to be innovative, new, daring, and experimental. Sometimes, it got a bit embarassing, as when Fellini tried to be psychedelic hip with Satyricon. And Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, though impressive, strains to hard to be really hip. And, Godard became stupid taking up the 68 radical youth banner. But, there was an interesting interplay of generations. If in many other areas there was much generational distrust and anger, there was between the art of cinema and art of rock culture a kind of generational give-n-take. As it turned out eventually, the filmmaking people of the 60s could not keep up with the new sensibility, and the 60s generation wasn't much good at making the Art Film. Just take a look at Beatles Magical Mystery Tour movie or my Renaldo and Clara or Paul Schrader's bogus imitations. 60s generation was too restless to succeed in the Resnais or Bresson vein. Any such attempt was forced and unnatural. The cinema that came to dominate was rooted in a new loud and brash rock/youth sensibility. It was spearheaded by Spielberg and Lucas and expanded by the likes of Michael Mann and Ridley Scott and then sped up by Hong Kong filmmakers and so on. There is still an art cinema but it is a matter of acquired taste for a select urbanites. In the 60s and 70s, you still had a large number of older folks who would have appreciated slower Serious cinema. But, as yrs went on, they grew older and died out. What was left were boomers whose ideal music/movie was fast fun stuff. And, their kids were even brought up on faster and faster and wilder and wilder stuff. It's funny that greater sexuality and violence in the 60s were supposed to take power away from corporations and give power to the youths. Bonnie & Clyde and El Topo meant youth power. Yet, with the mass marketing of sex and violence, corporations in popular entertainment are stronger than ever. And, the audiences are dumber. What passes for art film directors today are Tarantino and the Coens. Europeans aren't much better as they think drabby dreary knee-jerk anti-Hollywoodisms automatically make for serious film art.
Anyway, the filmmakers working in the 60s were special not because they were OF THE 60s--in fact, they weren't--but because they preserved and presented the poetic and reflective sensibilities of earlier eras. They lent a sense of continuity with the past when so many rockers were giving middle finger to the past. Cinema of the 60s had a link to the past--and non-American culture--, whereas 60s pop music made a clear break with the past. If 60s cinema culture meant digging out forgotten treasures from the past, the musical culture rejected everything before rock n roll, or even rock n roll itself; in the era of the Beatles and myself, Elvis was old hat. Though 60s youths saw this as rebellion, corporations loved it as they love nothing more than new fashions to hype and sell. Anyway, if movie culture of the 60s demanded respect for old masters in American and abroad, the rockers of the 60s didn't give a shit for Cole Porter, Gershwin, Sammy Cahn, Sinatra, Big Band Jazz, or even Bebop which all fell by the wayside.
Since the 60s it has increasingly become All Youth. Even boomers who are old still think/talk in terms of their golden youth. Rosenbum is still bummed out that the 60s ended. Why such fixation to an era? Earlier generations didn't fixate on youth and grew mature with the yrs. Boomers, in contrast, only look back to the 60s and their youth. And, the message that new batches of young ones hear since the 60s is youth is all that matters. This is easy to understand if you think about it. As sociologists say, generations prior to the 60s had to either quit school to work or work soon after leaving school. There was little opportunity for leisure for most young people.. So, they looked forward to being adults in order to be free. So, independence for pre-boomer generations was associated with adult responsibility, work, and family. Boomer generation, on the other hand, had much leisure and freedom even before they grew up and became financially independent. They was an economic boom, bigger houses, lots of music and the tv. You could still be living at home and feel free as hell. And, you could feel independent without taking on responsibilities. It was like utopia. To feel free and loaf off your parents. But, when the boomers finally had to grow up, they felt bitter because they had to face reality as reality, not reality as some utopian fantasy while listening to the Beatles and gazing at a Che poster on the bedroom wall. I can attest to this. My pa had no easy time growing up. He knew that a man must work and raise a family and put childish things behind. And he made good money and made all my leisure and fun possible. I loved laying about reading books, watching movies, buying records, and riding my motorcycle which my pa bought me. So, from such fun and sense of freedom--delusional as it was paid for by my pa--, it was hard for me to accept reality as it really was. I didn't want to be some working stiff as most people were. It's funny that capitalism made this leisure possible, but it's also capitalism which pisses us off because it means competition and hard work once we leave home. Socialism is appealing to boomer folks because it restores their youthful ideal--people doing whatever they feel like while others pay for it. We want big government to replace our parents. We want the allowances to keep coming so we can be free without having to work and toil.
Anyway, I was not a typical 60s artist because I chose to grow up eventually. Consider pre-60s musical artists like Sinatra. He was not afraid of growing up and being a man. He didn't try to be young forever. I wanted to be like that. I didn't wanna play the rebel schtick forever. No 'hope I die before I get old' for me. When I see Mick Jagger today, I laugh. The dude is 63 yrs old and he's still acting like he's 25. It's pathetic. I didn't wanna be like that. I wanted my art to grow with my years. So, my music when I was 30 was the music of a 30 yr old man. My music when 40 was that of a 40 yr old man. My music when 50 was that of a 50 yr old man. It was not a 50 yr old man pretending to be 20. A few rockers grew up and matured. Myself, Neil Young, and Jerry Garcia before too many chili dogs finished him off. But, most 60s guys are stuck in their long faded youth, and it's pathetic when you see them panhandling on PBS. It's sad when rebels have become nostalgia acts. This is why I didn't want anything to do with the 60s after 1966. I had my fill, and I realized that the so-called rebellion had long ago been co-opted by the corporations who saw youths as a huge market and Rebellion, Peace, and Hair as something to sell. I realized whatever I did was gonna hyped by the media--which is too run by corporations--and turned into a brand of sodapop. Spokesman-of-his-generation sodapop. Or, Rebel-Hipster sodapop. It was all media fizz. And, I saw right thru The Summer of Love. It was not youth power, but corporations manipulating youth power. They had tons of cash to rake in from all that Love crap. So, I turned away from rock music and the whole scene to make contact with simpler and maturer music; I came up with John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline and worked on Basement Tapes. The songs were religious or about children-doing-their-parents-wrong like on Tears of Rage. I felt greater affinity with the filmmakers in the 60s--though not OF the 60s--who grew up in earlier times when youth was not everything. I wanted John Wesley Harding to be as pure and sober and austere and sever like a Bresson movie, and that's a fact. I wanted to learn from growed up men, not teenybopper hippies, drug-addled bums, and silly radicals who took over the culture in the 60s. Times they were achanging in a bad way, and I figured I should be changing myself by being growed up.
Of course, I had to be me. I couldn't grow up in the Sinatra sense. He was a great artist but he maintained this Public image and sang other peoples' songs. My art was about my personal soul, and I wrote my own songs. It's the difference between John Wayne and Brando. Both growed up to be men, but Wayne stuck to his public persona whereas Brando expressed his deep inner soul through his art. But, they were not afraid of growing up into men. But, look at today's movie stars and they are like kids forever. Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Leonard Dicaprio, Johnny Depp, and so on. They are forever heartthrobs for teenyboppers. They are good but boys, not men.
And, most filmmakers make them stupid blockbuster movies or those stupid independent films which appeal to young people. If Tarantino is the art director of our age, what is a Hollywood director? There are exceptions like Scorsese but his serious mature movies mostly bombed in the 90s and early 2000s so he had make a Tarantino ripoff based on some Hong Kong movie to get himself a hit and remain relevant and bankable. It sucks more than ever.
This is why people should seriously appreciate my genius. I was truly unique in the 60s. I was a young rocker for freedom AND a deep serious artist grappling with profound and timeless issues. Visions of Johanna is perhaps the only song of the 60s that compares with 8 1/2, Persona, and Muriel in its depth and profundity. I was part of the 60s but didn't want to be glued to no zeitgeist. I wanted to be an individual 'auteur' like the great filmmakers. Also, I wanted to grow up. Just when Summer of Love was about to happen, I decided to be a man and grow up. Be a husband and have a wife. And, I wanted my songs to reflect the process of growing up. You see how pathetic the Stones look still trying to be young? I'm now 66 and acting like a 66 yr old. When I was 30, I acted like a 30 yr old. When I was 40, I acted like a 40 yr old. So, I changed over the yrs. Aint this what supposed to happen to us? To grow up and change and take on new responsibilities and have new thoughts? Apparently not to guys like Haynes who see my changes as a series of ruses and poses. Not so. I would have been a real poser if I pretended to be folkie when I was no longer a folkie or pretended to be a proto-psycheli when I was no longer a proto-psychedeli or christian when I was no longer a christian and so on. I'm a very organic kind of guy. I grow up and change. But, I've always been me. But, every 'me' around the world changes. I mean compare what you were when you were 10 with what you were at 15 with what you were at 20 with what you were at 25 with what you were at 30 with what you were at 35 with what you were at 40 and so on and so on. You changed too. Does that mean you're been a poseur all you life, a funny chameleon just playing games? Haynes should grow up and Rosenbum oughta grow up. Get married, raise a family, and other stuff. No, that aint misogyny. It's life. I wish I hadn't allowed Haynes to make this movie. I was never no lucky with movies, and that's the fact.
To put in more simply, I was not coming up with all these (false) identities as many movie and culture critics charge. They are the ones who are misrepresenting me. The only time I was something of a poseur was when I was young, in my teens and in my early twenties. But, who isn't a poseur during that stage of life? When you're a child, you are what your family and town made you. As you grow into late teen yrs and enter into your 20s, you wanna find out what you really are. You experiment, you explore, you seek, you bullshit, you try different masks, you fall on your face, and so on. It's just a part of life. EVERYONE is a poseur during that stage in life, as least in the free world where young folks are given freedom to 'find myself'. I was trying to find myself, and it's not so hard to understand why. I was a middle class Jew kid from Minnesota, but I loved country music, blues, rock n roll, and other stuff(echos of Al Jolson). I came to NY and was among intellectual and hipster types who'd read more books than I. I was confused and I was thrilled. But, I wasn't sure what I was. And, I had to survive because the urban jungle and music business were dog-eat-dog and ruthless and half-crazy. But, everyone in that community was like me, except I was better at it. I wasn't the only young hipster trying to be someone in Greenwich village and Soho. Everyone was just like me--trying to be somebody, create an identity, create a myth. After all, our heroes--whether Picasso, Guthrie, Mahler, Steinbeck, etc--all had their myths. We looked up to them, and we wanted to be famous and rich too. So, we all experimented. I was no different. I was part of the norm. The ONLY difference is I made it big time while others did not. The ONLY difference is I decided to grow up and ask my own questions and jump off someone else's bandwagon.
At any rate, the only time I consciously created any kind of myth was when I was in my early 20s when I was a nobody. A nobody wants to be somebody, and this requires an element of hype. Suppose I said, "Hey, I'm a middle class Jewish kid from Hibbing, and I want to entertain you with my folk song". Zzzzzz. You see how boring that sounds? So, I had to create and project a colorful image of myself. And, that image was 'conscience of a generation' stuff with half-joking tall-tales about my past. I must have played it well because all these old people were patting me on the head and saying, "Good boy, Bobby". At first, it was cool because a nobody is happy just to be a somebody. But, once I became a somebody, I didn't want to stop growing and developing as a person and artist. You see, what I came to dislike about the folk movement was it was just another means for old people to control us young people. Most folkies detested rock n roll and beatles and all that stuff. They said it was greedy capitalism, it was blacks acting crazy instead of being saintly negroes marching for peace, it was corrupting the young, and so on. It wasn't just the Southern rednecks who hated rock. Reds hated it too. I never could understand why Pete Seeger got so pissy but I do now. I respected Seeger and felt he should do whatever he wants. If it's singing 'Tom Joad' for the umpteenth time, fine by me. But, he didn't feel the same way about me. He wanted to control and limit my art and career. He wanted me to be his clone. He wanted me to submit to the collective will. The whole folkie movement seemed like some crazy cult, like Scientology or the Moonies. It was pod people trying to make me a pod person. When I went electric, the folkies wanted to fry me in an electric chair. Seeger picked up an axe at Newport and maybe wanted to hack me to pieces.
Anyway, I wanted to grow and evolve. So, when I left the folk movement, I was not posing; if anything, it was the end of my posing and my real journey to self-discovery. I was confused and thrilled and curious about what I was and what my art could do; Godard was like this too in the early 60s when he wasn't so sure about politics or what cinema was capable of. We were seeking and searching; this was not posing.
I acted like an asshole during this period because the media and folkies came after me and kept demanding that I fit into some category, such as 'spokesman of his generation', 'protest singer', 'hippie prophet', 'pothead poet', and so on. I was just an artist trying to make great music was all I was. If anything, I was trying to end this myth-making factory which was the work of the media industry and stupid culture critics who tried to mold me in their ideals and image. I didn't want to be a mere 'hippie', 'radical', 'pothead', 'acidhead', 'mr. conscience'. And, I was certainly no Judas. I believe the worst thing an artist can do betray is himself, and I didn't want to betray myself. So, my 'asshole' period was to ward off all the mythologizers and mystifiers. Sure, I loved hanging with fashionable and hip people, loved drink and drugs, women and motorcycles, and all that fun living. But, I wasn't putting on anyone; I just wanted to be a personal artist who's looking for answers and searching for truth and beauty. But, people love labels. So, the new myth about me during 1965-1966 is that it was my 'asshole period'. If I acted like an asshole, it was because I got sick of all the people--real assholes--trying to tag me with myths I didn't care for.
Again, I only made up a few myths when I was a nobody wanting to be a somebody, and even those myths would have been noticeable as jokes and pranks with anyone with a sense of humor. It wasn't so much that I was trying to fool people as to pull their legs. It was the Marx Brothers in me. But, all those literal minded idiots took them seriously and so I got labeled as a compulsive liar ever since. Call me a compulsive joker and prankster, but don't call me a liar. If you're too dumb to know what is a joke or a tall tale, you're a dumbass. Calling me a liar is like calling Lenny Bruce a liar. Only a moron believes everything that shit literally.
So, I was no poseur. I changed with the times. So did everyone else. Take the king of rock n roll, Elvis Presley. Look at his many 'personas'. He was a mama's boy, a truckdriver, a country singer, a blues singer, a rock n roll star, army man, family man, hollywood star, the 68 comeback kid, karate man, nixon supporter, a las vegas act, shooter of black faces on the TV, gospel singer, fatass drug addict, and so on.
He changed as much as I. So did Lennon. In Liverpool, he was leatherjacketed hard rocker. His image was cleaned up under Epstein into lovable John. Then he was Jesus bashing John. Then he was acidhead John. Then he was avant garde John with Yoko. Then he was peacenik John. Then he was radical John. Then he was family man John. This is not really about 'personas' but about how a person really changes thru life. And, it's true of everyone. One's main passion or obsession in his teens aint the same in his 20s or in his 40s or 50s. But, generally speaking, it's during late teens and early twenties when one is most uncertain of what one is and seeks an identity and tries different ideas and attitudes--poses. I was no different. But, around the mid 20s, one's identity and values become more fixed. And, it's true with me. I really began to sober up in late 1966 when I was 25. I'd gone thru so much that I had to put my life in order. I was not into mythmaking. I didn't wanna do interviews. I just wanted to be left alone to be with my family and learn how to paint and make music with friends. It was the media and crazy fans who demanded that I put forth a simple image of myself or created all these false images of myself thru hearsay and rumor mongering--sometimes, I obliged by tossing some misleading info just to throw them off my track.
I didn't want all this mythmaking crap ever since I left the folk movement. Remember how Elvis was always told what to do by Colonel Parker. He didn't want to do all those dumb Hollywood movies but Parker insisted. As Elvis was raised to respect elders more than me, he went along but he felt real bitter. Well, I hated it when Seeger tried to pull a Colonel Parker on me. He wanted me to sing protest folk tunes on and on just like Elvis had to make all them stupid Hollywood movies, one after another. I was trying to be true to myself in personal life and trying to make good music for the fans. I didn't want fans to pry into my personal life or demand that I conform to their idea of me. If there was something about me that fans should know, that would come thru the music. It's like Kurosawa said his films are his biography; as for his personal life, that's none of anyone's business. I agree with those sentiments exactly.
Now, I read all these movie reviews--Hoberman, Edelstein, Ebert, Rosenbaum, etc--and, they all take it on faith that I was some pathological chameleon putting on masks to throw everyone off. Not true at all. Again, I only toyed with masks in my early career. Later, I was sincere in my passions though the passions changed--as such is the case with everyone.
Indeed, much of the misinformation about me was spread by others--like that garbologist who rummaged thru my trash. Or, endless articles in magazines speculating as to what I was up to. Or, books and more books by scholars who claim to understand my private soul thru my music and lyrics. For yrs and yrs, I aint said a thing but only made music, but the Dylan Mythmaking industry was going full throttle... and then blames ME for all these rumors and myths it made up itself.
Take one segment of the movie where Richard Gere plays me as Billy the Kid out to get Pat Garrett. This is ludicrous. For one thing, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was Peckinpah's obsession and movie, not mine. I was just asked to write a song--not very good I must admit--and do a minor cameo role. Yet, from Hayne's movie, you'd think the whole Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was my obsession, my idea, my doing, my vision. I had VERY LITTLE to do with the movie. The script was by Wurlitzer and the direction was by Peckinpah. I was interested in the West as you could tell from my John Wesley Harding, but the Pat Garrett movie was not my obsession in the 70s. I just tagged along for the ride. Maybe, Haynes is suggesting that my falling out with Albert Grossman was like the conflict between Patty and Billy, but that's a stretch. If anything, by the70s, I was more like Pat Garrett in a way. I was kinda weary and tired and wanted to peace and find stability as my domestic life was kinda turning sour. The Thunderroad Tour and album 'Desire' notwithstanding, I was not obsessing about outlaw as romantic.
Finally, I wanna ask why Haynes needed to make a movie about me when any other artist or entertainer could have served just as well for his theories on semiotics and signs and texts and whatever that's supposed to mean. He could have done this crap with Herman's Hermits, Fabian, Donovon, George Harrison, or Ringo? Or Billy Joel whose personas were truly bogus and ranged from imitating Paul Mcartney to Frankie Valli to myself. Why take on the life of a great artist like myself to make some academic point about how our pop culture works? What I'm saying is this: If you wanna do some target practice, why not use an old raggedy dime-a-dozen poster? Why take shots at the Mona Lisa? If you need to wipe your ass, why not use some old newspaper instead of the first edition of Catcher in the Rye? Wouldn't a raggedy old poster or newspaper serve just as well? The thing is this Haynes movie could have been about ANY pop star of the 60s as the movie is about 'signs and texts', not the original subject. He's not interested in me or my art. He's just interested in how the image/significance/meaning of an artist changes as filtered thru the media and popular consciousness and so on. If Haynes is interested in that process, why choose me? Why not Andy Gibb or Tiny Tim or Pee Wee Herman or Kevin Federline or Britney Spears or 50 cents or Menudo? As those guys and gals aren't much as artists, Haynes could have had his intellectual fun, critics could have played their games, and whatever truth about how our culture operates could have been exposed. So, why use me for this when anyone could have served just as well? "I'm Not There" is just an expensive remake of "The Karen Carpenter Story" with Dylan-as-sign substituted for Carpenter-as-sign with no interest or understanding for the real person(though what with Haynes's narcissistic ego, he may well think this is his version of Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew); this is stupid because if you make one movie about signs, you've made them all; all signs are just about the same and serve similar bogus and superficial interests or needs. Semio-pic is less interesting than bio-pic; if we focus on signs, Hitler becomes the little tramp, Mao becomes a T-shirt, and Gandhi and Lenin can both sell the same sodapop regardless of what they were REALLY about. If everyone is reduced the signs he can be made to signify anything. For example, as signs Monkees and the Beatles were interchangable--equally at the mercy of the media, hype, fans, critics, and etc--, and we'd never learn anything special or unique about one or the other; in fact, Monkees were the Beatles reduced to signs, but can you learn what was great about the Beatles thru the Monkees? Can you learn anything about me thru Haynes's monkeeing around? No.
Ultimately, what makes Beatles more interesting is their art, not their usefulness as signs or texts. This is also true of careers of the ex-Beatles. Lennon faded by 1975 as an object of cultural interest not because he was any less a sign or text but because his music began to suck. There are people who are little more than sign(s) of the time--consider the brief career of Tiny Tim--, but such novelty acts fade away. That which lasts lasts for a reason; that's what's interesting about me or any great artist, not the trivial signs attriubted to or around me. Haynes's gay sensibility is more interested in the signs and fashions I was dressed with--often against my wishes--than with the flesh-n-bone reality of my life and art. In Blade Runner, Batty wants to relate his inner soul as he 'dies'. Batty's true inner self would be fascinating, but Haynes is someone who'd only be interested in the punk haircut and leather jacket. At any rate, Batty is just a fictional character, but I've been a real flesh-n-bone person and soul-searching artist all my life. Haynes just sees me as a fictional character. This is what happens when all you do is watch too many movies and read too many pointless fancy academic books. The kind of books I read were deep, heavy, and solid stuff about history, art, and culture. But, most fashionable academics aren't into that stuff and only interested in 'signs'. Yes, it's so much easier to glide on the surface which is what signs are all about. If everything is reduced to signs, everything can be associated with everything. This is why capitalist hedonists think Che Guevara is cool when, in fact, Guevara would have locked them all up in forced labor camps. This is why Polish skinheads give Heil Hitler salutes when Hitler would killed the lot of them. This is why capitalist Chinese keep Mao images as tokens of good fortune;; these fools don't know history but only know signs and what those signs can be made to mean--which is just about anything. And, this is why our politics suck so bad because the media and hype have turned all candidates into superficial signs. What sucks about guys like Haynes is while they pretend to deconstruct these signs they don't wanna do anything but toy with signs. If Haynes had any balls, he would take down the signs and try--at least, try--to get to the real me and my real talent. There is no such attempt. He made this movie like the opening scene of Don't Look Back where I flash thru a series of word-signs. Now, I was just fooling and trying to be clever and it lasted only 3 minutes. Haynes goes on with schtick for over 2 hrs.
Just think about it. Jefferson Airplane--later Jefferson Starship—changed(“posed” with different personas) more than me; they went from 60s psychedelia to 70s glam rock and then to 80s new wave pop. And, what about Rod Stewart who went from Maggie May to If You Think I’m Sexy? And, remember the Grateful Dead went from blues to hippie psychedelia to country and so on. Many rock stars changed more than me; the only difference is people made more fuss about my changes. The simple fact is people grow. Spielberg who made Jaws wasn't Spielberg who made ET. And Spielberg who made ET wasn't the Spielberg who made Schindlers List. And, Spielberg of Schindler wasn't the Spielberg of AI. But, look deeper and there is a connective line between Jaws and AI. And, same goes for my career. If you look at the deeper soul of my art, you will see a connective link throughout all of my music. I've been a searcher. I searched thru politics, thru inner emotions, thru Christianity, thru Judaism, and I'm still searching.
And, people really gotta give me more credit. I could have made 100x more money in the late 60s if I wanted to. With the counterculture getting bigger and with millions of kids swapping their allowance money or burger flipping salaries for the latest rock album, I could have done the Beatles Love thing in 1967 and 68 and made tons of money. I could have cashed in on the whole movement which saw me as a prophet. If ever my property value was on the up-and-up, it was in the late 60s. But, I didn't take advantage of that. I wanted to be true to myself and I raised a family and learned how to paint. It was as if a real estate broker pulled out of the trade just when housing values were going sky high. I could have sold my intellectual property for tons of cash in the late 60s. I could have burped and kids would have flocked to hear it. But, what did I do? I got together with friends in my basement and tried to better understand the source of music which was rural. And, I returned to the source of my identity which was Jewish; you see, I took all them drugs to be hip and cool, but my inflated self-image imploded and made me come face-to-face with what I was--a small town Jew kid born of and loved by Jewish parents. I tried to be true. Yet, I get called a poseur pulling another stunt. Look, stunts are pulled for attention and money. I could have pulled stunts to make plenty of dough in the late 60s. The fact is I wanted to be me. It's like Daniel Day Lewis quitting acting and learning shoemaking in Italy. A stunt? No, he wanted regain his equilibrium. Similarly, I wanted to stand in my shoes and go my way.
Critics, in their own narcissism, may love Haynes because Haynes, like some of Godard, is less a filmmaker than a academic-as-filmmaker or auteur-as-critic. Haynes's cinema implies that film criticism is an higher calling than filmmaking. Haynes is more criteur than auteur. Now, I aint knocking the admirable profession of film criticism. Critics are leeches but they do suck out the bad blood. But, when art becomes criticism, it starts to suck. Art should be art; sure, art can be self-exploratory but it shouldn't be self-explanatory.
It seems to me that the ONLY reason to make a movie about me is to explore and express what made me so different from everyone else, what made me so great, so towering, so lasting, so everything under the sun. And, that cannot be discovered or knowed by some academic pseudo-intellectual tinkering and posturing. I aint learned a thing about Wittgenstein from Jarman's already forgotten movie, and aint no one gonna learn what was special about me or my art by watching this dumb Haynes movie. The Jarman movie was just about Jarman's narcissistic intellectualism and this movie is just Haynes stoking his own ego.
Now, some of you may say, 'well, Bobby, you created and used myths too'. Sure enough. For example, my song 'John Wesley Harding' was not about the real man but how historical figures become distorted by hearsay, legend, and myths. But, I was being organic and soulful and even a bit spiritual. I wrote that song in critique and in reverence of the strange and organic way culture evolves and gives us meaning; and it was poignant because in the old days--from which so much of myths sprang--there was no means of accurate communication or fact checking. This is not the case with the era in which I lived in. If you wanna find the facts about me, they are all there in a 1000 different books and articles; my myths have been busted long ago IF you want them busted; worse, no one gave a crap about me since the mid 70s. Treating me like John Wesley Harding is foolish because the times we lived in are so different. Harding became a myth because there was so little or no documentation, and his legend grew mouth to mouth, song to song, ear to ear among ignoramaouses and illiterates who needed tall tales and myths. In contrast, my 'myth' was created from too many articles, too many books, too many references, too many fact checks, too much documentation, and so on. They were de-mythifying me more than mythifying me, and if anything, the demythification led to bigger myths than the mythification--in this sense, Rosenbum is right that Haynes adds yet another layer of myth even as he pretends to demythify me. I always wanted to be left alone, but all these morons--Haynes included--keep making something of me that aint me. It's like they are pretending to be me, to know what I'm thinking. All I wanted was to make music and have people listen to my music. As for my private life, leave me alone and the hell with this dumb movie.
Haynes is being smartalecky, pseudo-intellectual, and a pain in the ass. In my public persona, I was sometimes aloof but just listen to my songs. I was for real, with real passion, real pain, real agony, real hopes, real beauty, real ugliness, real everything about what life is about. Haynes isn't for real. His Far From Heaven is bogus postmodernist twist on melodrama, his Karen Carpenter story is about personal tragedy exploited to score cheap ideological points, and this shit movie about me is to make Haynes feel superior to me and my fans. He seems to think he's better than me because he can play these games. I aint impressed. I was a clean cut kid but he made a joker out of me, that's what he did.
And, he lied to me. He explained this project just like a man. He made certain promises just like a man. He assured all was going fine just like a man. But, he make this movie just like a gay. Don't waste your money on this sham.
To sum it all up, this is what I mean:
It's no good to reduce people to signs because you end up with stupid shit. All this semiotics stuff is just an excuse for pseudo-intellectuals to justify their dereliction to duty when it comes to historical, moral, and spiritual truths. The rationalization goes, 'since nothing can be established as 100% true, everything is equally true-and-false'. But, who's kidding who? You know that these pseudo-intellectual types have no interest in anything other than pop culture and simply wanna reduce everything to pop level--all the while pretending to deconstruct and analyze these signs. In a sense, Haynes is worse than even South Parkers for whom history and politics are indistinguishable from Three Stooges or Sofia Coppola of Marie Antoinette where 18th century French history has been turned into Girls-Gone-Wild slumber party. Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Coppola don't try to justify their history-as-signs as intellectual exercises; they are just happy to be vapid and stupid. Haynes, on the other hands, pretends to be a thinker and can get away with it because there are so many critics with the same sensibility and conceits. It sucks that Rosenbaum would fall for this shit. Didn't he once review a Chinese movie called "Blue Kite" and praised it because it showed that 'history happens'. In other words, here was a movie that achingly and courageously searched for truth. As it was made in authoritarian China, it couldn't tell the whole truth but it tried to get at some personal and historical truth. But now, he's lavishing all this praise on this crap movie which has no use for history or real people and says, 'history happens to be whatEVER!' What is better? Rohmer's "Lady and the Duke" or "Marie Antoinette". Now, I aint saying Rohmer's movie is the truth or the only truth, but the man was obviously emotionally and morally involved in the period of the French Revolution; he is giving us one truth. I'd say the same for Barry Lyndon by Kubrick. But, Marie Antoinette is just crap; it's a Lizzie Macguire movie as art film. Some folks might say "I'm Not There" is like "Citizen Kane" or "Rashomon", but again the difference is Welles and Kurosawa were interested in truth or the nature of truth even as the truth was elusive whereas Haynes is content with myths when the facts are already there and well-established. It's one thing to not know something but quite another to know it but pretend otherwise. And, the myths about me in the movie are not even genuine Dylan myths. So, the movie isn't even about the myths that came to surround me but Haynes's own twist on those myths or myths created for this movie. Me as Billy out to kill Garrett? What is that? And, what does this mean for the future of cinema? Some Haynes imitator making a movie about the Beatles as space aliens out to conquer the planet? Or, how about a movie about the Grateful Dead where Garcia is portrayed as the resurrection of Jesus? Now, I can see the satiric aspect of such playing around, but Haynes's myths aren't meant to be satire but intellectual thought. And, it's piss poor. In West Berlin, people said tear down the Wall. It's about time we shout 'tear down the signs'.
Remember when people were saying 'Paul is dead'. The real Paul was very much alive and making his best music, but he was supposedly dead because Lennon sang 'I buried Paul' in "Strawberry Fields Forever" when it was 'cranberry sauce'. This is what I mean. Cranberry sauce suddenly meant Paul is dead. And, if Paul-as-sign is dead, then Elvis-as-sign is alive working in a CIA-fronted diner jointly managed by Lee-Harvey-Oswald-and-Jack-Ruby-as-signs. And, this movie is stupid no less. Because I was drug-addled and excessive in the mid 60s, Haynes bunches me with rock stars who were more excessive and croaked. But, that wasn't me. If you reduce me to a sign--that of excessively partying rocker of the 60s--, I become interchangable with the rest. Wouldn't it be more interesting to see me as an individual capable of change and evolution? You see, people evolve and grow; they don't just turn from one sign to another, like the changing labels for sodapop or candy bars. Of course, people who don't know the personal me would only hear about the 'new' dylan and assume I went from one mask to another. What they fail to see is the evolution of my soul, my feelings, my values, and my priorities. A true artist understands and accepts this capacity and necessity for change. Haynes is too shallow to understand that. He only gazes at the changing surfaces and says that I went from one mask to another. In fact, the changes of my 'persona' were a reflection of deeper changes within my soul. Take the seasons. Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring. If you only deal with photos of each at its height, you'd think the world is schizo and playing some kind of game. How did bright green summer turn to cold dark winter? If you wanna understand the seasons, you gotta see the evolution of summer to autumn, evolution of autumn to winter, and so on. That's what's interesting, and that's what my greatest music is about. It's about change, the pain of change, the capacity for realization and illumination. It's not simply about love or happiness or hatred or one thing or another. It's about how love co-exists with hate, how hate grows to forgiveness, how this turns to that, and that reverts to this; in many of my love songs, there is love, anger, rage, hatred, realization, compromise, and so on; they are more like mini-art films than pop songs. My songs don't just state a simple emotion but show nothing remains the same. This is why some of my songs are longer than most. I composed songs as richly textured and multi-faceted as the music of Sibelius whom I admired greatly. Much of Blonde on Blonde was based on the works of Sibelius and Mahler. Symphonies are long and textured enough to present more than one emotion or perspective. There are several melodies flowing and threading thru one another thru layers of harmony to create a rich, contradictory, and overlapping fabric. And, Mahler and Sibelius weren't doing this to be smartass intellectual but to express their deep inner selves ranging from tormented hells to blissful heavens. Yet, you don't get any sense of this in Haynes's movie about my life and art. Instead of working on me as Rembrant or even Picasso--who was very deep and powerful--might work with a given material, Haynes uses me like Warhol used whatever caught his fancy. I hung around the Factory and partied and toked with the best and worst of them, but my interest was with real stuff by which I mean the great artworks of history, great classical literature, and that stuff. People say I was a poseur but I was more like an opposeur, and I wasn't just opposing the squares but the hipsters who thought they were too good for traditional culture and deep mysterious stuff. (Folkies will say they were into traditional culture, but I disagree because they didn't love tradition as tradition but merely as a tool for crapping on the so-called establishment. They were acting like 19th century yokels to create an industrial utopia of drably clothed workers reciting Marxist dogma). My hipsterism wasn't just to snub the squares but to ward off the hipsters for whom histperishness was the ONLY meaning of life. They didn't care for classical music and Ancient Greek literature and the Bible like I did. I was an hipster in the way that Yojimbo was a killer in the Kurosawa movie. Yojimbo used murderousness to beat the murderers. And, I used hipsterishness to beat the hipsters who got on my nerves, being so predictable and all.
What's interesting is how unique and different I was from the others. One must ask what made Camus different from Sartre. What made Lennon different from McCartney? What made Van Morrison different from Mick Jagger? Those are the really challenging, deep, and interesting questions, not reducing us to a bunch of signs whereupon anyone can become anyone. (Would you be more interested to learn about other cultures for real or just stick with exoticist signs created by Hollywood movies? I'd rather learn some real stuff about geisha than watch that dumb movie by Rob Marshall. Of course, you could argue that all traditional cultures developed from misunderstanding and misinterpretation of 'signs' as well, but that was genuine and organic misunderstanding whereas hyper post-modern stuff is knowingly 'ignorant' of facts and stubbornly insists on dealing with falsity it knows to be false. When the tales of John Wesley Harding spread in the West, people really believed that stuff because they didn't know any better. Haynes knows better but pretends not to so as to have fun with signs. Or, maybe he's pretending to know better than knowing better in the sense that ALL knowledge--even verified facts--are simply just another batch of signs. This shit's so crazy I'm more confused than Mr. Jones). In this movie, I'm just a Dylan doll--like a Barbie Doll--that Haynes can dress and undress, stick a wiener on and off, change the color of the hair, and so on. If I may speculate, I think Haynes as a child wanted to play with girlie dolls but got only toy guns for Christmas. So, his career has been compensating for his frustrated childhood. Since he wasn't allowed to play with Barbie Dolls as a child, he's making Barbie Doll movies. This movie aint about Bobby Dylan but Barbie Dylan. Of course, Haynes has to disguise his secret childhood doll fetish with intellectual pretensions so that people won't laugh at him.
It's the same with all these film buffs who are really immature folks who just wanna watch movies and more movies; that's pretty pathetic for a grown-up, so they pretend to be all intellectual and stuff. This shit doesn't fool no one.
Cate Blanchett playing me is just a Barbie Doll dressed up in Ken's clothes. It's embarassing what Haynes done to my image. If he ever makes a movie about Jodi Mitchell, I bet some guy will play her. Is this what passes for 'brilliant' these days?
All these filmmakers and critics don't care about reality. Their entire lives are about watching movies and reading essays and all that fancy stuff. They only see reality thru such prism. They go even further and say reality is nothing but signs. Aint this based on some stupid French theory? This is the reason why so many 60s radicals can never give up the stupid cause. In reality, political radicalism was just a lot of crap, but you can deny all that if you deal with signs and symbols; as a bunch of signs, history is whatever you make it based on the signs and slogans you prefer. This is why there's so much amnesia. This is true of the Right too, and their funny myths and signs and symbols. You'd think American history is mostly baking apple pies and Norman Rockwell thanksgiving dinners. Yes, signs have a powerful hold on us, but there is a reality and there is life. You can make a bunch of signs about your mother but if she's dead, she's dead. Toying with signs don't make her alive. Maybe our signs have come to be so realistic--cinema and digital video and sound recording with a push of a button--that we really confuse signs for reality. Just turn on a movie and guess what? Some movie star who died many decades ago is alive on the screen in pristine form. We can lose ourselves in signs to a greater extent than ever before; we don't even have to decode signs thru imagination; seeing is believing, and with newer technology the signs we see are indistinguishable from reality. We almost can't even identify them as signs anymore.
All this sign stuff can be pretty trippy, but it's a deadend. Remember in the 60s how people used to take all them drugs and were more into mind probing mind than mind probing matter. All this 'sign and text' business seems like so much academic tripping. It's art probing art, and though it's nothing new it's gotten more flaky and pseudo-intellectual in the postmodern age. And, this movie is just another deadend. This is just one more Godardian stuff which got tiresome after awhile. It's worse because it's Godard turned into MTV. Everything--culure and counterculture--has been synergized and synthesized into soda-parlour games.
But, maybe the thinking on the part of Haynes and his pals is, if you make ME the subject of such film more people will see an 'avant garde' film. Yeah, Godard used this tactic too when he made a movie with the Rolling Stones. He figured more people will see it just for the Stones. And, Haynes probably thinks people who aren't into avant garde cinema will see this movie because it's about me; they'll be 'forced' to appreciate avantgardeness in their hopes of seeing a movie about me. Sunday Schools do the same thing by telling kids that you might win a pet alligator if you come to service; you see how they try to slip in Jesus thru the backdoor? I'm the alligator in this equation. Alligator and Jesus, Dylan and Semiotics.
Remember how Woody Allen's films were regarded as the bridge between American populism and European elitism? For those who couldn't sit thru a Antonioni, Bergman, or even a Fellini, there was Allen. And, for those who can't sit thru a Godard, there is a Haynes. I suspect Rosenbaum is praising this movie for mercenary reasons; he figures more young ones will be led into the avant garde camp thru the backdoor via this movie. They'll come to see a movie about Dylan but develop a taste for avant gardism. They come with a mindful of mush and leave thinking like geeks.
I shoulda had Scorsese, Spielberg, Fincher, or Linklater make a movie about me--Linklater most of all. That dude can be hip and experimental, but he's also flesh-n-blood artist and no smartass like Haynes. It probably has something to do with the fact that Linklater, like me, is pretty much self-taught instead of getting his learning from an ivory tower environment ruled by intellectual robots. I learned and read organically. As you discover in my book "Chronicles", I lounged in some basement or private library and read and read. And, I loved them thick, juicy, manly stuff like ancient greeks, biographers of great men, and historical and philosophical topics. Those 'dead white males'--most of them anyway--had balls, vision, weight, depth, nobility, maturity, dignity, and soul; to be sure, many were assholes but assholes with gravitas. All these modern intellectual types are mostly spoiled brats from suburbs or urban privilege who think they are so smart and intellectual because they were teacher's pets at a high priced university.
The more I read and more I learned from reading them old books, the more I came to respect all of history and appreciate and ponder all its richness, contradictions, and mysteries. But, today's academics and intellectuals aint full of nothing but conceit. They don't understand the meaning of organic richness and mystery. They only know words like 'misogynist' with which I've been tagged because I didn't encourage Sara to burn her bras.
Personally, I think RAY and WALK THE LINE were too conventional though well-made. So, maybe a movie about me should be different. A fine example of what-might-have-been is the Bobby Darin movie with Kevin Spacey. Many stupid critics dismissed it as conventional and bland when it was one of the most brilliant, subtle, and sly biopics ever made. Now, that movie deals with the many identities, the myths, and the real facts of Darrin. It's great because it could be mistaken for a straight movie when there's much more happening. The Darrin we see is both sympathetic and pathetic, idealistic and idiotic. We see him at various stages, at various levels. and from various angles. His life is a fantasy and fantasy is his life. It gets really weird when his mother turns out to be his grandmother and his mother turns out to be sister. You see, reality is stranger than fiction. This guy's been fabricating a career for himself, but his personal history had been fabricated too--for his benefit AND at his expense. He wants to be a pop star and a political advocate and finds a way to do both which is, at once, compelling inner tragedies and triumphs. Haynes's movie is only about what meets the eye. That's so gay.
Anyway, I aint seen this movie yet but don't need to in order to tell you how bogus it is. It's all a conspiracy, all these movie makers and all these fancypants critics.
Full Metal Disclaimer: "Is that you, Bob Dylan?" "Is this me?"
