Bob's Not All There

I'm not frantic to see Todd Haynes' mystical/mythical movie on Dylan, with Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett, and Heath Ledger portraying Zimmerman at various points in his life, but in the meantime, the wonderful soundtrack to I'm Not There will serve as a placeholder. What irks me is the number of movie reviews that generate the mythical image of Dylan, in which each act is loaded with layers of hidden meaning.

This is why I find David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street book on Dylan's life with Baez, Farina, et. al. to be far more interesting. Hajdu raises the legitimate complaint that Dylan acted like a prick to Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and others, because he had a very calculated sense of what he wanted to do. That calculation, sometimes with a rather superficial intent, has remained in place throughout his career. Right now, Dylan is not touring the state-fair circuit with Willie Nelson in some mystical effort to dissect Americana. He's touring middle America to milk an audience who loves to hear All Along the Watchtower from the dastardly caballero with the pencil-thin moustache. Not that much different from the Eagles doing a sales exclusive at Wal-Mart, really.

Don't get me wrong, I am neither condemning Dylan as a sellout nor dismissing his act as worthless. His calculation is as self-evident as Woody Guthrie's, when Woody chose to do the American hobo trip with a wife who gave up Martha Graham's dance company for folk-dancing. Dylan was brilliant in the political talking-blues period, in the hallucinogenic Blonde on Blonde period, and even tolerable in the Self-Portrait and Christian periods. But many of our cultural icons choose to make calculated shifts in image in a very transparent way. We can point to Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Norman Mailer, and thousands of others (to say nothing of every punk-rocker and every poseur). To be truly mystical in personas, one must dance on the edge of total madness like Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. Anything else is just calculated marketing. Critics who put artists on pedestals and treat calculated images as mysticism do no one a favor. We do not need icons to be puffed up to several times larger than life.