Tearing the World Apart

Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

Nina Goss, Eric Hoffman

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781496813329
• eBook ISBN: 9781496813336
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Contributions by Alberto Brodesco, James Cody, Andrea Cossu, Anne Margaret Daniel, Jesper Doolard, Nina Goss, Jonathan Hodgers, Jamie Lorentzen, Fahri Öz, Nick Smart, and Thad Williamson Bob Dylan is many things to many people. Folk prodigy. Rock poet. Quiet gentleman. Dionysian impresario. Cotton Mather. Stage hog. Each of these Dylan creations comes with its own accessories, including a costume, a hairstyle, a voice, a lyrical register, a metaphysics, an audience, and a library of commentary. Each Bob Dylan joins a collective cast that has made up his persona for over fifty years. No version of Dylan turns out uncomplicated, but the postmillennial manifestation seems peculiarly contrary—a tireless and enterprising antiquarian; a creator of singular texts and sounds through promiscuous poaching; an artist of innovation and uncanny renewal. This is a Dylan of persistent surrender from and engagement with a world he perceives as broken and enduring, addressing us from a past that is lost and yet forever present. Tearing the World Apart participates in the creation of the postmillennial Bob Dylan by exploring three central records of the twenty-first century—" Love and Theft" (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest (2012)—along with the 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan helped write and in which he appears as an actor and musical performer. The collection of essays does justice to this difficult Bob Dylan by examining his method and effects through a disparate set of viewpoints. Readers will find a variety of critical contexts and cultural perspectives as well as a range of experiences as members of Dylan's audience. The essays in Tearing the World Apart illuminate, as a prism might, their intransigent subject from enticing and intersecting angles.

CHAPTER
ONE

VISIONS OF THE FLOOD: MASKED AND ANONYMOUS BETWEEN “LOVE AND THEFT” AND MODERN TIMES

Alberto Brodesco

ALIAS

In a bar, somewhere in the United States, Bob Dylan and his band are playing a Bob Dylan song, “Down in the Flood (Crash on the Levee)” (1967). We are not watching a YouTube clip, a documentary, or a filmed concert but a feature film, Masked and Anonymous, co-written by Bob Dylan and director Larry Charles. In the film, the singer’s name is not Bob Dylan but Jack Fate. Tony Garnier, Larry Campbell, Charlie Sexton, and George Recile (Dylan’s 2003 touring band) are introduced as the Simple Twists of Fate, a Jack Fate cover band that Fate himself joins on stage. Moreover, the bar is geographically in the United States, yet the America in this film’s narrative is a very different place, a merciless dictatorship. As writer and actor Bob Dylan can play two of his favorite games: assume a mask and shadowbox with an alias; and, continuing to skip from the real world to an imaginary one, portray a world bound for apocalypse.

The plot follows a has-been singer, Jack Fate, freed from prison by promoter Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) to hold a music performance intended for a nationwide broadcast. The concert is set up for the benefit of the orphans of the opposing riots of governmental, revolutionary, and counterrevolutionary forces that are devastating the country in a civil war. Fate is the rejected son of the country’s president-dictator. Fate was in prison because many years before he was caught in bed with his father’s mistress. The long-ill president dies at the precise moment when Fate starts to sing the first and subsequently only song of the benefit concert. The president will be succeeded in power by the wicked, Shakespearean-named Edmund (Mickey Rourke), who immediately gives a terrifying speech whose broadcast obscures the concert’s transmission.¹ The television screen goes blank. A gang of government thugs bursts into the studio to stop the music. Accused of the murder of a journalist, Fate is led back to jail.

Jack Fate both is and is not Bob Dylan. He is not because he has a different name and because in the film’s diegetic universe a rock star named “Bob Dylan” does not exist (while Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and others are named). At the same time Fate is Bob Dylan: the character is played by Bob Dylan, sings Dylan’s songs, and plays with Dylan’s band. Furthermore, the depiction of Jack Fate as a washed-out star is evidently tailored on Dylan’s career and personal idiosyncrasies. These involve some of the most common charges addressed to Dylan’s artistic choices and ideological turns. Journalist Tom Friend (Jeff Bridges) asks: “You remember Hendrix at Woodstock? I’m just curious, you weren’t there were you?”—an allusion to Dylan’s absence from the Woodstock stage in the summer of 1969.² In Masked and Anonymous, the journalist—a profession often seen with distrust by Dylan—plays the part of the evil character. The assistant to Fate’s manager, Nina (Jessica Lange), tells Uncle Sweetheart: “Are his songs going to be recognizable? That’s what I want to know”—a reference to the alleged difficulty to spot the songs rewritten live by Bob Dylan on his so-called Never Ending Tour (1988–present). Sweetheart’s reply works as an ironic self-defense for Dylan himself: “All of his songs are recognizable, even if they are not recognizable.” Also, the scene in which a mother approaches Fate and tells him “my daughter has memorized all of your songs” seems to portray Bob Dylan’s daily nightmare when on tour, with obsessed fans willing to show him their love and blind devotion. Fate asks: “Is that so? Why’d she do that?” The honest but lamentable answer is “’Cause I made her, that’s why.” The interpretation of Fate’s song lyrics is also essentially a Bob Dylan auto-exegesis. Listening to “Drifter’s Escape” (1967), Tom Friend’s lover, Pagan Lace (Penelope Cruz), comments: “I love his songs ’cause they’re not precise. They’re emotionally ambiguous. Nobody else will do that. They invite different interpretations.” Even Uncle Sweetheart proposes his reading of “Drifter’s Escape”: “What strikes you about the song is the Jekyll and Hyde quality.”

Jack Fate is doubtlessly Dylan’s alias. Leaving aside concert footage and filmed interviews, Bob Dylan’s cinematographic presences involve a disguised self-portrait: either in documentaries: Dont Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker, 1967), Eat the Document (Bob Dylan, 1972); in fiction: Hearts of Fire (Richard Marquand, 1984), Catchfire (Alan Smithee [Dennis Hopper], 1990), Dharma & Greg episode “Play Lady Play” (1999); or in documentary-fiction: Renaldo and Clara (Bob Dylan, 1978).³ Even an “expository documentary”⁴ like Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home communicates the idea of an unachievable portrait: facts, witnesses, interviews, concert footage are just pieces of a broken mirror. In Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Dylan plays the role of an outsider in Billy’s gang. Here is the dialogue between Dylan and two other gang members when his character is introduced:

GANG MEMBER ONE: —What’s your name, boy?

ALIAS: —Alias.

GANG MEMBER ONE: —Alias what?

ALIAS: —Alias anything you please.

GANG MEMBER ONE: —What do we call you?

ALIAS: —Alias …

GANG MEMBER TWO: —Hell, let’s call him Alias.

ALIAS: —That’s what I’d do.

GANG MEMBER ONE: —Alias it is.

Dylan seems to use cinema to play hide-and-seek with his multiple identities. In front of the request for truth made by the film medium, all that Dylan can do is wear a mask. Questioned about his participation in Hearts of Fire, he confirmed how problematic he finds the referential nature of the photographic medium, the ontological connection between the sign and the represented object: “When I asked, ‘What am I supposed to do in this scene?’ the director would say, ‘Just be yourself.’ Then I’d have to think, ‘Which one?’ Nobody ever explained it to me.”⁵ Surrendering to the multiplicity of Dylan’s identities characterizes Todd Haynes’s anti-biopic I’m Not There, where the character of Bob Dylan is interpreted by six different actors, including an African American boy and a woman (Cate Blanchett).

Masked and Anonymous certainly does not mark a peak in Bob Dylan’s long artistic journey. Precisely set between “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, however, it is an important key to understanding his commitment and intention in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Like the two albums, the film is built on lyrical images, trademarks, obsessions, counterpositions, remote visions, and narrative dead ends.⁶ Also in the film are plenty of what Dylan calls “appropriations”⁷ from a large spectrum of sources. Intertextuality is indeed a major attribute of Bob Dylan’s work, particularly from “Love and Theft” onward. Masked and Anonymous’s references go from the speeches of US presidents (John Quincy Adams; Andrew Jackson’s Farewell Address)⁸ to novels (Naked Lunch by William Burroughs; The Big Money by John Dos Passos; The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen; Death Is My Dancing Partner by Cornell Woolrich; Moon Palace by Paul Auster),⁹ plays (Agamemnon by Aeschylus, Easter by August Strindberg),¹⁰ sports books (Ball Four by Jim Bouton),¹¹ and religious texts (the Gospel of Matthew; Letter to Donatus concerning God’s grace by Saint Cyprian).¹²

As I have already mentioned, the film also permits Dylan to dedicate space to one of his favorite topics. If Masked and Anonymous is, as many critics have noted, a Bob Dylan song in film form,¹³ it is certainly an “apocalypse song,” a sort of sub-genre in Dylan’s songwriting at least since “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963).¹⁴ As David Janssen and Edward Whitelock write, “apocalypse is Dylan’s muse.… Apocalyptic aesthetic … is perhaps the defining element of both the content and style of Dylan’s own songs.”¹⁵ In “Love and Theft” and Modern Times we hear allusions to the end of time in “Mississippi,” “High Water (For Charley Patton),” “Sugar Baby,” “Thunder on the Mountain,” “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” and “Ain’t Talkin’,” songs filled with figures of inundations, deluges, thunders, skies on fire, and blowing horns. All of these signs are intended as warning messages from Nature or God. Masked and Anonymous is a bridge between the two albums and a lightning rod for Dylan’s apocalyptic obsession.

DOWN IN THE FLOOD

Joining the Simple Twists on stage, Jack Fate picks up the guitar and sings these verses: “Crash on the levee, water’s gonna overflow / Swamp’s gonna rise, no boat’s gonna row.”¹⁶ Two years before the production of Masked and Anonymous, Bob Dylan recorded for “Love and Theft” “High Water (For Charley Patton),” another song about the flood. A few years later, in Modern Times, we find one more major water problem in “The Levee’s Gonna Break”—a kind of remake of “Down in the Flood.” Floods are prominent in the musical culture of the American South. The image, which has obvious similarities with the Genesis deluge, allows Dylan to cross and condense references to black music and the biblical tradition.¹⁷

The first song performed in Masked and Anonymous sets the frame for the whole film, inscribed in an apocalyptic outline. Most of the songs featured in the movie come from the apocalyptic repertoire. Other than “Down in the Flood,” Jack Fate sings, at the film’s climax, “Cold Irons Bound” (1997). The apocalyptic playlist on the soundtrack also includes the condemned land mentioned in “Blind Willie McTell” (recorded 1983; released 1991), the black shadows of “Not Dark Yet” (1997), the mysterious valley below of Sertab Erener’s cover of “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)” (1976), and the road to Armageddon in Jerry Garcia’s cover of “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” (1978).

If the apocalypse can be evoked in songs by a few inflamed, biblical lyrics, a film has to face the difficulty of visually creating this same imagery. As Bob Dylan himself said about Masked and Anonymous ten years after its release, “whatever vision I had for that movie, that never could’ve carried to the screen.”¹⁸ What can be portrayed in a film is instead the descent toward the apocalypse. This is the domain of dystopian fiction. Masked and Anonymous does not literally show the apocalypse, yet is set in a dystopian country and depicts a political world and its distortions. Like all dystopian narratives, it assumes the ethical role of a warning: to avoid ending up like that in the future we have to take action to modify our present. Dystopia can be read a contrario as the only possible manifestation of utopia in contemporary society.¹⁹ Dystopian literature and art focus on possible futures, faraway planets, afterlife visions. In these representations the reader or viewer is invited to find possibilities of resistance to the apparently inexorable progression that leads to the apocalypse.

In Masked and Anonymous we hear the following news on the radio: “Geologists in Trenton are digging the world’s deepest hole and have reached the depth of thirty miles. Scientists have measured the temperature down there as up to 3,000 degrees. They have lowered microphones into the pit and heard the sound of millions of suffering souls.” In the world of Masked and Anonymous Hell is a real place, whose existence is confirmed by science. This allusion works as a mise en abyme, a small insert that has a relation of similarity with the larger text in which it is embedded.²⁰ This radio-announced Hell recalls Masked and Anonymous’s dystopia. The shocking news on the radio, however, is received with general indifference. Even the scientific proof of the existence of Hell is not enough to produce a change in human behavior. Given that the insert en abyme summarizes the whole text, the capacity of dystopian art to awaken people’s consciousness is therefore radically questioned. If the existence of Hell cannot affect people, neither will dystopian fiction. This nihilism, we may add, can be attacked only by an apolitical or a different political approach to history and social change.

HISTORY, DYSTOPIA, SMITHSVILLE

“If I know nothing else, I know at least one thing is true: that the sacred is in the ordinary, the common things in life.” In Masked and Anonymous Jack Fate’s voice-over mumbles presumed great thoughts in a very naïve way. Such candor makes Masked and Anonymous a particularly revealing work. Dystopia is presented as a consequence of the distance we took from “the sacred … in the ordinary.” The return to roots, the ideal of simple living is a recurrent theme of Bob Dylan by the time of “Love and Theft” and Modern Times.²¹ Nonetheless, the memory of the past is not a nostalgic experiment but expresses “the necessity to find an acceptable perspective in front of reality”;²² it is the logical product of Dylan’s career-long devotion to American folk, country, and blues tradition, the cultural heritage in which Dylan retrieves the sense of sacred for which he longs.²³

The confrontation between dystopia and musical tradition is represented in Masked and Anonymous with essential traits. In the film we eventually witness an encounter of three different universes that coexist, overlap, and superimpose each other. The first universe is the domain of history: Masked and Anonymous makes reference to historical events like Woodstock and historical figures like Richard Nixon or Bruce Springsteen, while on the soundtrack we hear songs written by the real-life Bob Dylan. The second universe is the dystopian/apocalyptic one, depicting a country in war, ruled by a president-dictator. In this world Jack Fate (not Bob Dylan) is a well-known rock star. The third universe is an imaginary or mythical one, this time not dystopian but utopian. We could call it, following Greil Marcus, “Smithsville,” the “Invisible Republic” captured and created by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952): “What is Smithsville? It is a small town whos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One Visions of the Flood: Masked and Anonymous between “Love and Theft” and Modern Times
• Chapter Two Dylan’s Together Through Life: Rolling in Places
• Chapter Three Down the Foggy Ruins of Time: Bob Dylan and the Performance of Timelessness
• Chapter Four Tempest, Bob Dylan, and the Bardic Arts
• Chapter Five You Can’t Repeat the Past? Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft” and the Events of 9/11
• Chapter Six A Sudden Blow: The Story of Violence in “Love and Theft” and Modern Times
• Chapter Seven Narrative in “Love and Theft,” Modern Times, and Tempest
• Chapter Eight Dylan’s Direction Home through the World’s Mighty Opposites
• Chapter Nine Performative Lyric Voice and the Refrain as an Architectonic Element in Bob Dylan
• Chapter Ten The Last Bob Dylan Record
• Chapter Eleven “Everybody Got to Wonder What’s the Matter with This Cruel World Today”: Social Consciousness and Political Commentary in “Love and Theft” and Modern Times
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index