Behind the Masks

Director Todd Haynes on his unorthodox approach to I'm Not There.

by Sam Adams

Like his movie I'm Not There, Todd Haynes moves fast, slipping from thought to thought, sketching the outline of provocative ideas and leaving his audience to fill them in. When we first talked about I'm Not There, it was in the midst of a publicity blitz at the Toronto Film Festival, and Haynes apologized for his "punchiness." Two months later, in Philadelphia, Haynes was better rested but no less energized, sentences spilling out too fast for him to complete all of them.

When Haynes sent Bob Dylan a one-page outline of the approach he might take to exploring his life and work, he titled it, "Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan," and in some ways the description still fits. I'm Not There makes no pretensions at being a comprehensive portrait or exhaustive analysis. Splitting its subject into six different characters, each the star of his (or her) own miniature film, the movie embarks on a voyage of discovery while proclaiming at the outset that Dylan's terrain can never fully be mapped.

"The movie makes it very clear it's not literal," Haynes says. "When we start with a black boy called Woody Guthrie, the tenor of it is already playful. It's going to distort myths, but all movies do that. The difference is we let you in on the joke." Haynes mixes incidents recognizably taken from Dylan's life with quasi-mythic events and even outright falsehoods. The Dylan who went into rural exile following his near-fatal motorcycle crash (whose seriousness is itself the subject of much biographical debate) is represented by Richard Gere's Billy the Kid, who takes up residence in the town of Riddle, which Dylan's predecessor Woody Guthrie claimed as the origin of his own invented life story. (Billy the Kid himself was rumored to have staged his own death, a myth Haynes points out was so persistent that his body was exhumed several years ago.) Ideally, Haynes says, "You would suspect all of it of being semi-constructed and semi-real at the same time."

While I'm Not There makes a handful of on-the-nose references — when a groupie knocks out a violently disagreeable fan, Cate Blanchett's Dylan doppelganger Jude Quinn deadpans, "Just like a woman" — its reference points tend more toward obscurities and outright arcana (or unrelated sources, like Fellini's 8 1/2). The quasi-direct cinema of the mid-'60s scenes owes less to D.A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back than to his unreleased follow-up, Eat the Document. Haynes doesn't shy away from the canonical Dylan, particularly on the soundtrack — he proudly notes that he found a place for both "Visions of Johanna" and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" — but for reasons both personal and strategic, he found himself drawn toward the less-explored corners of Dylan's documentation.

"The lesser-known stuff erupts more freshly in my mind than something that I might have felt when I first heard Highway 61 Revisited," Haynes says. "But something gets worn out. It's almost like the strategy for casting a woman as Jude. It's something that makes it seem alive again, and authentically scary or strange, in ways that how well known those images of Dylan are has long since drained."

In the 40-plus years since his first record, Dylan has become part of the classic-rock canon, and "hence, as dead as you can get," Haynes says. I'm Not There's radical approach is dictated in large part by a desire to remind a new generation just how revolutionary, and how plain odd, Dylan's work was and is.

"My private pact with myself was to make it my mission to reveal the genuine weirdness of Dylan," Haynes says. "Because it's true for anything that's become the Great Thing — the blood and guts, the risk, the radical shock of it is gone. And yet it wouldn't have been the Great Thing had it not risked something tremendous at the time, and usually brought shock and shuddering in its day."

What's more, Dylan reinvented the form while scaling the charts: making "art on the jukebox," as the film's Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) puts it. Cribbing slightly from The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus' study of Dylan's Basement Tapes, Haynes posits Dylan as a "truly American artist," whose art reveals that being American is, and always has been, far more complicated, complex and multifaceted than some current guardians of the culture would have us believe.

"At the time, he had a popular touch that translated his views to a very pop level," Haynes says. "Dylan was not necessarily thinking of himself as a sort of marketing device of external changes or fashionable appropriations, but as a sort of conduit of that whole tradition of American music which is one of absorbing disparate influences from regional and black music, from Appalachian music, from European traditions, and continuing to evolve the musical form. So he becomes, just in his physical and stylistic changes, this constant parallel to the American tradition of masks and reinvention."

Haynes points out that, despite being in the public eye for nearly half a century, Dylan has been astonishingly successful in keeping his personal life shrouded in "the veil of the inscrutable." Even many of Dylan's fans couldn't tell you how many times he's been married, or how many children he's had. "What does the average person know about Dylan?" Haynes asks. "He knows he went electric and people got upset. He knows he changed. But then, what do any of us know about Dylan?"

Dylan's refusal to remain static, to reinvent himself even at the cost of abandoning his position as a spokesman for the civil rights movement, provoked intense anger from those who felt he had betrayed the cause. But Haynes sees a gesture toward a deeper form of freedom, one that has ultimately proved more lasting. "If fascism is about consolidating power at every level, and if the American system is one that always tries to challenge the consolidation of power — although we're in a pretty rough patch right now — then simply proposing freedom as a refusal of identity and being fixed is something profound," Haynes says.

A former student of semiotics, Haynes believes that radical change is always a matter of form, and not content. "That's where art can change things, when the form changes," he says. "When the content changes, that tells you what it thinks on the surface, that's not how it works. Sometimes the most overly political works might be the least effective or meaningful."

It's possible to draw an analogy between Dylan's turn away from traditionally constructed protest anthems to the explosion of New Queer Cinema in the early 1990s, as films like Haynes' Poison and Tom Kalin's Swoon took the place of conventionally assembled gay weepies like Parting Glances and Longtime Companion. Haynes himself had an activist background, but Poison's interwoven triptych, combining elements of Jean Genet's novels, '50s horror movies and a surreal mock documentary, was hardly the kind of thing to convince mainstream American that gays and lesbians were "just like us." Haynes' movie attracted its own controversy, though less from his comrades than from the culture wars' advance guard, who attacked him for having made a "pornographic" movie with public funds.

Haynes shies away from the parallel at first, not wanting to compare himself to Dylan. But he warms to the idea as he tosses it around. Like Dylan's folkie critics, who were incapable of understanding what he was doing but correctly inferred that it threatened to make them obsolete, so the conservatives who attacked Poison for a few seconds of male nudity were "right for the wrong reasons."

"To be honest," Haynes says, Poison "really did have a kind of sinister glamour, a la Genet, in trying to find some regenerative property in transgressive behavior. That should upset people, even if the film wasn't pornographic. So something was infusing the argument that was probably accurate, or fair."

"There was a political necessity that made New Queer Cinema happen" at the height of the AIDS crisis, Haynes points out. "Yet what was really interesting about it, and what made me proud to be part of it, was that the work that was coming out was finding new ways of telling stories, and challenging the narrative language, and hopefully broadening things about filmmaking. That is what Dylan was trying to do in response to a political imperative in the civil rights era, but he was not giving simple social histories in his songs, and he was not directly prescriptive. He was doing something more complex."

In other words, I point out, it's possible to see Poison as the "Like a Rolling Stone" to Parting Glances' "Blowin' in the Wind." Parting Glances, with Steve Buscemi as a two-dimensional saint dying sympathetically of AIDS, served a function in its time, but Poison has survived the decades in a way its predecessor has not.

"The stuff that really does challenge things really does survive and can supersede the more conventional approach," Haynes says. "But still, it's nice to hear some Peter, Paul and Mary now and then."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

I'm Not There opens Wednesday at Ritz at the Bourse.