In the current issue of Books and Culture, Jean Bethke Elshtain writes about two “meditations on celebrity”; the films “I’m Not There” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” Some of what she writes on the Bob Dylan film and on Bob:

I’ve been a Dylan devotee — this by contrast to an obsessed Dylan freak — for over forty years. I think I know him passing well. Oddly enough, I think he knows me, too, on some level. His recent songs, with their stirring evocations of life’s end and getting to Heaven before they “close the door,” bring me to tears. Just like the rest of us, Dylan is still trying to figure the whole thing out — the difference being that his songs reach millions, and that is a substantial difference indeed.

She feels that Todd Haynes’ film doesn’t bring us any closer to the real Dylan, and implies that it neglects the “religious yearning for transcendence” which inhabits his body of work.

Consider “When the Ship Comes In” from the album The Times They Are A-Changin’. I recall discussions with my compatriots in our 1960s “commune” [...] when I urged that the song was not about political triumph but rather the joy of the eschaton. Nobody knew what I was going on about. But I still think I was right. I’m Not There doesn’t help much with this. We don’t see Dylan poring over texts, devouring everything from philosophy to poetry to theology. We get no sense of his Jewish family and origins. In this way the film winds up burnishing the mythological dimensions of Dylan’s story even as the director has stated repeatedly that he intended to mock mythic biopics in the vein of Walk the Line, the film that told the story of Johnny Cash and June Carter.

I’m Not There is too idiosyncratic to be construed as a direct riposte to anything: it is what it is, an attempt to capture a defining genius, an American original, a believer, a walking paradox whose “ship will come in” one day when he is on the road, by then an old man, living out his vocation as a restless troubadour, distilling in his songs so much of the fear, anger, beauty, faith, hope, fear, confusion, love, and hate that compose the perturbed American spirit of the last half-century and more.

I’d agree with what she says. I never did do a “proper” review of the film, I suppose. Immediately after seeing it, I wrote about how much it just plain made me laugh — and it did — and about how I quite liked the part of the film with the Richard Gere character living in a “Basement Tapes” type of landscape. My appetite for a more serious type of review just wasn’t there. You could take anything as a starting point and write reams and reams, and be very argumentative over this or that fact, but what would be the point? Having followed the stories in the press about the film from the very beginning, I think I also was very prepared — arguably too prepared — for what I was about to see on the screen. Months before I saw the film, and based on a big spread in the newspaper about it, I had already said this:

By giving the characters other names, and a variety of faces, a detachment is enforced from any notion of reality (whatever that is). So the film is not about dispelling myths, but apparently is about tackling them in such a way as to only amplify the mystery. As has been said before in this space, this extremely unconventional approach is likely what led Bob Dylan himself to cooperate with the project. He need have no fear that anything in this movie is going to really stick to him, after all. It will be self-evidently Todd Haynes’ riffing on other people’s stories about Dylan.

As to who’s going to like it: I don’t know. It seems to be generating buzz. From the point of view of this fan, I have no doubt I’ll go see it, and I hope it’s well done and lots of fun, but the old myths and legends and swirling images of Dylan’s career are a lot less interesting to me than the artist’s actual work. And the whole theme of Dylan being an inscrutable man of many faces is one that, in my opinion, has been overworked and excessively resorted to by critics who, for reasons of their own, are flummoxed by where Dylan has seemed to be coming from at various points in his career.

And now, months after seeing it, I certainly wouldn’t change a word of that (although I might adjust some syntax).

The whole “I’m Not There” bandwagon has frankly been a little too much to take for this particular “obsessed Dylan freak.” Every search of “Google News” for stories on Bob Dylan produces, daily, another bunch of gosh-darned reviews of this movie, from one side of the world or the other. It never ends. So, I also must confess to feeling some relief that Cate Blanchett did not win the Oscar for her role in the film. It would have given even more legs to the entire thing.

Now I’ll stop talking about it too.

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