Bob Dylan’s 2003 film Masked and Anonymous has come up repeatedly in some recent correspondence. Maybe it’s something to do with what’s been on the news lately. Indeed one e-mailer observed that he thinks “it is a picture of what this country is getting ready to become if we do not control illegal immigration.”

I don’t think there’s any question but that the fractured country — the alternative America — envisioned in the movie reflects a direction in which Dylan can see his country moving. In a 2001 interview with Robert Hilburn in the LA Times Dylan said:

I am not a forecaster of the times. But if we’re not careful, we’ll wake up in a multinational, multi-ethnic police state — not that America can’t reverse itself. Whoever invented America were the greatest minds we’ve ever seen, and people who understand what the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are all about will come to the forefront sooner or later.

Clearly, the phrase “multinational, multi-ethnic police state” describes the nation as pictured in M & A to a tee. Not that the movie doesn’t also reflect off of elements of current reality, and ways in which any civilization might decay.

I don’t have any great theory of the film that I could call my own. It’s always kind of shimmered and changed shape before my eyes, and I think that’s intentional (or maybe I need a new prescription for my glasses). I was just watching it again recently, and was struck that it has aged pretty well in these four short years. It’s easier now, at least for my mind, to take it in without prejudice. I was watching it with the “director’s commentary” turned on, and it also struck me how Larry Charles — while providing a great deal of minutiae and interesting factoids, never really gets beneath the skin of the film — or, should I say, beneath the skin of the script, the play itself. ( “The play’s the thing,” to quote Shakespeare, as the film sometimes does.) Of-course, one reason is that the director doesn’t want to explain the film, but I think another reason is that he genuinely doesn’t know. I think most people are pretty sure that the script is almost entirely Dylan’s writing, with good reason.

Ronnie Keohane, who has often provided dramatic perspectives on Dylan’s work, wrote a piece about the film for ISIS magazine in the fall of 2003. It is also reproduced in the book "20 Years of ISIS: Anthology Volume 2." It’s called “It’s Alright Ma, It’s Dylan’s Fate and Dylan’s Fate Only.” One of her key proposals in the piece is that Jack Fate’s father in the film (who is also the dying president) represents …

… ‘the sixties.’ Meaning the revolutionary mindset, the drug culture, the free love movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmentalist movement, the moral/silent majority and the global identify movement to name few. Dylan as Jack Fate says the early on the father (sixties) was loving. But soon priorities changed. The father adopted political goals that became the focus. Dylan/Fate did not follow in his father’s footsteps.

And then who is Fate’s mother representing?

In a monologue Dylan/Fate portrays the mother figure as a woman who is not just disillusioned with the marriage but actually hates the spouse. If my theory that the father represents the sixties is correct, then the mother represents those who detest what they believe the sixties were and the societal changes that the sixties gave birth to. The mother turns her resentment and hatred on Dylan/Fate, the son. The son in a home movie is shown only wanting to entertain and play his music for the mother. But the voice tells us that her hatred for the father and their marriage made her hate the product or physical symbol of that marriage. The son was never able to overcome the mother’s animousity to the father and be accepted as the son on his own merits. No matter how wonderfully he performed he would never get the accolades that a less talented individual would get.

[...]

Today, the mention of the name of Bob Dylan brings out extreme feeling in many people who could not name five songs or 1% of of his catalog, nor tell us anything about the man. But Dylan has been dubbed as the conscience or voice of the sixties generation, and for that he has endured worship by some and intense dislike by many more.

That last part is certainly very true. As for the allegorical interpretation of Jack Fate’s mother and father: it seems to me it’s impossible to make sense of this part of the movie’s story without applying some kind of allegory, and this one has a great deal going for it. You can fit in the fact that the president’s other son, Edmund — in theory the “child of the sixties” — is poised to take the reins of power and is eager to impose his own kind of dictatorship.

But no interpretation of the film is going to be the last word, not even Roger Ebert’s description of it as “incoherent raving juvenile meanderings.”

Another recent correspondent has remarked, maybe half-jokingly, that he thinks the film is an “evangelistic tract.” Well, the case for that would be much longer than I have in mind for this post, but it is one that can be made. Without any doubt, as with much of Dylan’s work, there are questions being posed and signposts being pointed; typical of Dylan’s peculiar kind of evangelism, you could say. The film begins with a voice-over by a radio preacher asking: “Are you humble before God?” It is filled with Biblical quotes and references. It ends with an act of self-sacrifice by the lead character. You can go and on. Ronnie Keohane deals with some of this in the piece I already quoted from, as well. She quotes Larry Charles as acknowledging that “God’s one of the main characters, actually … It’s a highly religious movie in a lot of ways, but not in a traditional, Cecil B. DeMille sort of way.” And in the light of Dylan’s latter-day work, how could it be otherwise?

I have no last word to posit, either. It is a tribute to the film that it remains fun to watch, and continuously surprising, at least for someone like me. I’d be curious to hear what others out there think about it at this point.

One of Fate’s voice-over lines comes to mind as a possible warning to interpreters:

Sometimes it’s not enough to know the meaning of things. Sometimes we have to know what things don’t mean as well.

Ponder that in relation to the film itself — as opposed to life generally — and maybe Masked and Anonymous is Dylan’s best attempt to send all of his interpreters (and I very much include yours-truly) into a complete mental melt-down.

Close, Bob, but no cigar. Yet.

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• If it keeps on rainin’
• Cyprian of Carthage, Bob Dylan and “Masked and Anonymous”
• “Stop Loss” loses