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No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
At about the mid-way mark of Martin Scorsese’s astounding documentary No Direction Home, about the rise and coming-of-age of the American songwriter Bob Dylan, an interviewee articulates the central mystique of Dylan in the simplest way possible, but with the most accurate words I have ever heard concerning the songwriter: “As he stands on the stage, he somehow conveys to us with his songs that he knows something that we do not.” There is the rub put as plainly as possible; it is the reason that Bob Dylan continues to mystify us to this day. He is a myth among men, a man so shrouded in the persona created out of his cryptic lyrics and blue-collar appearance that even a director as masterful as Martin Scorsese can only begin to scratch the surface of this strange man who is seemingly able to contain the world’s deepest secrets in his music. Dylan is not without his critics; I am reminded of Roger Ebert’s questioning of the poet’s cryptic persona in his review of Dylan’s disappointing (or, if I may be so bold, god-awful) vehicle Masked and Anonymous: “Those who worship him are inexhaustible in their fervor, and every enigmatic syllable of the great poet is cherished and analyzed as if somehow he conceals profound truths in his lyrics, and if we could only decrypt them, they would be the solution to—I dunno, maybe everything. … I have always felt it ungenerous to have the answer but wrap it in enigmas.” Yet I’m not sure that it is as simple as Ebert’s generalization (to be fair, Ebert admires Dylan’s music and also awarded No Direction Home four stars): Do we really want, after all, the answers to “maybe everything” dumbed down into tangible absolutes? How, then, are they really the answers to life, love, and all the other secrets that even the likes of Plato and Shakespeare sweated over to little (but nevertheless genius) avail? I’m not even sure that Dylan himself would make such an intrepid claim that he’s got all the answers, but he is at least enlightened enough to approach the questions correctly. Through the course of No Direction Home, he admits that he has no idea what many of his own songs mean, and prefers to write them primarily for himself. “All my songs are protest songs,” he insists, even though he’s often hard pressed to tell us exactly what he is protesting against. Certainly he has his share of anti-war and civil rights songs (it’s hard not to catch the message in, say, “With God on Our Side” or “Only a Pawn in the Game”), but most of his songs have more to do with interesting images and intangible ideas that he mulls over in his own brain, without any revolutionary answers in sight. This fact seemed to disappoint most of his fans in the 1960s, who expected him to have all the answers and were irritated when he impassively announced that he didn’t. In one of the most revealing scenes, Dylan seems sincerely perplexed by the various students and reporters who litter him with questions like, “What does the shirt you are wearing on the cover of your album symbolize?” Dylan’s answer: “Um. I think that was just the shirt I was wearing that day.” Yet somehow Dylan’s enigmatic lyrics have been able to tap into our collective consciousness and establish himself as a poet for the ages. I believe that his appeal really boils down to the image that he created for himself through his hauntingly vague lyrics—the idea that he has found a train of thought that will eventually take him on the road that has the answers. There are plenty of great musicians that sing about life’s challenges and the human condition (among them is my personal favorite, Peter Gabriel), but how many artists project the sort of sly, “I’m asking the right questions,” aura of Dylan? Today, there is only a handful of great American songwriters who capture this mystique with their lyrics and their personas, among them Rufus Wainwright, Ani DiFranco, Joseph Arthur, Kevin Max, and the late Jeff Buckley. But even these musicians, talented and even brilliant though they are, exist because Bob Dylan paved the way and passed the torth, and only measured together do they make up the whole of Dylan’s legacy and inspiration. To accomplish the daunting giant of that legacy and inspiration, Scorsese provides two distinct narratives that play simultaneously: The first is the familiar, archetypal “rise to fame” story that begins with Dylan’s dreams as a young lad to make it big, carries on with his obsession over his “last hero” Woody Guthrie, and proceeds to his relocation to New York, his growing fame, his eventual record deals, etc. With different names and locations, this story could belong to any other great artist or musician. It is the second narrative, however, that provides the edge that reveals Scorsese’s strategy: Bob Dylan is seen with a full band on a stage in Britain, in which the audience literally boos and hisses throughout the show, chanting words, “Traitor!” and “Judas.” Dylan takes it in stride but is clearly affected by the bitterness of the crowd—at one point he turns to his band and says, “Play it f---ing loud,” perhaps to drown out the dissent. How he got to the point where such fans would actually pay money for a ticket simply to boo him becomes the central conflict of No Direction Home; this more complex narrative plays backward as Dylan’s early life plays forward, and once the two dichromatic images of Dylan meet at the halfway point, we have a clear picture of Dylan’s enigma, why his fans felt so betrayed, why he probably couldn’t care less about what they think, and how this apathy only fuels our admiration for the man. Along the way, Scorsese includes a series of clips and rare segments of various performing artists that inspired, influenced, and played alongside Dylan, and these clips serve as priceless comparisons between Dylan and the artists of his era: We see whose torch he was given, who shared it with him, and who envied the passing. My favorite clip: Dylan and Johnny Cash, seemingly very stoned, singing, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” There is a bond between the men in this scene that reveals the barrier between the private persons and public personas of our musical legends. Indeed, that barrier is the heart of No Direction Home. In a way, No Direction Home is a continuation of what Scorsese attempted to do in The Last Temptation of Christ (the controversial reinterpretation of Jesus’ life), Kundun (concering the early years of the Dalai Lama), and The Aviator (the Howard Hughes biopic), which was to rip prominent historical characters out of their own clichés and stereotypes and provide them with human faces that only enhance the myths that surround them. Martin Scorsese doesn’t have the secret of Dylan, but what he has given us is an invaluable look into the clockwork of the poet’s mind, revealed through interviews with both Dylan and his closest friends. Much like Dylan’s lyrics, such an exploration only makes the singer all the more impenetrable, but it also taps into the American consciousness that has embraced Dylan as one of their greatest artists in a way that allows us to see what is so attractive about him and his approach to his controversial songwriting. It is one of the year’s best documentaries, and one of Scorsese’s best films. Featuring: Paramount Pictures presented a film by Apple and Public Broadcasting Station. Directed by Martin Scorsese. No M.P.A.A. rating (contains profanity). Running time: 201 minutes (in two parts). Original United States television broadcast: September 26 and 27, 2005. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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