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Initially revealed in Uncut Take 85 [June 2004]
It’s 1964, and the singer is alone on the stage of New York’s Philharmonic Corridor, speaking to the darkness: “It’s simply Halloween. I’ve my Bob Dylan masks on. I’m masquerading.”
It’s 1965, and the singer is in a black and white Britain, studying about himself in a newspaper: “God, I’m glad I’m not me.”
It’s 1972, and the singer stands within the mud in Durango, saying his identify: “Alias something you please.”
It’s 1975, and the stage lights go as much as reveal the singer is hiding his face behind a clear Richard Nixon masks.
Now it’s 2003, and the singer is carrying a blonde wig and a woolly hat on the Sundance Movie Competition, watching a film he wrote beneath the alias Sergei Petrov. Within the movie he performs a singer who seems like him however calls himself Jack Destiny. He’s referred to as the film Masked And Nameless.
The movie is filled with extra stars than any since Robert Altman‘s The Participant. Regardless of – or possibly as a result of – of this, the screening turns into one of the vital notorious premieres in Sundance historical past, scary walkouts and a firestorm of unfavorable evaluations. Within the damning piece that units the tempo, veteran critic Roger Ebert decries the singer’s film as “a conceit manufacturing past all motive”.
The critics’ objections in the end boil down to at least one query: who the hell does Bob Dylan assume he’s?
It’s a superb query. Right here’s one other: who the hell do we expect Bob Dylan is? Hell, does anybody even take into consideration Bob Dylan in any respect any extra?
These are some although on no account all the questions kicked up by Masked And Nameless – the bewildering, lovely, incisive, incoherent, intriguing and infuriating garbage can thriller which marks Dylan’s first critical sortie into cinema since 1987’s universally reviled Hearts Of Hearth.
The truth is, Masked And Nameless reaches again additional, nearly 30 years, to Renaldo And Clara, the mixed-up confusion of hats, masks, mirrors and music Dylan shot on 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and the best way that movie reached again to Dont Look Again, DA Pennebaker‘s seminal doc of Dylan’s 1965 UK tour. Like these, Masked And Nameless finally ends up being about a variety of issues, however, like these, it begins off being about Bob Dylan.
“In a bizarre means, the film may be very autobiographical for Bob,” says Larry Charles, the Seinfeld author/producer who co-wrote and directed Masked And Nameless. “He’s a person of many masks. However wanting on the masks is the best way to know him. For those who’re prepared to look deeply on the film – on the masks, by way of the masks – you’ll study all you have to learn about who Bob Dylan is. It’s completed with a code, but it surely’s all there.
“The film’s like a puzzle. You’re the final piece. It’s important to put your self into it.”
Right here’s the puzzle, then. Masked And Nameless describes an alternate universe wherein the USA has degenerated into a dirty banana republic, ravaged by ceaseless civil battle, dominated by a dying dictator whose picture wallpapers the streets.
In a slum LA, a huckster music promoter, Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman), as much as his neck in debt, hooks up with TV producer Nina Veronica (Jessica Lange), herself beneath stress from gangster-like bosses on the government-affiliated Community, to stage a televised profit live performance to help – or distract – victims of the battle.
In fact, all of them plan skimming the earnings. Factor is, they will’t appeal to anybody to play. So Sweetheart produces a tattered trump: his former consumer Jack Destiny, a burned-out legend, at present rotting within the sort of overcrowded subterranean jail wherein the Romans used to retailer the Christians till the lions had been hungry.
Listening to Destiny is concerned, a seen-it-all journalist, Tom Pal (Jeff Bridges), rouses himself to get the story behind the live performance – or reasonably, the story on Destiny. Everybody vaguely remembers Destiny, even when nobody remembers why, or believes anybody would need to hear him sing. He has a status for making songs unrecognisable. Nonetheless, the present should go on.
That’s the plot. The feel is one thing else. Like Destiny, Masked And Nameless appears a relic of one other period, a time when there was nonetheless the choice of doing issues in another way. It performs just like the Dennis Hopper of The Final Film has ambushed Robert Altman’s Nashville. It may be the primary sci-noir-bordertown-western-musical-art-movie.
In locations, it seems like information footage, in others a post-apocalyptic sci-fi interzone, in others a carnival. The digital camera tracks round eavesdropping on characters as if the movie had been a documentary, however, whereas they act pure, they converse a stylised language, mingling hardboiled one-liners with streams of rhetorical, beat-generation clean verse.
From time to time the movie stops for a speech, a gag or a track (caught by a single, locked-off digital camera, a method modelled on Hank Williams‘ Grand Ole Opry appearances and Johnny Money‘s ’60s TV reveals). It’s arduous to inform if it’s replaying nouvelle obscure distancing strategies or the rag-bag vaudeville of a Marx Brothers film.
And in the course of the mayhem, there’s Bob Dylan, strolling his stiff, jiggling stroll, extraordinary in gray Civil Conflict duds and a pencil moustache paying homage to a ’30s matinee idol. Squinting like Clint Eastwood, he doesn’t say a lot, as if he can’t resolve whether or not he ought to be Bogart, Brando or Groucho. It’s Final Tango At The Circus In Casablanca.
No matter it’s, Masked And Nameless started on the street in 2001. “At the moment,” Charles reveals, “Bob had gotten very closely into comedy. When he was touring, he’d watch a variety of comedy, bought excited by that, and tv. So, he determined possibly he’d do a comedy present on TV.
“Yeah, I do know. Bob Dylan? A comedy present? On TV? However that’s what he needed to do. So he began assembly writers.”
Charles, who along with his dude’s shades and wizard’s mane has been described by Peter Farrelly as “a cross between Jerry Garcia and Charles Manson“, was launched to Dylan by his good friend, long-time Dylan affiliate Jeff Rosen. “Jeff mentioned, ‘We’ve been organising these conferences with writers, however nothing’s actually coming – you wouldn’t take into account sitting down with Bob would you?’ I used to be like, ‘Are you kidding?’
“I figured, I’ll have one assembly with Bob – he actually insists on being referred to as Bob, as a result of Bob is the particular person; ‘Dylan’ is your drawback – and I can inform all my mates, and that may be it. However we simply instantly began riffing, and it developed into this very exhilarating verbal jam session. By the top of that assembly, we had been working collectively. He walked me to my automobile, and I felt like I used to be on a *date*. Automobiles are driving by, I’m considering, ‘Will somebody please look and see – I’m with Bob Dylan!’”
Masked And Nameless is formally credited to phantom screenwriters Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov. When the film first opened within the US final July, Charles made a gallant effort to take care of the pretence that these ciphers actually existed, however that’s one masks which has since slipped. The seeds of the script had been present in a field of scrap paper Dylan produced: a pile of scribbled notes, names and features, apparently the byproduct of his writing for “Love and Theft”. The truth is, the movie shares that album’s mysterious sense of bizarre, misplaced and hidden American historical past, of Tin Pan Alley echoes merging with plantation moans. The very title appears to name out to Charley Patton, the bluesman who recorded as “The Masked Marvel”, to whom Dylan devoted “Love and Theft”‘s surprised apocalyptic bluegrass knees-up, “Excessive Water“.
“Bob dumped all this paper on the desk,” Charles remembers, “and mentioned, ‘I dunno what to do with these.’ I regarded by way of and mentioned, ‘Effectively you may take this, and put it along with this, and that may very well be a personality who says this‘ – nearly like a William Burroughs, cut-up approach. We’d simply throw concepts out, connect them to different concepts. There was no plan. The movie started to emerge naturally.”
That approach is mirrored within the form of the film: a collection of moments bumping into and bouncing off each other reasonably than connecting in any linear means. Charles says, “It’s an enchanting means of working.”
But it surely’s additionally anathema to Hollywood. When it got here to elevating the “shockingly small amount of cash” wanted to make the film – round $7 million for a 20-day digital-video shoot, shoehorned into Dylan’s touring schedule – Charles says, “We bought a variety of extremely impolite feedback. Folks can be very chilly, ruthless. They’d say: ‘Effectively, Bob Dylan’s by no means bought a film ticket.’ I imply, we’re speaking about presumably the one American artist who will survive the collapse of civilisation.”
This, too, fed into the form of the movie. “The rationale we wound up with the forged we did,” Charles reveals, “is we thought we have now to encompass Bob with sufficient stars to make the people who find themselves going to present us cash comfy they’re going to get it again.”
The extraordinary forged has been dismissed by many reviewers as merely the results of actors scrambling to affiliate themselves with Dylan. However as Charles factors out, “These are all risk-taking actors. Jeff Bridges has all the time sought rigorously and vigorously impartial films. Mickey Rourke is a tremendous, intense, distinctive American actor. It was a battle to get him in the film. Folks had been like, ‘Oh, he’s bother.’ Bob and I truly fought to verify Mickey was in, as a result of he says one thing concerning the film.
“Then there’s John Goodman and Jessica Lange, who usually do Shakespeare or Brecht in theatre. These are nice connoisseurs of language. They had been interested in the script’s language, which may be very totally different from what you discover in American cinema at this time, and the concepts. These actors are in search of that sort of expertise, some sort of problem. Some sort of non secular high quality to their work. We couldn’t give them cash. However we might give them that.”
The movie’s eventual producer, Nigel Sinclair of Spitfire Movies, responded for related causes. “I bought concerned,” he says, “as a result of this movie addressed some human and political points which are actually necessary, and have gotten extra necessary, initially of the twenty first century by way of social teams, friction and bloodshed, and what occurs to us as a human tribe.
“That’s what this movie is about: the hyperlink between our existential, particular person expertise, and, if you’ll, the political, group expertise – the sort of battle that has gone on since Marxism was first launched, as as to whether the person or society ultimately is most necessary.”
In all of the potshots fired at Dylan for daring to make a film, there appeared a reluctance to acknowledge that, wrapped within the movie’s woolly ball of confusion, there are certainly arduous questions. About America; about political mayhem; about race; about enterprise, authorities and the media; concerning the co-opting of the counterculture; about corruption and greed; about picture and actuality and the way they get mistaken for one another; concerning the artist’s accountability; about people with their very own issues, caught up in all this, discovering themselves unable to know, not to mention assist one another.
Nonetheless, greater than something, the movie is about Dylan. He’s the filter by way of which every thing else is seen. How else to elucidate why, once we first glimpse Jeff Bridges because the journalist who can be Destiny’s nemesis, he’s hiding inside a hooded sweatshirt precisely just like the one Dylan wore whereas recording Underneath The Purple Sky? Why, earlier than going after Destiny within the movie’s most extraordinary scene, turning on him with a creepy, hectoring rap about Jimi Hendrix, Destiny/Dylan’s absence at Woodstock, and the that means of Hendrix’s epochal reordering of “The Star Spangled Banner“, Bridges adjustments costume, re-emerging as a black-leather-jacketed xerox of the Dylan of Dont Look Again?
“Sure. He’s dressed precisely like Bob Dylan 1965,” Charles confirms. “All the way down to the *sneakers*. Most individuals don’t choose up on that. The movie is plagued by these sorts of particulars. In some sense, all people is a mirrored image of Bob. But it surely occurred to me very vividly that Jeff was additionally taking part in the younger journalist Bob will get into the argument with in Dont Look Again, 40 years later.
“Bob is consistently competing with the youthful variations of himself. That, I believe, is certainly one of his large points with the media, not accepting him for what he’s, no matter that may be. He’s continuously combating his personal previous. He can’t actually get pleasure from his personal music, in a way. He has to maintain shifting ahead.
“‘Don’t look again’ turns into a theme. Of this movie, and his life.”
Accompanied by a soundtrack of Dylan covers – acquainted songs rendered as Japanese punk or Italian rap till they blur right into a babbling muzak Esperanto, pierced sometimes by Dylan’s personal lacerating performances – Masked And Nameless is, lastly, Dylan speaking to himself, about himself, the place he’s been, the place he’s and what he sees. If that’s a conceit venture, then that’s what his work has all the time been.
“I used to be all the time a singer, possibly not more than that…” Jack Destiny concludes. “I finished attempting to determine every thing out a very long time in the past.” Perhaps that is simply one other track. Perhaps it’s simply Halloween.
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