Tangled up in Bob

>> Todd Haynes talks about I’m Not There,
his lush meditation on the many
lives of Bob Dylan

by MATTHEW HAYS

From the moment the news broke, it sounded like one of the strangest marriages in cinematic history. Todd Haynes, arguably one of America’s most vital filmmakers and the queer mastermind behind such dense and complex films as Poison, Safe and Velvet Goldmine, was going to make a film inspired by the life and work of rock icon Bob Dylan.

This fusion just didn’t make sense. I mean, Haynes is just so damn queer. His past musical dalliances—Karen Carpenter in the banned short Superstar, glam rock in Velvet Goldmine—made perfect sense. But Dylan has always struck me as a decidedly het icon. His was the kind of music my older brothers were always playing, to which I responded by cranking up the volume on my ABBA, just to piss them off.

Sitting in a hotel room during the Toronto International Film Festival, Haynes understands the question, but also rejects being pigeonholed by his brazenly queer status. “I have a wide range of tastes, interests and curiosities,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “I was so deeply into Dylan during high school. I mean, I was into Joni Mitchell too, which you probably get more. But I loved Dylan and still love him. I find Dylan to have many shades that contradict this idea of him being simply a heterosexual icon.”

The result, which has premiered to overwhelmingly positive reviews, is I’m Not There, a sprawling, strange, disparate, anti-biopic meditation on the various mysterious incarnations of Dylan. The film is being noted for many things, but chief among them is its central casting call: lifting a page out of the book of Todd Solondz—his 2004 film Palindromes had seven different actresses playing the same girl—Haynes has chosen six different actors to play different Dylans. This allows Haynes to constantly remind us of the many phases of the musician’s life, while also playing with race and gender. Actors include Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Richard Gere, but the standout is Cate Blanchett, who dons drag for the role and actually looks more like Dylan than any of her counterparts.

“Using Cate was crucial, because this was a time in the ’60s when he really was this bizarre androgynous figure, who still garnered his biggest and deepest sense of identification from his predominantly heterosexual male fan base. But he was queer; it was a queer moment in rock ’n’ roll. And I would argue that it was a punk moment in rock ’n’ roll. It was something we wouldn’t see anything comparable to for many years to come. Whether he was channeling Patti Smith or the Sex Pistols ahead of their time in ’66, there was something strange going on.”

Bob’s blessing

Beyond the androgynous style, Haynes points out that Dylan was hinting at a queer dimension himself. “He claimed in ’66 that when he arrived in ’61, he hustled to pay his rent. Whether any of this is true—and the truth is kind of secondary with Dylan, because it’s much less interesting than what he says—it said something about where he was. He talked flamboyantly about gay things. He talked about how cool it was to be gay, and he said that anybody who thinks that men were made for women and women were made for men didn’t know what was happening. And he adored Allen Ginsberg. Dylan introduced Ginsberg to the Beatles, and they were unnerved to meet this very openly gay person.”

CONSTANTLY CONFOUNDING:
Haynes (with Charlotte Gainsbourg)

Haynes concedes that this all changed when Dylan had one of many religious conversions in the ’70s, declaring himself a born-again Christian. “He spoke in an unbelievably homophobic manner at this point, joining a very Pentecostal brand of Christianity in the late ’70s, saying all sorts of things about gays, the Middle East and politics in general, that would throw off any of his left-leaning following.”

Given Haynes’s treatment of the subject at hand, one might have expected a degree of distance from Dylan himself. After all, through litigation, the Carpenter Estate has kept Haynes’s incredible 1987 short film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, out of circulation (and that’s a real pity, because the film, which has Barbie and Ken dolls portraying the Carpenter singing duo, is a revelation). And David Bowie refused to grant Haynes the right to use any of his music when the filmmaker made Velvet Goldmine in 1998.

But amazingly, I’m Not There had Dylan’s blessing from its beginnings in 2000. Haynes first approached him via his eldest son, filmmaker Jesse Dylan (Kicking and Screaming). Haynes and producer Christine Vachon met with Dylan and (by phone) Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen. They described their plans for the project. Rosen suggested the plan be written into a one-page description for Dylan himself. Haynes did just that, but given his track record with recording artists, didn’t hold out much hope.

Dylan reportedly looked at the proposal and watched Haynes’s films on video. And then, Haynes got the surprise he wasn’t expecting: Dylan gave his blessing to the project, allowing his music to be used. This opened a lot of possibilities in terms of how the film would look, sound and feel.

Critical darling

Haynes and co-screenwriter Oren Moverman worked to keep the film as erratic and confounding as Dylan himself has been. Shot primarily in glorious black and white by veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman, I’m Not There has a time capsule feel to it, while remaining decidedly contemporary. Like Haynes’s last film, Far From Heaven (2002), it is already a critical darling. But like that film—and many in the director’s oeuvre—it is bound to connect with critics better than it will a larger public.

It’s something that one can’t help but note when looking at Haynes’s career. He’s not a household name, and yet he’s had (and continues to be making) an indelible mark on American cinema. He’s the visionary auteur behind the Jean Genet-infused Poison (1991), a film that placed him at the vanguard of the then-emerging New Queer Cinema. He continued to startle and cajole complacent audiences with films like Safe (1995), his artful collapsing of literal illness and symbolic illness into one (a film that a Village Voice critics’ poll indicated was the best of the entire decade of the ’90s), and Far From Heaven, his melancholic reconfiguring of the classic 1955 Douglas Sirk melodrama All That Heaven Allows.

Audience reception, contends Haynes, is as mysterious as Dylan himself. “I actually feel that one can never be an objective barometer of the public. But you know, I know a lot of people came to Far From Heaven with no kind of cinema background, without any big knowledge of film per se, and they loved it. On a plane once, the film was showing, and I walked down the aisle during the closing credits. The men would be watching something else, but the women would all be crying, totally wrapped up in it. That was very gratifying.”

Whatever the broad public response, whatever the response of Dylanphiles, Haynes’s career overall must be seen as a stunning achievement. He continues to make difficult films that confound expectations and constantly remind the viewer—like many of Godard’s best work in the ’60s did—that they are watching a movie. Indeed, Haynes is one of the few filmmakers working so close to the American mainstream who continues to get funding while subscribing to the principles of art philosopher Bertolt Brecht, who argued for a strident, self-conscious formalism. I’m Not There never lets anyone forget they are watching a movie, a construct, and that’s part of the larger point: that Dylan was interpreted in many different ways by the press, and most if not all of that was a façade itself.

And that makes this latest film’s reception all the sweeter for Haynes. “This is a really unusual film. It could have been received in any number of ways. It wouldn’t have changed my feelings about it. But I was prepared for a bigger fight. So far, we’ve just been getting a lot of immediate good reactions.

“And that does surprise me. The market is not used to stuff like this. We’re so far away from the ’60s, where you’d actually see experimental stuff. People don’t really know what that is anymore.”

I’m Not There opens this
Friday, Nov. 30