Dylan doc deceitful about characters
To be a Bob Dylan fan these days means to be an apologist and enabler.
You have to willingly overlook his long history of deceptions and dodges, most alarmingly his multiple alleged acts of plagiarism that include cribbing SparkNotes comments about Moby-Dick for his 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature speech.
Dylan’s purported purloining of the music and prose of others is explained away by devotees as simply part of “the folk process,” wherein musicians, poets and writers share lyrics, riffs and inspiration.
His career-long habit of adopting various guises and pseudonyms — beginning with his name, which was Robert Zimmerman at birth — is seen as Dylan’s mystique.
His first big movie role was playing the enigmatic character Alias in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in 1973. “Who are you?” James Coburn’s Pat Garrett asks him. “That’s a good question,” Alias replies.
We’re all still asking the question of Dylan, but his evasiveness has gotten harder to explain and accept. His latest act of “conjuring,” as his current explainer/enabler Martin Scorsese calls it, is shot through the Scorsese-directed Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, now playing on Netflix.
The film is billed as a documentary, a chronicle of the 1975 first half of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue road show of ensemble music-making alongside Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and others, but it contains many instances of outright fakery and lies.
The credits list 21 “players,” each given a character name for the movie, who toured with and/or visited Dylan during Rolling Thunder.
Most are genuine, but four are fakes, albeit played by real people: the Beauty Queen (actress Sharon Stone); the Filmmaker (actor/performance artist Martin von Haselberg); the Politician (actor Michael Murphy); and the Promoter (Jim Gianopulos, Paramount Pictures chair/ CEO).
These four deceivers claim to have actual memories of what they supposedly did on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, confirmed by Dylan in a new interview he did for the movie. Stone says she was 19 years old (she was actually 17) in 1975, when her mom took her to a Rolling Thunder Revue show and she met Dylan, who invited her to join his musical wagon train. Stone also claims to be at least partial inspiration for Dylan’s decision to wear white face paint throughout the tour; she wore a T-shirt of the Kabuki-painted band KISS to the show.
Such “revelations” help make Rolling Thunder Revue the compelling watch it is. But none of the many statements made by Stone, von Haselberg, Murphy and Gianopulos are true, as it turns out. These bogus “players” and their untrue assertions make Scorsese’s film less of a doc and more of a mockumentary like Christopher Guest’s folk satire A Mighty Wind.
Scorsese says in his production notes that he “wanted the picture to be a magic trick … There’s a great deal of sleight of hand.”
Fair enough, but usually when you go to a magic show, you know in advance that you’re watching a magician. Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue is presented as truth, something you’d think he and Dylan would want to honour and protect in these post-truth days, where the U.S. president tweets off multiple falsehoods before breakfast.
Compare their attitude to that of Charles Ferguson, who has a real documentary, the epic two-parter Watergate, opening Friday at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. He’s a stickler for detail, a master at explaining difficult ideas and a fervent pursuer of the truth, as he proved in Inside Job, his Oscar-winning doc about the 2008 financial meltdown.
Over the course of Watergate’s combined 270 minutes, which never drag, Ferguson describes and connects the participants and events of the scandal that drove U.S. president Richard Nixon out of office in 1974, a year before Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour began.
The phrase “obstruction of justice” is heard often, as Nixon and his henchmen try to evade the legal net that is slowly gathering around them — and which resonates with current events in Washington.
Ferguson uses actors to recreate many of the meetings and phone calls that Nixon had in the Oval Office, but their conversations scrupulously follow the words recorded by Nixon on the secret tapes he’d been making.
“Everything you are about to see actually happened,” Ferguson says in a title note at the start of Watergate. We have every reason to believe him.
You might also think that Bob Dylan would want to engender such trust about himself, if only to dispel allegations to the contrary. During the Rolling Thunder Revue, where I saw him perform for the first of many times, I took him to be a plain-speaking troubadour and man of the people, even if he did sometimes did wear a mask or face paint.
This was the common view of Dylan back then. We all used to believe the guy. But he apparently viewed us all as suckers and dupes, like the journalist character Mr. Jones in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” of whom he contemptuously sneers, “’Cause something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
Hard to know what’s happening when you’re so eager to lie to us, Bob.