Personal note: Never have I remotely been attracted to the waifish and slightly Jewish appearance of Bob Dylan, yet embodied by the scrawny and slightly taller figure of Cate Blanchett, oh boy I want to jump his Yiddish bones!
Todd Haynes’s allegorical film I’m Not There is a parade of Dylan. Five Dylans in fact, personified by five distinct actors; none of who, in the flesh, remotely resemble the iconoclastic singer-songwriter. However, it is Blanchett’s eponymous performance as the post-folk, post-acoustic, post-political, post-Christian Bale and dare I say, post-Dylan Bob Dylan that eats Queen Lizzie’s cake, as evidenced by her recent Golden Globe win and Oscar nods.
Floating through a whimsical landscape patched together from interviews, live performances and well-known anecdotes, Blanchett channels the ghost of a man who simply is not. From press conference to performance to garden party, he, she, they… stammer dyslexically through their meaningful meaninglessness with lyrical acumen: “Two words on Shakespeare…Raving queen. Cosmic amphetamine brain. I dig Shakespeare.”
He is a performer, a “trapeeeze R-tist”, a caricature of existential bad faith and a poster-child for the post-modern identity: neither present nor absent, active nor passive, man nor woman. And who better to portray such a conundrum of personality than one who has shared sheets with the likes of Queen Lizzie (Elizabeth) and Cat Hepburn (The Aviator)?
Throughout his career, Dylan’s consistence in defying and defiling the media’s claim on him is a testament to his self-reflexive infidelity. He is a liar, a sinner, an asexual deviant, who for years, has been sleeping with the other halves of himself (“God, I’m glad I’m not mee”); and so the time has come for Blanchett to loan her body to an ephemeral orgy with the ghosts of Bob Dylan.
Ephemeral, for whatever photographs, sound bites and archived film reels are splayed out for the sake of defining the man behind the music (Blanchett’s act is partially based on D. A. Pennebaker’s fly-on-the-wall documentary Don’t Look Back), he vanishes, to be replaced, somewhere between the fifth and third acts by Richard Gere. Simply, he is not there. Bob Dylan is not present. He is yonder, at the vanishing point of the horizon, outside the screen’s frame, watching from the projection room with a doped-out grinning Allen Ginsburg wondering, “what does that even meeean, maan?”
And so where Dylan is not, Blanchett will be. Where Dylan disintegrates into the tomes of music journalism and cinema vérité, Blanchett is present with harmonica and cigarette; that is, to nail down, for a fleeting second, the smoke-filled spectre of a man not there.
The enigmatic Blanchett outperforms Dylan’s phantom. He is annihilated leaving a post-Dylanism, leaving in his wake a corpus, a body of work, a body that matters; that is, Blanchett’s body. And logically, this body must reinterpret the cinematic oeuvre and embody all of histories curly-haired paragons: Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan as Queen Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan as Catherine Hepburn, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan as Captain Jack Sparrow. But why stop at the world of celluloid? Imagine a political revolution of Blanchett: Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan as Barack Obama as President of the United States. For in the performance of all things, if gender is an illusion, surely then, race is too.
For who can deny the power of the Blanchett? She is a performer to outperform all others, to outperform the very idea of performance. She unveils the very lie that is identity and that indeed we are all sleeping with our other halves. “Sleep? Sleep is for dreeamers, maan,” and what a dream it is, because in the post-Dylan, Blanchett discloses to us all, that really, at the end of the day, we are Bob Dylan.
And so the logical question transpires? In the coming post-Blanchett era, who will play Blanchett who plays Bob Dylan who plays no one but himself who isn’t there in the bio-pic about Blanchett who plays Bob Dylan in I’m Not There?
The answer, of course, is you, because “you’re liiaars, all of you.”
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