I am only familiar with the musician who acts upon a special social stage, and I love his creations. Because Dylan the performer has the poet's touch, a hyperbolic sense of the fantastic, he draws me into his magical web in the pursuit of deeper truths. He is an artist at war with his art and perhaps his true self, and therefore forces me to venture into uncharted territory and ask uncomfortable questions. His songs demand that the listener's mind and spirit be moving as the spirit of creative inspiration moved him. A close listening to many of them will force one to jump from verse to verse - to shoot the gulf - since there are no bridges to cross, no connecting links.
A Magic Show
From the start , The Rolling Thunder Revue, a fused compilation of film from a tour throughout New England concocted by Dylan that took place in 1975-6 as a rollicking experiment in communal music making, announces that we are going to be played with and that Dylan and Scorsese are conjurers whose prestidigitations are going to dazzle us. The film is gripping and cinematically beautiful. The opening scene is taken from a very old film in which a woman is sitting in a chair and a man throws a cloth over her. When he pulls the cloth away, the woman has disappeared. Call it playful magic, call it fun, call it entertainment - we can't say we haven't been warned - but after decades of postmodern gibberish with the blending of fact and fiction, fake news, endless propaganda, and the fiction-of-nonfiction, one might reasonably expect something more straightforward in 2019.
I could understand it if it served some larger purpose, but as the film shows, it doesn't. Later in the film, Dylan says, as if he needed to pound the point home, "If someone's wearing a mask, he's gonna tell you the truth. If he's not wearing a mask, it's highly unlikely." This may be true for him as an artist, but as a general prescription for living, it is bullshit. Of course lies are commonplace, but isn't it best to strive for truth, and doesn't that involve shedding masks. Then again, what does he mean by a mask?
Society trains us all from an early age to lie and deceive and to be socially adjusted persons on the social stage, and since person means mask, do we need some white face paint to obviously mask ourselves to tell the truth? Why can't one take off the masks and be authentic? Why can't Dylan? In an interview in 1997 with the music critic Jon Parles, Dylan said while he is mortified to be on stage, it's the only place where he's happy. "It's the only place you can be who you want to be."
These are the sad words of a man living in a cage on a stage, and only he might know why. Yet we are left to guess why Dylan is unhappy off stage, but such guessing is the other side of the social game where gossip and pseudo-psychoanalysis sickens us all as we try to decipher the personal lives of the celebrities we worship. Maybe we should examine our own looking-glass selves.
The Mask Falls
Despite being a masked man, there are times in this fascinating film when the lion in Dylan breaks out of the cage, and while the face paint and costume remain, one can see and hear a sense of short-lived liberation in his performances. His performance of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is so true, so passionate, so real, so intense that his true face shines through in its genuine glory. The same for his performance of "Hurricane" and a few others. It's all in his face and body, his articulation and energy, his fiery eyes. The performances refute his claim that only a masked man can speak the truth. As Joan Baez mordantly says, "Everything is forgiven when he sings."
There is something elegiac about the film, for many of the people in it are now dead and their film presence - that eerie afterlife that technology confers - conveys the ephemerality of fame - and life. Allen Ginsberg and Sam Shepard are dead, and many of the others are in their twilight years. But to see them young and frisky and bouncing around on stage and off, giving off sexuality and joy in the music and the trip they're on, one can't help be gripped by the passing of time and the contrast between then and now when depression and its pharmaceutical fixes has so many in its grip. Dylan's craggy, lined face in interviews for the film belies the young man we see perform and laugh, and though he still performs and is addicted to being on the road so often (interrupted by the coronavirus lockdowns) - quite a feat for a 80-year-old - the juxtapositions of the images underscores the power of Dylan's musical messages. "Once upon a time," Dylan croons these days, "somehow once upon a time/never comes again."
When one puts the then and now into historical and social perspective - which is essential since works of art are rooted in time, place, economic and political realities - one is jolted further. It's almost as if this Rolling Thunder Revue tour was the last gasp for a dying political and artistic culture that represented some hope for change, however small, while also being a symptom of the encroaching theatricality of American life, what Neal Gabler aptly calls, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.
The Triumph of Techno-Entertainment
Trace, if you will, the transformation of the United States from 1975-6 until today. It's as if the theatricality of the tour was announcing the end of straightforward dissent and the ushering in of endless postmodern gamesmanship that is still with us. Masks. Games. Generations disappearing into technological and consumer fantasies where making money, watching television, and entering the system that destroys one's soul became the norm, as the American empire ravaged the world and Baby Boomers found life in their cell phones and on yoga mats, as Herbert Marcuse and his compatriots of the Frankfurt School warned. The culture industry absorbed dissent and spit it back out as entertainment in the service of the maintenance and consolidation of the power of the ruling class. How to transform a depraved society when the culture industry has corrupted so many people at their cores is where we're at now. "The carpet too is moving under you," Dylan intoned in 1965, "It's all over now, Baby Blue."
I looked around the movie theater before the film began and the rows were lit up by old folks staring at their little lit-up rectangular talismans. It was enough to bring me to despair. I was reminded of being in the circus in Madison Square Garden as a child where the kids were swinging sticks with cords attached with lights at the end that lit up the place.
They say the circuses are all closing, but I think not. "It's not dark yet/but it's getting there."
In an exchange between Dylan and Sam Shepard, who was on the tour as some sort of writer, Dylan asks Sam how he writes all those plays, and Sam says he does so by "communing with the dead." The Rolling Thunder Revue is like that, a medium between a time when passion still lived, and today when death, dying, and nostalgia are the norm for so many whose passion has fled into things.
Capitalism has conquered consciences with commodities.
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