TINY GEMS

He’s Not There

Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There (2007) has probably garnered most of the attention it has received on pure novelty and curiosity. Ostensibly a biopic about Bob Dylan, the part of “Bob Dylan” is played by six different actors, each portraying a different moment in Dylan’s life and a different attitude – including Cate Blanchett (pictured below).

The most interesting thing about the movie, though, is that Dylan himself is conspicuously, almost entirely absent.

While Blanchett’s “Jude Quinn” most closely resembles the 1960s Dylan of (collective) memory, each incarnation of “Dylan” seems one step removed – a reflection of the myths and legends surrounding Dylan and 1960s-counterculture as a whole, rather than anything “real.” Haynes filters real (or perceived) events of Dylan’s life through a tangle of art-film techniques (nods to Godard and Fellini abound) to comment on the centrality of celebrity and myth in culture; the finished product is much more interesting and multi-dimensional than a conventional biopic – compare the vision of Dylan in I’m Not There to that of Johnny Cash in Walk The Line (2005).

Not to stretch the point too far (especially from a self-confessed ’60s-phile like myself), I’m Not There felt like a bit of an attempt to clear the air on this legendary idea of “the 1960s” that has loomed large over the United States for almost 50 years. By pointing out the gaps between the image of Dylan and his reality, Haynes points out the 1960s – a time when people had the power, when anything was possible, when real revolution was about to happen – might be, like the image of “Bob Dylan” everyone remembers, imagined into existence.

(Edit: In a review of I’m Not There in the latest issue of “Cineaste,” I discovered that Todd Haynes studied Semiotics at Brown University. Go figure.)