I'm Not There

After its release on DVD, I was finally able to see Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. It managed to meet my expectation, and even exceed them in some areas. Here are a few of my first impressions:


Out of the whole movie, the song whose placement seemed most apt to me was The Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone." This is far from the best song in the movie, but the way it is used speaks volumes. It is played at a party during Bob's hectic 1966 tour. Superficially, Bob is being used as a stepping stone to wealth by people like Albert Grossman. On a deeper level, the song, like all pop music, is a construction. Being the Monkees, this stands out even more as they were put together out of American Idolesque auditions. They didn't play instruments or write songs when they started. (To be fair, in their later years the Monkees did try to seize creative control and wrote their own material and played their own instruments, and it wasn't half bad.) "Stepping Stone" is a fantastic pastiche of The Who, which is made even more ironic by the doubling that comes from them singing "you won't find me in your book of Who's Who's." What makes this further intersting, is that this song is, out of all of the Monkees early work, their most anti-establishment song and, though it is a Who pastiche, it also has another dimension to the sound which is unmistakeably authentic in the sense of uniqueness. All of these, of course, echo the debates surrounding Dylan post-Newport. Thus, there are several layers to the song worth explicating in relation to the Dylan myth.

One thing I had hoped for was for the various Dylans to meet up, as I thought this idea as very fertile for creating all sorts of ideas. The only time this happened, however, was when Billy the Kid is riding through town and Woody Guthrie runs out of a saloon and begs for his help, right near the end of the sequence where Arthur Rimbaud is reading from "Advice For Geraldine On Her Miscellaneous Birthday." Unfortunately, this encounter was all too brief and ultimately unresolved. The camera cuts away, and so we don't know if one Dylan saves the other, so that a multiplicity of selves can exist simultaneously, or if the other Dylan cuts off self by leaving Guthrie there to die. Also, of course, due to constraints of time period, the film takes a more surreal turn than usual by placing Guthrie of 1959 in the same scene as Billy the Kidd in 1911, putting this dangerously close to losing the viewer altogether. (Had the times been blended more often throughout, the viewer would be prepared for it and it wouldn't be an issue; a good film teaches its audience specific ways to view it.)

The reason I place 1911 as the year is from a later scene with Billy the Kidd. In this scene, Pat Garrett is coming to town, but not to kill Billy because he has already (supposedly) done so. In Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the Kid dies, replete with a hymn called "Knockin' On Heaven's Door." This movie sets up an alternate reality where Kid escapes and survives in seclusion, a ragged rebel forever on the fringes of a society that has rejected him. When Garrett comes to town, to build a railroad, the year is mentioned as Garrett and Billy engage in a hilarous showdown of wits that is among my favorite moments in the film.

On a final note, from reading literature surrounding the film's release, I was led to believe there were seven Dylans and that Christian Bale played Jack Rollins and Pastor John (the Revelator). I was pleased to find out this isn't true, but that Jack Rollins, as he ages, becomes Pastor John. I felt this was a fantastis move on Haynes' part because it shows the tradition of preaching which informed the folk movement and especially Dylan's early finger-pointing songs. In fact, "Pressing On" is the least preachy song Jack Rollins sings in the movie.