Talkin' I'm Not There (+Ex)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This show is a part of the FM podcast network, the home of great music podcasts. Visit [email protected] you are listening to the Dylan Tons podcast. Hey everyone, I'm Jim Salvucci of the dilentaunts and welcome to the latest installment of million dollar bash. It's that million dollar bash. We are entering a season of maximum hype for the Timothee Chamolay vehicle, James Mangold's biopic of Bob Dylan, a complete unknown. The release date is December 25, 2024, and I for one can wait. It's not that I don't dearly love movies about Bob Dylan. It's just that I don't trust this particular director to create anything but a feel good yawner, complete with loving recreations of settings and a superficial interest in actual biographical details. But that's me. Besides, haven't we already traversed the Dylan biopic territory with I'm not there? Granted, even die hard Dylan fans have found it hard to digest, but isnt that how it should be? In my case, I think im not. There is about as suitable and excellent a crack at Dylan's biopic that we shall ever see. The eminent filmmaker Todd Haines is known for such masterpieces as far from Heaven, the Velvet Gold Mine, Carol, and last years may december. His first movie, the highly acclaimed and now legally banned superstar the Taryn Carpenter story, is told using Barbie dolls. So you know that Haynes is not a conventional filmmaker in any way. Indeed, his 2007 film I'm not there is anything but your grandpa's biopic. For one thing, absolutely no one in the film is named Bob Dylan. The feature's a sensible subject. In fact, no one utters the words Bob Dylan, and many of the events depicted have at most a tangential relationship to the life and times of said Bob Dylan. On the other hand, Dylan's music features primarily and wonderfully throughout, and some settings, dialogue and events are Dylan lyrics put the film if you are not aware or need a reminder. In the film, six actors portray six characters who correspond somewhat to aspects of Dylan's life and personality, although some scenes fall clearly into the subgenre of what if? What if Bob Dylan found Jesus as a young man and became a pentecostal minister? What if Bob Dylan were an actor portraying a Bob Dylan like character in a biopic? The characters that stand in for Dylan are an eleven year old black hobo, a nearly hermit like aging cowboy, a hotshot actor with a passion for cheating on his artist wife, a folk singer termed small time devout preacher, a poet who's being interrogated for some reason, and a hipster rock star immersed in a world of ephetamine and androgyny. Meanwhile, several other characters in the movie are Dylan Adjacent, an Albert Grossman like manager, a Joan Baez like folk singer brilliantly portrayed by perennial Hanes, actor Julianne Moore, a Bobby newer type sidekick, and for some reason, Bobby Seale, UEP Newton and Allen Ginsburg. That last one is wonderfully portrayed by David Cross. And for good measure, this non biopic shows us the actor character Robbie Clark and a scene from his biopic of Jack Rollins. For those at home keeping score, thats a fictional biopic of a fictional character within a non biopic of a real person. Still with me as biography, im not there. It falls way short, but it never fully attempts biography. Indeed, like Dylan's unreliable memoir chronicles volume one and scorseses Rolling Thunder review of Bob Dylan story, it is a metabiography that uncovers the constructiveness of Bob Dylan in our culture. Furthermore, as a non biopic or even a metabiopic, it explores the fraught limitations and possibilities of biography itself, particularly when it is contained entirely within the four corners of a screen. I hope that cues it up pretty well and cues up our discussion of Todd Haines 2007 film I'm not there. So let's meet our million dollar bashers today. Say hello. [00:04:08] Speaker B: Court Carney hello everyone. [00:04:12] Speaker A: Rayleigh Herron. [00:04:14] Speaker C: Hey there, glad to be here. [00:04:16] Speaker A: Earn Callahan. [00:04:18] Speaker D: Hey everyone, glad to be here again. [00:04:21] Speaker A: And Nina Goss. [00:04:22] Speaker E: Hello. Nice to see everyone. [00:04:26] Speaker A: Great to have everyone here. And unfortunately rockin Rob won't be able to make it. But I'm sure he's with us in spirit because I know this is a subject he really loves. So let's get your hot takes or cold takes or old takes or new takes on I'm not there. [00:04:45] Speaker E: I think your intro was an impossible act to follow, so I'm just going to sign off because I agree with everything you said. [00:04:57] Speaker A: Nina and I are in agreement. [00:04:58] Speaker E: Yes, I love this movie. I love it and it's exhilarating and creative. It does injustice to Dylan and I. The question I want to raise here is whether in fact Michael Gray and other critics are right that despite all its wonders for people like us or me and Jim, how accessible and the film really is to people who don't know a thing about God. Dylan. [00:05:37] Speaker D: I can answer. I used to teach I'm not there in my litten film class with chronicles and also the Scorsese film and the students when they got to I'm not there said that they wouldn't have gotten. [00:05:49] Speaker E: It if they wouldn't have it. Yeah. [00:05:52] Speaker D: Or seen the Scorsese film. And it allowed them some sort of access to at least the narrative arcs that are in the film outside of discussing the film. Because they hadn't seen all the photos like the Arthur and bone interview where it's mimicking Dylan photos and stuff like that. But at least the narratives they could follow because we had gone over chronicles in the Scorsese documentary. So I would assume that's probably the case for most casual. [00:06:19] Speaker E: Otherwise the pastiche would have been inaccessible. They wouldn't sit right. Yeah. [00:06:26] Speaker A: I used to have a similar experience using this film and I was using it in a Dylan course. And even then the students were like, there's a lot of this. It's just over my head. And there is. There's tons. I guess the question, another way of looking at that question though is this. Does this film stand alone in its own right without knowing a great deal of background about Bob Dylan? [00:06:48] Speaker E: I watched so badly for it after I saw the dare came out. And I got to say, here in New York, the lines were around the block to get into this film. And I don't think that will be the same case for Mister Chalamet and his impersonation. But when it was over, I want. All I wanted was for this film to be the new Citizen Kane. I wanted this to be an american life just outlined and charged with the sense of what an american life is. But I don't think that's its profile or status. I don't think it can be. I don't think it's accessible enough to do that. [00:07:28] Speaker A: For the record, Nina, I was in that theater with you. We didn't know each other then and wouldn't for quite, quite a few years. [00:07:33] Speaker E: Film form. [00:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I was there. [00:07:36] Speaker E: Do you remember that line around. [00:07:37] Speaker A: I was in it. [00:07:39] Speaker E: That's right. [00:07:39] Speaker A: I came up from Baltimore to go see that movie. [00:07:42] Speaker E: Oh, that's so cool. [00:07:45] Speaker A: What are other thoughts? [00:07:47] Speaker C: It's a Bob Dylan. It's a great movie made by a hardcore Dylan fan. For hardcore Dylan fans. And we're going to talk about all its many brilliances over the course of the next hour. [00:08:01] Speaker A: But I. [00:08:02] Speaker C: For one, I think there's room for a conventional biopic like I'm anticipating the Timothy Chalamet vehicle to be, and room for this. I think that probably it'll be a more spoon fed, straightforward, conventional film that we're going to see that's going to play up the love interests and and that sort of thing. And okay, I'll see it. And I think that the more casual fan will understand that film, get it more readily than I'm not there. But I sure am glad that there's an I'm not there out there, too. And I'll tell you the connection point that immediately comes to me just because I saw it literally this week was the film about Samuel Beckett dance first. I was one of only four people in the theater, so it quickly closed. That is not a popular subject, but it was, in a lot of ways, a pretty conventional biopic. And the Beckett purist in me, I wish Rob were here, too, because I know he's a huge Beckett guy as well. But the Beckett purist to me wanted it to be more about the work and for the film to, in certain ways, grapple with the kind of aesthetic innovations that one associates with Beckett's work. But I guess if I want that, I can just go see a Beckett play. I'm not going to get it out of the Gabriel Byrne vehicle. And yet, it was fascinating at times to feel like you're a fly on the wall with young Beckett having conversations with Joyce and his family in Paris. And yeah, I suspect that what I saw in that Beckett biopic is going to be pretty similar to what we'll see with the Timothy Chalamet. What's it called? Complete unknown. That's fine. It'll probably sell a lot more tickets across the nation. Then I'm not there. But I bet I'll be returning more often to I'm not there than I will to a complete unknown. [00:09:51] Speaker B: I know we need to get I'm not there. But my only comment, which seems a little different on this, is that I was fairly ambivalent about the film until I read that interview that Mangold gave where he's talking about why he was attracted to it, and he's talking about the fact that the film is about a guy who's in Minnesota, and then it's choking to death. The phrase he uses is choking to death. And so he runs away and he reinvents himself, and he creates this new life in New York, and he creates all this new sort of thing, and then he finds himself choking to death, so he runs away again. That concept of this young kind of creative person constantly feeling trapped and enmeshed and then reinventing and then feeling trapped by that and then reinventing. I found that really moving. And I think that part of it, maybe if the film is within that realm of it, it could be interesting. Ultimately, I don't care about biopics. Ultimately, I want it to be a good film. I want it to be a creative film. I want it to be successful. I want it to be great. And it could be. It very well could be. But I don't need it to be like, here's the story of Bob. I don't. That's not interesting to me. I want it to be a good film, and I'm not. There is a story of Dylan, but it's also much bigger than that. I think it really is a beautiful film. And I think it's a film that kind of gets into the brain a bit, which I think the best films do. [00:11:11] Speaker C: And I don't want to be unfair. I'm making all these assumptions and casting aspersions about a film that I've not even seen yet. And I'm very like you court, very hopeful. I want it to be a good film. I'm really just going on the trailer and on the trailer. I think Charlemagne's done his homework, right. He's trying to get down the look, he's trying to get down the voice. He's not Bob Dylan. Who is? But you can see he's trying. And yet, where my criticism is coming from is that when I went back to watch, I'm not there again. The scenes and the performances that I was least impressed by were the ones that were most imitative. Right? The Christian Bale who clearly did his homework to try and look and sound and mumble like Bob Dylan. And it just fell flat to me. The best moments, and I'm not. There are not the ones that are trying to be this kind of photographic accuracy. Verisimilitude in imitating Bob Dylan. No, it's when, like in Jim's introduction, where you're taking all these various influences and you're throwing them together like ingredients in a blender and making this smoothie of something that you can see is related to Bob Dylan. But it's so different than Bob Dylan. That's when the I'm not there excels. It's when it's not trying to imitate Bob Dylan. And if I have some skepticism about the complete unknown, it's from that trailer, which makes me think that they're leaning into the let's see who can do the most convincing Bob Dylan imitation. [00:12:44] Speaker E: I would push back a little on the Christian Bale thing. I think that he's deliberately miscast in a way, that he's productively miscast and his height and his age and the angularity of his face, everything. It's a parody. The tv thing when he's all shucks and it's an excessive parody of the character. And the gospel section is just hilariously mortifying to see him, Victor, he's got the fro and the eyeliner and it seems extreme and hilarious to me. So I totally see what you're saying, that there's a way that those that's trying to do Bob, but I think that means knows what he's doing and is pushing this into a kind of parody of grotesquery that works with the whole movie. But I see what you're saying, I think. [00:13:42] Speaker D: Okay, so I agree with everything you've said about complete unknown, but I think I'm a little bit more positive because I do think that it will bring new folks to Bob Dylan. And if this is their banal entry point, hopefully it will get them to something deeper once they dig into Dylan and his art and whatnot. So for that reason, I'm excited about the show because I think, not because there'll be great performances, because I think you're right. It's going to be this mainstream biopic of Dylan starring someone who Gen Z is really excited about. And hopefully they'll see that and then go back to the source material and find something deeper and richer in it. And that's my hope for the film. [00:14:27] Speaker E: Yeah, I see. I hope that will happen too. I hope that was going to happen with no direction home. But the problem was that for neophytes, that was so excessive, that was so overstimulating, that by the time it was over, they weren't rushing out to download blonde on Blonde. They'd already had enough. Hopefully. [00:14:46] Speaker D: Maybe this won't be overstimulated exactly. It'll be as milk toast as they can handle. [00:14:51] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I have a feeling we're going to be talking a lot about that movie. Let's talk about I'm not there and I'm going to follow up on something Nina said about the preacher scene, the Jack Rollins preacher scene with Christian Bale. Um, one of the things I love about that scene when he's preaching and then he starts singing pressing on and actually a pretty wonderful cover pressing on too. And he does an impressive job of lip syncing, much better than Bob Dylan ever does. But one of the things I love about that is just the banality of the setting. [00:15:21] Speaker E: There's twelve people in the room. [00:15:23] Speaker A: It's a crappy room on a stage and there's kids in the back of the room and they start running around and playing. And the camera pans over to them and shows them playing while all this is going on. And it just undercuts everything that's happening in this scene. I think that's absolutely brilliant. It's one of the things. I watched this movie last night for the umpteenth time. And one of the things I love about it is its attention to unbelievable details. [00:15:49] Speaker E: Oh, my God. The production design is amazing. [00:15:53] Speaker C: The shoes he's wearing in this. [00:15:54] Speaker E: That's the. [00:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah, his office. [00:15:58] Speaker E: His little cramped, shabby office that, you know. Oh, my God, he spent all day. Yeah, that was. But it's true. The production design is amazing. Michael Gray, in his review of it, talks about what a master of color haines is and that. My God, the family. The white bleeding heart family that rescues Marcus. Just that brief scene in the living room of their house where they get the call from what's supposed to be red wing or whatever, the juvenile. And just every single item. And the tone, the way he washes out the tone into this early sixties, upscale white living. Oh, it's just so well done. Every scene that's not an item or a tone out of place. [00:16:50] Speaker B: I think that's where it works its best. I think as a tome poem, as a. I was thinking this last time I watched it, I was just so drawn to Heath Ledger and Charlie Gainsborough. And the way that's filmed, too, that looks. Oh, yeah, 1970, it looks like that. And just the browns and the blues. And it's the way it's shot. But I think that's also. It reminds me of the other high level filmmaker of like Wes Anderson with Grand Buddhist Budapest hotel, where he's able, each time periods filmed with the technology of that time period. So it's subtle, but then you realize you're looking at a soviet science. And this is the same kind of thing, all the different film references. If you're a film person, you're like, oh, this is this where he's borrowing this from all to create this Bob Dylan character. But that's why it's so multilayered on this creative level that it just is imminently, repeatedly valuable. And so you might start with Cate Blanchett because her performance is so amazing. But then it's like the whole divorce paper scene. And he's comparing that to Vietnam, that there's a lot of really tricky pieces there that work. That really work. And I don't think you can. It's as tear jerky as it is when you get Dylan at the end. It's a fucking. [00:18:08] Speaker E: Oh, my God. That is. [00:18:10] Speaker B: That's the performance. [00:18:11] Speaker E: That is. What a brilliant choice that was. [00:18:16] Speaker B: It could have been so many things. It could have been. [00:18:17] Speaker E: Exactly. It could have been so many things. [00:18:20] Speaker B: And this is where it's interesting. Are these Easter eggs? I don't think they are. They're almost like footnotes. They're like, look, I know this story, and if I'm going to be able to put these things in here so that you know that I know this story as a matter of trust, maybe, I don't know. But like, to go to that harmonica performance, that's it. And I think if he. If you'd seen that and it didn't have the different tones or had this, and it was like, let's. Whatever. And I also don't think it's. It's in the service of saying, hey, did you catch this? I don't think it's about that at all. I think it's saying that this is a story that's very thoughtfully put together in a way that you're not going to be thinking. That's bullshit. Because he's also playing completely with all the characters. None of the characters are involved. So then to trust that part of it, you have to know this other part, and for the oxygen of the film to make sense on that level, then you go away, then you go along with the other thing. I think that's one way of looking. [00:19:17] Speaker C: And the best parts are always when Bob Dylan is singing a song. Of course, in that case, it's just the harmonica. It's not even any. It's nonverbal. And yet it's also the most powerful moment in the entire film. But it reminds. It even runs the thread of undermining the film in that Bob Dylan stills the scene in every scene that he's in musically. And it runs the risk of you thinking, why am I not just watching and listening to Bob Dylan instead of a pale imitation of Dylan? [00:19:47] Speaker E: But I agree the last. It always makes me think that he's playing in a wonderful way on yellow submarine. You remember that? And then at the very end you see the Beatles. And then I feel that he's playing. [00:20:03] Speaker B: Interesting Luhrmann's Elvis, which is not without. [00:20:07] Speaker E: Oh, it's not. Maybe it's a. [00:20:09] Speaker B: That's a very beautiful ending, I think. [00:20:11] Speaker E: Yes, it is incredibly moving and good. Yeah, you're right. He does the same thing. [00:20:16] Speaker B: I like the yellow submarine point, though, because this is cartoon. This is not real. And then here they are. Yeah. [00:20:23] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:20:23] Speaker C: It's like you would get the parody of a religious scene with the christian bell preacher scene. But then there's something that feels authentically religious, sacred and holy at the end of the film. Right? He has risen. This here's the real thing. [00:20:38] Speaker B: It's hard to breathe when you get to that part. It's hard to even breathe. And yet what you're focused on is his breath, because it's the harmonica. [00:20:46] Speaker E: All you get is his breath. No voice, but breath. That's just brilliant. [00:20:51] Speaker B: It's really beautifully done. I don't know, I just. I've used this in the classroom, and I think that the students, it wasn't really about, like, them knowing or not knowing. How do you make sense of this? I guess on some level, I think we've all used it in various ways, and I don't know how successful that is, but I think as a film, it's very successful. I think it was lovely to go back and see it again because I hadn't seen it in a couple of years. [00:21:16] Speaker E: What about the use of the music? What, for other people were strong moments or striking moments or things you forgot. Use of music that songs and that you forgot. [00:21:29] Speaker B: My hot take was that Stephen Malkus is the. Except rewatching it, he completely changes the one in thin man. Right? He goes. He changes throat to mouth. [00:21:40] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:21:41] Speaker B: I don't think that works very well. And that kind of gave me pause as to saying he's so great. Balmus is great, don't get me wrong. I think he's great in all of this. And I think using his voice for the jude sections makes even more sense. And that has that reedy quality. I don't know why he changes the lyric on that. I'm not a lyrical purist and I don't. But that one lyric, I think throat works so well. Here's your mouth. Thanks for the loan. Anyway. I think that part works really well. I think musical performances throughout. I think the soundtrack. I remember the soundtrack being pretty popular at the time. The soundtrack has some good stuff on it that doesn't show up. Jim James is. That's like prime Jim James territory. [00:22:21] Speaker E: Oh, my God. That's just breathtaking. His acapulco. I thought that when I first saw. [00:22:29] Speaker A: The film, and it's beautifully shot, too. It really is the close ups that zooms in on the trumpeters. And then the whole time there's this corpse of a young woman with a. [00:22:38] Speaker E: Slit throat right behind misses Henry. And I love them cycling over and over, man in the black coat. When you see, because I thought that was just using that as. As tone and mood, I thought is lovely for the gear scenes. [00:23:00] Speaker C: I had a few songs that I thought were used particularly effectively. One was blind Willie Mactell. [00:23:06] Speaker E: I like the way that was interesting. [00:23:08] Speaker C: Yes. Because you've got within the song itself, this, what seems to be the perspective of a dying man at the end. And now the way that they merge realities and figures to make that Woody Guthrie and have the one Woody with the other Woody. And there's a racial interracial dynamic there, which is also irrelevant for blind Willie Mactel thought that was an effective use wind. I thought that outtake of idiot wind for the break. So on the one hand, it makes sense. Okay, break up between our Robbie and Claire character, idiot wind. That makes sense. But the thing that I loved, and one of you mentioned this earlier, is the way it's intercut with the Vietnam war. That there was that line. I wrote it down. Oh, yeah. Early in the film, Claire sees Nixon announcing the end of the Vietnam War, and she says, where is it? That's when she knew it was over for good. The longest running war in television history. The war that hung like a shadow over the same nine years of their marriage. So why is it suddenly so hard to breathe? And I never even thought about that. So hard to breathe and the breath of Dylan at the end of the film. But now I'm seeing maybe an interconnection there. But. So that notion of a couple breaking up. But it's intercut all along with the kind of breakup of the nation and all that the Vietnam war stands in for in the american. [00:24:33] Speaker E: They emphasize in the script that she's french triangulation of Vietnam, and they don't underplay gains. [00:24:42] Speaker C: That's right. I hadn't even thought about that part of it. But it's also. It's doing cinematically what Dylan is already doing in that song. Idiot win. [00:24:49] Speaker B: Right. [00:24:49] Speaker C: Because it's not just about a breakup. It is an idiot wind that's blowing across the nation from the grand Coulee dam to the Capitol. Right. It's the idiot wind of the Nixon administration and Watergate and Vietnam. And so I think it's a great place where, cinematically, Todd Haynes has found this correlative to what Dylan's doing musically and a great song like Idiot Wind. So those are two that really stood out to me. [00:25:15] Speaker B: What's brilliant, Greylee, is that if you look on the paper and you go, oh, idiot Wynn. Okay, I want you. They fall in love. It's so obvious, but it works so well. Like, I want you. That scene looks. It's beautiful, it's funny and it's sexy and it's all that kind of stuff. Idiot wind. But the way it shot, I think they're almost like. They're almost, you think back on. Those are almost like silent films too, with the two of them, the way that you just think of them as being filmed. But yeah, that was incredibly well done. And I wrote down the same thing with blind Willie Mactel. And also you're talking about a film called I'm not there. And the opening credits are really beautifully done. I love that. But it's also. I'm not. There is not. That is not the Spotify's top ten. That was a song that was a mystery for so long. [00:26:03] Speaker C: I'm glad you mentioned that, corb, because that so rewatching, it's one experience, but I'm also remembering watching it for the first time. And though I was a Dylan fan, I wasn't anywhere close to as hardcore of a Dylan fan as I am now. I didn't know the basement tapes nearly as well as I do now. And I'm pretty sure this is an embarrassing confession in a group like this, but I'm pretty sure I had never heard the song. I'm not there until I heard it in the film. And so that was one of the most powerful moments for the entire thing. The first time I saw, it's like, wow, where did that come from? I've never heard that. That's an amazing performance. And I was like, okay, I get why you call the whole film that now, because this star vehicle of you unveiling this amazing deep cut that I've never heard before. Oh, it blew me away. [00:26:52] Speaker D: I could have gone back to the credits and I, Ludo Foster wrote a paper and you guys may have seen it, Nina, you may have seen it in the book Anne Marie Mai edited. And he goes into the credits and just from the beginning, it's like the Rolling Thunder review, how it splits the word. And that was a clue to me that it was a farce. But he looks at the way that the words come up and it's really focusing on the complications of identity with I'm her. And it's really. It's interesting to read that analysis because, yeah, the way that the words come up and the letters come up, but there's that sort of questioning, the androgyny, the complexity of the identity that's presented. [00:27:32] Speaker A: There's opening credits I want to talk about because I've always been struck by them, partially because of their references. Right. There's a lot of. Just the images that panning of the street. That's used in don't look back. That's used in the last waltz. The people. [00:27:47] Speaker C: Mast and anonymous, too. [00:27:49] Speaker A: Mast and anonymous, yes, exactly. You've got references to chronicles in there. Some of the images on the street, you see a Moondog type character. There's references. You see the miners. Why the hell are there minors? Right. Where did Bob Dylan grow up? The Iron Range. Right. Just on and on. And the use of the black and white. There's a shot of a street scene where there's all these black kids and adults looking directly at the camera. And later on, it's funny, as many times I've seen this film, it wasn't until last night that I realized that those same characters appear later in the film on a street scene. Exactly. Dressed exactly the same way. [00:28:31] Speaker E: I noticed that, too. Yeah, the kid. I noticed that too. [00:28:34] Speaker A: Yeah. It's really cool just the way that's put together and the number of film. Todd Haines is obviously a film scholar, right? He knows film the way Dylan knows music. And he puts together the film with all these references we mentioned before. The different styles are to use, like the Fellini section with Jude Quinn and whatnot. Really brilliantly done and very accurate in a lot of ways. I wonder if anybody has any thoughts about that. [00:29:02] Speaker C: One thing that struck me, clearly there are a number of scenes that are homage, if not outright pastiche of Scorsese, especially no direction home, but also even the beginning there when we're following the figure, making his way onto stage. That's partially out of don't look back. But it also reminds me of that scene. Is it in goodfellas? Going through the kitchen and single, unbroken shot. But then the cool thing is. So if Todd Haynes is making his nod towards Scorsese in this film, Scorsese seems to do the same and make nods to Todd Haynes that I hadn't thought about in his Rolling Thunder review, where you're like, oh, you could do these same kind of interviews and just fake some of them or have these fictional or quasi fictional characters, and suddenly now it feels like rolling in Rolling Thunder review, Scorsese is returning the favor to Haynes and imitating some of his stuff from I'm not there. [00:30:00] Speaker E: I would like to think that's true. Yes. [00:30:05] Speaker A: Yeah. The Alice Fabiana interview scenes, which are. It's clearly referencing the Joan Baez interview scenes in no direction home, but with the added twist of her like saying all these little passive aggressive things. This little toad came up on stage. [00:30:24] Speaker B: Well, Jim, you mentioned this earlier, but I still can't get over your cigarette. Every time I look up, I'm like, it looks like. [00:30:30] Speaker E: Can you see that, Jim? [00:30:31] Speaker C: Can you see that? [00:30:32] Speaker E: It looks like you have a big hand. [00:30:34] Speaker A: Anyone not watching this on video, my background is the Cate Blanchett photo as Jude Quinn. And she's holding a cigarette up and it just happens to look like I'm holding this cigarette up with a giant hand. Well, it's a good effect. [00:30:47] Speaker B: But what you mentioned earlier is it really is inspired to have David Cross come in the way he does. And that's really well done because it seems realistic, too. Like that letter on the golf cart or whatever it is. And that really makes sense. And he really does play that role pretty well. [00:31:04] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. That's one of the best casting in the film. [00:31:06] Speaker A: And it's so bizarre. Like Whitney pulls up in the golf cart alongside the car and they're running along together. The whole thing is just such a bizarre conception. Why a golf cart? [00:31:15] Speaker B: It's unrealistic, though. Yeah, but I'm nervous. Can you this? Or do I just turn to the right and drive off? [00:31:23] Speaker A: Because it was so bizarre and so out of left field, it felt realistic. Right. It's like, who would think so? I'm thinking, was Allen Ginsburg known for riding around a golf cart? I'm trying to think. [00:31:35] Speaker C: I love when they're heckling the crucifix, too, which is so fantastic because we all know that image of Dylan standing by the crucifix. I guess that's it. Visiting the cemetery where Kerouac's grave is. But then that scene of them. You're going to get yourself killed. How does it feel? Do your early stuff. Classic piss takes there. That's great. [00:31:57] Speaker A: So it looks like Aaron managed to get back on. I hope her sound's working now. [00:32:01] Speaker E: Say something. [00:32:02] Speaker D: I guess it's fine for now in the household. So that's good. I can actually participate a bit more. [00:32:10] Speaker A: Welcome back. [00:32:11] Speaker D: 30 sight lane comes by. See, it's freezing for me. I don't know what's going on, but we'll see how long it lasts. [00:32:18] Speaker A: Yeah. You have a slight underwater sound, do you think? [00:32:22] Speaker C: Underwater? Like when the. What is it? Kind of Jonah reference falls off the train and into the water and gets. Yeah. [00:32:33] Speaker A: The Charlotte Gainsborough character, Claire, suddenly appears and she's like, pressing her hand against glass during that. Which is one of the few times. In fact, Woody is the only character who leaps. There's that connection, and there's also the time. He's in the town of Riddle, which he's from, which is also where Billy the Kid is played by Richard Gere. And Woody suddenly appears and runs into the horse that Richard Gere's on and says, hey, get me out of here. This is chicken town. [00:33:03] Speaker C: Rest is Charlie Chaplin. [00:33:04] Speaker A: Rest is Charlie Chaplin. And the only other sort of interphased interaction between characters from these different worlds they never meet, that we see. But it would be Christian Bale and Heath Ledger chAracter, because Heath Ledger is playing Christian Bales. Christian Bale's character playing Robbie. Right. No, he's. He Ledger's Robbie. Christian Bale played Jack. Sorry. So there's that as well. So there's all these weird interconnections that sort of help tie the movie together. [00:33:41] Speaker C: Plus, there's Robbie Robertson, who's married to a french canadian woman. Dominique, I think her name was. [00:33:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:48] Speaker C: Bourgeois. That's one of the ingredients thrown into the smoothie blender, too. [00:33:52] Speaker A: Never thought of that. Yeah. That's great. I love it. What did you make of the Black Panther sections with Bobby Seale and U. E. P. Newton? [00:34:04] Speaker E: But that's based on historical facts. Right. Wasn't a thin man that made an impression. [00:34:11] Speaker C: Bobby Sill's memoir sees the time, I think, is the name of it, where he elaborates this theory. That ballad of a thin man is an incisive commentary on race relations in America. Though I also felt that there was a godfather illusion there, too, where the Albert Grossman character getting massaged looks like Mo green getting massage before he takes a bullet through the glasses at the end of godfather. Near the end. [00:34:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And then there's the actor Bruce Greenwood playing the reporter. Just fabulous. But then he later on turns up, he's packed out as well in the riddle scenes. [00:34:50] Speaker C: So. [00:34:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. In fact, there's even one weird juxtaposition. He's wearing a beard and whatnot, so it's hard to tell. It's. It's Bruce Greenwood, but it just suddenly flashes and just shows an image of Bruce Greenwood as the reporter, and then flashes back to the face. A close up of Pat Garrett as well. [00:35:12] Speaker D: So I'm sorry, Jim, but I thought that if they make the equation between, like, the assassin and the prince, of course. And then the joke is that Aries, he's still alive. Like, he didn't actually kill. And so it's gonna push back on that idea. But having the same character playdead the press and the 65 66. And then also, and were able to play Pat Garrett. Thats how I always understood it. But then also the pushback against that is that it doesnt matter with the press sentence, hes still there, or maybe hes not there. I dont know. [00:35:45] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. He survives both assassination attempts. Yeah. The character assassination and the literal assassination attempt. [00:35:54] Speaker C: Youre reminding me of the opening of idiot wind too, with the planning stories in the press. They say, I shot a man named Gray. Oh, and I love at Newport when they come on stage, Dylan in the band and pull out Tommy guns and just mow down the audience. That's a great touch as well. [00:36:10] Speaker D: That's almost something my students responded to and last time. But I taught, I had them read several different iterations of court. You might speak to this about sort of memory. And we talked about a little episode. I'm pro server here, but how perpetuating myth. And maybe they read it as that was the effect on the crowd. But also you have to make them savor with the axe cutting cable. And we were trying to parse out like, what's history, what's perception and how do we know it's real in terms of what the story is around that? I found that to, my students find that to be one of the most interesting parts as well because it's so jarring. You see them expect to have guitars and the students do when they turn around with machine guns. But yeah, to me, it's interesting when you read Heyman's account and all the different accounts of the biographies that are all similar has stranded a similarity, but a lot of them are different too. [00:37:07] Speaker B: And it takes us back to Denmark and the gunslingers. So they literally are gunslingers. That's also a very compelling take on Seeger, I think, because that seems realistic where it's like he's outraged. Right. That whole scene is shot really well. What's beautiful about this film is that you can say things like, it seems realistic and not cartoon, but it's completely invented. You watch the gunslinger scene and then the Pete Seeger scene, you're like, that seems pretty realistic. They're not speaking literally, but it's something Nina said at the very beginning of this made me think about this. I think it gets to the heart of so many of the different parts of the Dylan story without being literal and explicitly eschewing literalism is actually giving you a closer take on it. And so then comparing this to the film that we haven't seen, but we're all giving two thumbs down to compare this to a very literal biopic. This was going to win out because this gets to the vibe and the heart of the. So going to your question or your comment, Aaron, about is it word myth in all this? It actually is playing with the myth in a way which is giving you a more realistic take on everything than if you just said, this is what happened. And they moved here and here and here. So I don't know. I think it'd be really interesting to go back and compare the very brief moment of Newport here and then see what Newport looks like in the Mangold film, which I'm assuming will be very. I don't mean that negatively, but assuming it's going to be a part of the climax of the film. [00:38:38] Speaker A: Film I was originally, it was called going electric. [00:38:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:43] Speaker A: And it's based on a biography. It's called something like Dylan goes electric. [00:38:47] Speaker C: Or something like that. Elijah Wald. [00:38:49] Speaker A: Elijah Wald. [00:38:50] Speaker B: But then that doesn't seem to be the case at all. Right. I think, like, all that kind of got shifted. Anyway, it'd be interesting to see, like, where a biopic is not as successful by being literal, where an art film is way more successful in giving you something by not being literal. [00:39:08] Speaker C: Another angle of approach to this question of degrees of being literal. I wonder how this film would be received if it were being made and released today. And I'm thinking, especially the casting, I'm not on social media, so I miss out on a lot of the noise and the outrage machine of commentary. But I know there's so much pushback and protest when an actor is cast from a different demographic group than the character being played. We think of the pushback on Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein, for instance. Or I've heard that there's some pushback about casting someone who's not of mexican descent in the Joan Baez character for the upcoming film. And Todd Haynes is so out there in his casting on this, which is one of the things we've all responded to as capturing certain facets of Dylan in interesting ways. But I bet there are a lot of people on Twitter or X who have a different opinion about those casting decisions. If the film were coming out today, I don't know. [00:40:11] Speaker E: The only jewish reference is Aaron Jacob Adelstein, and he makes up this really hyper jew name for the character. [00:40:21] Speaker A: From Brookline, Massachusetts. [00:40:23] Speaker E: Yeah, from Brookline, Massachusetts, a very wealthy jewish community. It's not just middle class. It's a very wealthy jewish community outside Boston. And so that sat a little with me, a little ill with me, and shalom it was a lot of talk about whether they were going to do a nose for Timothy shall. That was. I was in the. So there is that element, I think. [00:40:51] Speaker A: Though, Graylee, the objections. Yeah, but I think the objections that you usually hear are when somebody from the dominant group is portraying someone from the non dominant group. Right. So you have a white guy playing a Mexican. [00:41:04] Speaker C: Right. [00:41:05] Speaker A: Or a white woman playing. Right. In this case, we're talking about a 13 year old black actor portraying an aspect of an adult white actor or white performer or a woman. Right. Playing a man. It would be very different playing a woman, I think, for a variety of reasons, but I think there might be some objections there. But in this case, he's commenting on androgyny. Right. He's commenting on Dylan's androgyny in the mid sixties. [00:41:35] Speaker B: Off topic, but connected to what greatly was saying, though I have some poorly formed thoughts on this, but I was reminded watching it about how this was a long time ago and we used to have films like this. It's like 2007 is a very particular era, and there are some really beautiful films being made during that period, and we just don't have the bandwidth for them anymore. And looking back on this was a film that would have gone out, that had an audience. He has an audience, Dylan has an audience. But it was also just, oh, this is another great film that we're going to have in the theater few weeks. And I feel like we're so far removed from that that it was very bittersweet in some ways. It's like smart entertainment, and I don't want to be like a curmudgeon here or anything like that. It's just, it's a very particular time in my life that I think about the late aughts into the early teens, and it's a really interesting period that we've completely lost touch with. I don't know if I have a comment on what you're saying specifically because I think that is interesting. I do think that now, regardless of how that would be done now that becomes the 95% of the conversation is that kind of thing. I'm not saying that's even wrong on some level, but I do think that's anathema to the artistic question. It becomes just this other sort of sideshow. I don't want to be denigrating specific cases where clearly that was problematic. I'm just simply saying that becomes all of the conversation immediately. And now everyone has to have a comment immediately as we all have on a film. We haven't seen yet. But I think there is something. We have to immediately have 15 2nd clips of commentary on something. And I think that's just destroyed, like an artistic conversation. [00:43:27] Speaker E: Agreed. Benedict Cumberbatch was supposed to be Pete Seeger in this, but he couldn't be because he's in this nightmarish see Netflix thing called Eric, which is nightmarish. And that stopped Benedict from being in our movies. [00:43:53] Speaker A: And who replaced him? I'm trying to remember Ed Norton. [00:43:56] Speaker C: I liked Ed Norton and several things. [00:43:58] Speaker E: So hopefully no Benedict Cumberbatch, are you, sir? [00:44:04] Speaker D: I was looking forward to Cumberbatche, but I'm a little disappointed. [00:44:11] Speaker B: I thought. And Norton was everyone's favorite. He's great. No good Norton when I think Pete Seeger and Gen Z when they are salivating for Pete Seeger biopic. So I think it's all good. We're gonna have some Mike Seager erasure. [00:44:29] Speaker C: More Cowbell and more Pete Seeger. Those are two things I hear from Gen Z. All of. [00:44:36] Speaker A: All right, I can see this is devolving here. I'm going to make the call here, but I want to. We've been talking for almost an hour, which is really amazing. I think we could keep going on this film. We did spend a lot of time though, talking about this new biopic coming up. But that's unavoidable. [00:44:54] Speaker B: Jim. We're going to have to do one on it. [00:44:56] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. But I think we should do it before the film comes out. I think we should do a full hour. Everything we think about it. [00:45:02] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:45:04] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:45:04] Speaker C: Right. Have deeply entrenched opinions about a film. That is the only way to go. [00:45:10] Speaker A: But we'll release it after the film comes out. So that would be a double whammy. All right, I want to thank everyone. This has been fantastic as always. Really enjoyed it. We miss Rob. Great job. [00:45:21] Speaker B: Good thoughts to Rob. [00:45:22] Speaker A: Yeah, good thoughts to Rob. Thank you. [00:45:28] Speaker D: That hand is freaking me out. [00:45:30] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Dylan Ponds podcast. Be sure to subscribe to have the Dylan Tons sent directly to your inbox and share the Dylan tons on social media.