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I'm Not There

Submitted by SarahJett on November 27, 2007 - 9:22am. | | | | | |

This weekend, I saw the movie I'm Not There. Afterward--actually also during--my sister complained, "This movie is too long! It's hard to follow! And why is Richard Gere even in it? I don't get that part. They should have made a normal biopic and had Cate Blanchett play Bob Dylan the whole time."

That made me wonder--what makes a biopic "normal"? (Possibly, the casting of Cate Blanchett?) Would it have been normal to retell Bob Dylan's life in an ordinary, linear, Cate-Blanchett-only fashion? I thought his music gave the jumbled events the sense of an orderly progression (of emotion and energy, if nothing else). In certain ways, allowing the music to dominate the story rather than a standard, narrative plot made the movie easier to follow and believe because maybe in Dylan's case the music makes more sense than the historical details. I wonder what he thought of the movie. It seems like he must have liked the concept because he let them use his music, so Cate Blanchett wasn't reduced to reciting Chaucer at cows (like Gwyneth Paltrow in Sylvia).

Biopics seem so popular lately. I'm just wondering if they're already a standardized genre or if they're a form still evolving or what.

Could an assignment relating to autobiography incorporate ideas like this?

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I think the Dylan movie

Submitted by laurasmith on December 3, 2007 - 10:52pm.

I think the Dylan movie would make a great topic for a class discussion about auto/biography. About what "biography" is in this film, what/how biography "usually" is, what it can ever be.... (Though to really teach it, I'd want to also show clips of the Scorsese/Godard/Fellini pieces it's constantly referencing.... and the cultural "quoting" certainly presents another interesting topic about making biography....)

Anyway, the movie's not really about Dylan's life--right? I mean, it's not about the life of Dylan, this specific, personal guy. It's about Dylan as a dense and wildly overdetermined cultural location, about being a person who is an overdetermined cultural location, about Dylan's repeated reinvention of himself, Dylan mythology, Dylan-made mythology, Dylan as mythology, which i think is why the ideas of sincerity and what you can be held responsible for come up so much in the movie (and the movie presents these partly to deflect them over and over). And of course--and this is what a lot of people are saying about it--it's very much about the music, right? It feels like a Dylan song---the way the film is structured, the way it blends fiction and reality, outside and inside, the way time works---everything is structured like a Dylan song, and the movie points this out over and over.

The film is also really interested in the status of public and private when you are a locus of cultural meaning... Do public and private remain meaningful as categories within such a life/within such a biography? Another interesting question is whether these ideas about self/autobiography only apply to Dylan (or other similar cultural figures) or to everyone...

(Interestingly, the POETICS list can't stop talking about this film, though the general feeling there seems to be that it's not experimental enough---that it gets too conventionally biographical in the Cate Blanchett sections and that it gets too literal in a bunch of other places, in terms of how it tries to correlate music and outside events. I was mostly relieved by the movie--in that it's NOT too straight.... that it manages to be very playful and mostly deessentializing--it was, in fact, an incredibly queer approach to Dylan. in that there's really no there there.)

When is Tremel going to chime in?

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