Bob Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America

September 20, 2003

Masked and Anonymous

Bob Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America

By DAVID VEST

Bob Dylan's new film, "Masked and Anonymous," has met with almost
universal
condemnation (or worse, condescension) from critics in the corporate
media.
According to most reviewers, in lieu of a plot the film offers "rambling

incoherence" and "incomprehensible dialogue." It is "an exercise in
self-indulgence." Several reviewers have actually worried in print that
Dylan made the movie in order to have some kind of joke at their
expense.
Dylan's character, Jack Fate, has little or nothing to say, we are
repeatedly told, and more or less just "sits there like a toad," in the
words of Roger Ebert, who should be the last person to accuse anyone of
that.

Could the movie really be this bad? It wouldn't matter if it were equal
to
"The Tempest" or "Julius Caesar," it has already been pronounced D.O.A.

Anytime the nation's media are this unanimous about anything, one would
do
well to be suspicious. After all, President Bush's decision to invade
Iraq
in search of "weapons of mass destruction" was met not with skepticism
but
with near-unanimous cheerleading and boosterizing in the corporate
media.

Reviewers had already effectively killed Dylan's film by the time it
arrived
in Portland, Oregon for a perfunctory one-week run. Although attendance
grew
steadily during the week, it started sparse and grew toward respectable.

Not ten minutes after the opening credits I could see why the film had
been
marked for assassination by big newspaper media critics. They are the
villains of the piece! "Masked and Anonymous" portrays the reporters who

wrote the bad reviews as people who have to wear ankle monitors. Editors

hold the keys that control them. Who owns the editors is pretty clear,
too.
The sight of superstar critic and Sixties specialist "Tom Friend" (Jeff
Bridges) being beaten to death with Blind Lemon Jefferson's guitar must
have
been too much for them.

"Friend," obsessed with his own memories of the Sixties but oblivious to

what is going on outside the window, never seems to notice that Fate,
his
quarry, answers none of his questions.

Officials of the "network" televising the "benefit" on which Fate is to
appear see him as self-indulgent, too. They want him to sing "Jailhouse
Rock," "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Revolution -- the slow version."

He gives them "Dixie."

The infamous "rambling and incomprehensible" plot is in fact rather
well-constructed and makes abundant sense. Although the project could
have
used some tighter editing and more attention to minor issues of
continuity,
anyone who couldn't follow this movie probably couldn't be trusted with
a
comic book. The storyline is no more "obscure" or "disjointed" than "A
Hard
Day's Night."

But it hits a great deal harder. When the camera pans slowly down a
desolate
L.A. avenue, and Dylan is heard singing "Seen the arrow on the doorpost,

saying This Land is Condemned, all the way from New Orleans to
Jerusalem,"
try to keep tears from welling. (Or sit there like a toad eating popcorn
and
stuff the feeling, it's your call.)

Whereas the concert finale of "A Hard Day's Night" is witnessed by
screaming
teenagers and an adoring TV audience, the concert performed by Fate in
"Masked and Anonymous" is seen by no one except stage hands and extras
because it is pre-empted by a presidential speech and interrupted by
guns
and bayonets.

In spite of what you may have read, the film is not "set in some
imaginary
third-world country at some point in the future," anymore than King Lear
is
about prehistoric England. Failure to recognize the true setting should
immediately disqualify any reviewer. "Masked and Anonymous" is a spot-on

accurate portrayal of what is going on RIGHT NOW, seen through the eyes
of
someone with vision and not just eyesight, someone who has looked
through
the eyes not only of Charley Patton and Elizabeth Cotton but also of
Emmett
Miller and even Daniel Decatur Emmett.

All America's chicken-hawk foreign wars have come home to roost. The
horrors
once visited upon El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Somalia and Iraq are
now
rolling through the streets of California. All the electoral disgrace of

recent campaigns has been compressed into one presidential speech. As
for
the major media as portrayed in this film, it is impossible not to think
of
Christiane Amanpour's recent admission that CNN "was intimidated" by the

Bush administration and operated in a "climate of fear and
self-censorship"
during the invasion of Iraq.

When the new president (Mickey Roarke) concludes his "war-is-peace"
oration
at the end of the film with the sarcastic words "May God help you all,"
it
is merely what anyone with a perceptive imagination can hear Bush or
Cheney
saying when they conclude their speeches with the formulaic "God Bless
America." Certainly the administration portrayed in "Masked and
Anonymous"
is no more thuggish than the one currently rooting at the trough in
Washington.

Or, as Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) puts it, "It's the dark princes,
the
democratic republicans, working for a barbarian who can scarcely spell
his
own name."

When a soldier (Giovanni Ribisi) tells Fate of fighting first with the
rebels, then with the counter-insurgents, then with the Government, then

with the rebels again, only to discover that some of the rebels are in
fact
funded by the very Government they're supposed to be opposing, how
strange
does that seem to anyone familiar with the betrayals and capitulations
of
contemporary politics, especially movement politics? It's like finding
out
who sponsors "Earth Day."

My favorite exchange: "I'm trying to be on your side, Jack," says Uncle
Sweetheart, the promoter who is, naturally, "only trying to help."

"You have to be born on my side, Sweetheart," says Fate.

To be on the side of workers, of animals, of oppressed people, of love,
of
the truth is to court destruction. Before singing his final song and
meeting
his own fate, Jack Fate experiences a visitation by his ghostly
forerunner,
Oscar Vogel (Ed Harris), a banjo-playing entertainer who worked in
blackface
and who disappeared after raising his voice against the times. When Fate

looks back to catch a last glimpse of Vogel, the vaudevillian has been
replaced by a young Black man who could be a janitor, a Reggae artist or
a
rising Hip-Hop truth teller, next in the line of destiny, or line of
fire.

This film isn't perfect. I have read the original screenplay and far too

much has been cut out of it to try to make it acceptable to people who
would
have had none of it under any circumstances. But it is the only motion
picture I have seen so far in this millennium that seems to have a clue
about what is going on in America. Moviegoers will get it or they won't.

Great pains have been taken to ensure that they won't even see it.

It is a tale of almost unbearable sadness and loss. When Dylan sings
"I'll
Remember You," as electrifying a performance as has ever been caught on
camera (all the songs are performed live, there's no lip-synching in
this
movie) you feel that he may well be singing not merely about a person
but
also about that "lost America of love" that Ginsberg mourned in "A
Supermarket in California," a work that in its visionary aspect and
intensity "Masked and Anonymous" resembles. (Its ultimate antecedents
are of
course Shakespeare's history plays.)

When Dylan's character, Fate, is reunited with his lost/doomed love
(Angela
Bassett, magnificent in the role), she endeavors with great tenderness
to
console him for his losses, and without a word Dylan manages to convey
that
Fate's grief is inconsolable. It is a scene of considerable beauty and
delicacy.

Dylan's performance has been called "inscrutable." But who else could
have
played this role? There are people who find his songs inscrutable as
well,
and I suppose arguing with them would be as pointless as trying to
answer
"Tom Friend's" interview questions. (These days, anything an idiot can't
or
won't bother to understand is "incomprehensible" and "inscrutable.")

The most daring (and intriguing) line in the film slips by almost
unnoticed:
moments after Jack Fate is arrested for a sudden act of violence
committed
by his sidekick Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson), he thinks to himself,
"Sometimes
it's not enough to know the meaning of things. Sometimes we have to know

what things don't mean as well. Like, what does it mean to not know what
the
person you love is capable of?"

Unlike D. A. Pennebaker's "Don't Look Back," which showed a young Dylan
eating dumb but presumptuous critics alive, "Masked and Anonymous"
depicts
an aging Jack Fate with nothing whatever to say to them. "I was always a

singer and maybe no more than that," he says.

So much for "self-indulgence."
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
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