MUSIC THROUGH THE YEARS, 16

40 years ago: December, 1967
I first heard Songs of Leonard Cohen in the summer after I graduated high school, which is to say almost a decade after its release. Not many albums compare to it for the way it dominated my listening; it seemed to create an unshakeable mood. There was a quality to Cohen's debut album that seems not to be assimilable to the pop song, or even into the folk-song consciousness that Dylan and various other "poets" of the '60s song-writing binge had already made familiar to me.

Cohen was already a published poet and a published novelist by the time he turned to song-writing and recording. It always seemed to me that his musical career began because of record execs realizing, in the wake of Dylan et al., that there was money in serious young men composing surreal lyrics. Like Dylan, his songs were recorded by various vocalists looking to add profundity to their repertoire. And like Dylan, the versions he recorded of his own songs were less "musical," less polished, certainly less "commercial" than what others could do with them. This album, maybe more than any other I can think of, with the exception of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, is for me a major marker of the '60s. So much of what passes for "the '60s" in the general conception -- whether acid rock, or Motown, or the British Invasion, or psychedelia, or Hendrix's guitar, or the best era for Top 40 of my lifetime, or whatever -- is set off to one side by this album. It consolidates my sense of the '60s because that seems the only time when an album like this could have been made. Granted, these days, with all the low-key, low-fi, indie alternates, it should be easy to find correlatives. But is it?

For one thing, Cohen was 33 when this album was released, and the maturity of it is striking in that regard. In fact, that may have to do with the quality of it that so arrested me. As if the first album Dylan released was Blood on the Tracks. There's already a long life behind these songs. These aren't songs that tell stories or that simply create feelings to go along with the tune. As performance, the songs are annunciations, statements, composed and delivered by a writer who understands, more than most songwriters, what it means to articulate a position. The task is to deliver, within a five or three minute song, a sense of experience as inner realization, to find images and phrases to enact what seem to be different facets of the same thing: the poet's mind beset by the poet's mind.

Generally the catalyst experience is some kind of relation to a woman, but not entirely or only. And maybe that's what registered so strongly with me at the time (in those uneasy late-teen years inaugurated by getting out of school finally): the attraction of the females that Cohen's songs sketch a relation to is a kind of attraction that is rarely met with in pop songs. It's the attraction of "the muse," that nebulous figure that one finds inside the mind, stitched or knit together, no doubt, from actual girls of one's experience, and of one's reading and of one's film-viewing, but blended with some ineffable quality that is ultimately the quality of the poet's mind, of his regard for how his words can shade that relation most artfully, most meaningfully.

A muse figure that would recur for Cohen is Joan of Arc, mostly because of the French component to the culture of Montreal where Cohen grew up and eventually studied at McGill. But choosing such a figure not only brings in medievalism -- which certainly had its faddishness in the '60s -- but also a Catholic mythology that Cohen -- whose first book of poems was called Let Us Compare Mythologies -- seems to evoke for the sake of two concepts that, perhaps, it takes Catholicism to appreciate: the flesh and the Word. And maybe that's the other thing that registered about Cohen, making him eclipse even Dylan for a time (for me): there is an aesthetic at work, or, more to the point, these are songs written by a man who knows what an aesthetic is, who has experienced it in a literary way, which makes him seem more worldly, more European, more cultivated than Blind Boy Grunt could ever aspire to.

Don't get me wrong: what made me believe in Dylan was the fact that he never became literary, try as many have (and never more so than these latter years) to accomplish that feat of making him so. Cohen is literary, without apology. Or maybe it's just that behind his songs a literary sensibility lurks, smirking at the simplistic stylings of these little ditties. Regardless, his claim to what he calls "stranger music" is unparalleled. It's a claim to the suffering the flesh undergoes because of the Word -- not just that our sin of desiring knowledge more than God's love makes us guilty even in our glory, but that knowledge of the Word means we can never be content with the flesh, no matter how we worship it. Almost every Cohen song meditates on some aspect of this mythology. So the mastery of Cohen is not only the oddity of "pop" songs set irrevocably in a fallen world, it's also the necessary sense that song is the only possible response to such a condition of existence. You must sing to the Lord via the Muse. It's really the best you can do.

And taking from his wallet an old schedule of trains
He says, "I told you when I came, I was a stranger."
--Leonard Cohen, "The Stranger Song" (1967)

KNIGHT THE KNAVE, KING

"The whole place seemed to me a huge refuse heap where I knew a dark jewel had been lost. My failure was absurd, horrible, excruciating. The leaden sluggishness of dream-endeavour. Hopeless gropings among dissolving things. Why was the past so rebellious?"--Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941)

The last book of the semester often seems, by the law of chronological advancement, the telos, the point to which all was tending. In some ways, it's always true: the last thing, like the first thing, sets unmistakable boundaries. And if where you end is a transition, all the more meaning accrues from the sense of finality that comes with stopping there. In historical terms, the course began before the end of the nineteenth century and ended during the Second World War. What comes after that war is the stuff of a new world unveiled. Nabokov, born in 1899, fittingly brings the years of modernism to a close. And it's a significant book to end on because it's the Russian author's only English novel -- which is to say, it's the first he wrote in English and the only one he wrote while living in England. He may have remained "an English novelist," but instead he moved to the U.S. and so became "an American novelist." No matter, he is a true cosmopolitan and this novel, about a writer, Sebastian Knight, son of a Russian father and English mother, who, a native speaker of Russian, writes all his novels in English, not only straddles the two languages Nabokov was most at home in, but also stands in that space cleared by the passing away of the modernist greats born in "the British isles" (both Joyce and Woolf died in the year of Real Life's publication).

The novel is a fantasy of Sebastian's life as pieced together -- or actually as performed, commanded, manifested, imagined, uncovered, conjectured -- by Sebastian's alleged half-brother, known only as V. V., we're told, remained Russian, growing up in the house of their common father and his second wife, after the departure and subsequent death of Sebastian's mother. The point is that Nabokov cleverly fashions one alter-ego -- his usual semi-demented narrative voice, obsessed, urbane, mellifluous, playful, arch, and absurdly verbal -- to write about another alter ego: himself as an English novelist who eschews his native language. Which is what Nabokov is doing in writing this novel, so that the numerous novels Nabokov had already published in Russian (while in exile in Berlin) become stand-ins for Sebastian's English novels.

Of course this gives our V. (the, uh, real V.--Vladimir) any number of levels of fictive fun to play with. For the "fictional" V. is composing what is ostensibly a biography of the novelist Knight, when in fact he spends as much time narrating his attempts to come to some kind of terms with Sebastian -- as a person, extremely elusive in his own right, and as a novelist, extremely clever and playful in his own write, so to speak. There are any number of quotations from Knight's novels and, like the poem of John Shade in Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), they are supreme Nabokovian performances; in this case, flights upon the fictive wings of an imaginary author whose fictions, truth to tell, become as real, or more so, than the "real life" that V. provides us with, if only because -- rather than finding the real life figures that correspond to Knight's fictional characters -- he seems instead to provide us "real" fictional characters that derive from his memories of Knight's books. The point being that he knows the books much better than he ever knew his half-brother.

In a sense, Nabokov winks at us to say, what can we ever know about a writer except his books? Who would wish to know more is bound to end frustrated. Not because people are unknowable (though they are), but because all we really can know is what the books do to our brains. And what person -- living, breathing, and taking up space -- could possibly be adequate to that secret, furtive little frisson that takes place when words on a page come to life as "something" in our minds? Nabokov is second only to Joyce (the Joyce of the most audacious passages of Ulysses and of Finnegans Wake) in his capacity for making words live with a life that is more vital, more fraught with actual relationships between letters, between sounds, than most of us, unimaginative clods as we generally aspire to be, could possibly lay claim to. In a Nabokov sentence, any word might suddenly claim a starring role and do things with its small part that are unexpected, able to invest its fellows with erratic associations that glide along "above" or "behind" (only because spatial analogies seem helpful -- actually, they're all right there together) the supposed manifest meaning that, we're supposed to think, is telling us a story. Oh, yes, there's a story alright, but it's the inevitable Nabokov story, as recurrent in its permutations as any old tale of Shem and Shaun: a man and his double, which for VN, is always an analogy (or doubling) for the situation of the world as we know it to our own minds and the world as it exists when we try to put it into words for the sake of . . . the world.

"Hopeless gropings amongst dissolving things." Many are the comparisons of Nabokov's fiction to systems such as chess (of which he was very fond) where there are numerous permutations but always within given bounds and in which "figures" or "pieces" have to behave according to predetermined rules. And it's true that his novels feel at times very much like a chess match in which you are trying to hold your own with but small idea of how many moves your opponent is ahead. Of course, in a Nabokov novel, that system or playing field is also all his, of his own devising, and you've merely stumbled into it, much as Alice tumbled down the rabbit-hole or wandered through the looking-glass. But what makes me think so highly of Nabokov, seeing him not as simply a great master game-player but, with Beckett, one of the first masters for the second half of that century we were all born in, is that "the play is the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" seems always to be in service: the game that arch narrating persona plays is out to catch "the king," i.e., the mind -- heart and soul, if you like -- or, use Hamlet's word, conscience -- of the man himself.

But what is meant by "conscience," here? For Hamlet, it's a struggle to see the king's guilt manifested. The game Nabokov's narrators play with his selves may also have something to do with guilt; at least it has something to do with sanity (which is what, it comes to seem, Hamlet himself risks by putting at hazard everything he is "in play"). In any case, call it what you like, there's not much more that can be at stake once you've decided that you will live by phantoms that you cause to occur in the minds of others more opaque to you than you are to yourself.

Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being -- not a constant state -- that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations.

CROWN PRINCE OF BANALITY

From films that make one consider the power of painting, as translated into another medium, let's turn to paintings that make one consider the banality of the medium. The weekend before last I attended the Guggenheim's retrospective on the career of Richard Prince, a career I was rather blissfully ignorant of, but for the cover of Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse, which, come to find out, is one of the more spectacular things he ever did.

My daughter and I began the exhibit at the top, where the Nurse paintings are. We didn't know they were up there, it's just that I thought (wrongly) that the earliest stuff would be at the top, then we'd spiral our way down to the present. As it turns out, you're supposed to start at the bottom and walk to the top, at which point you can take the elevator down (taking elevators up always makes more sense to me) or else walk down past the same unprepossessing canvases you already saw. A line from Dylan occurs to me here: "you know what they say about being nice to the right people on the way up / sooner or later you're gonna meet them comin' down." Well, I preferred meeting these paintings "comin' down." We started with the best stuff, and so ended with the insipid photographs of ads for VO whisky with which, the wall texts told us, RP had his big "breakthrough" -- while working for Time magazine . . . that's right, Time magazine. Ok, maybe I'm just an aesthete snob to think that no worthwhile artistic idea could come from Time magazine or from anyone who works for it, but I can't help it. Honestly. I remember Time magazine in the '80s (when RP was working there). It's like if I wanted to pick a detail which would completely deflate someone's supposed claim to cultural authority, that might be the one I would come up with: he worked for Time magazine in the '80s. How could you live that down?, you (meaning I) might ask. Wrong question. No need to. The breakthrough is that banality is the new profundity, or something. Pictures of "heroicizing" paintings of cowboys are not celebratory of the West, or of ads or films about the West, they are in fact wry send-ups of the Reagan administration and its claims to a rugged Western mythos. Or maybe they're comments on how Marlboro sold cigarettes. In any case, on the wall, they're just pictures of kitschy cowboy art.

But I'm doing this wrongly. We ended with that stuff -- good planning because then we could get out fast, patience exhausted. But we started with the Nurse paintings: they may only be huge inkjet repros of trashy nurse novel covers, painted over in bold colors and drippy paint, but they are, as one says, the most "painterly" canvases in RP's oeuvre. I suppose that might be conjectured to mean something about the return of some kind of "action" to the canvas. But it seems RP got a bad conscience about that, so he then set about to cut out "dirty" pictures and paste them onto repros from a de Kooning catalog. The end results were at least cartoonishly amusing, and I suppose it's always fun to see a little porn with your high art pretensions (snicker snicker). In fact, my favorite moment of the visit was in that very room as the obliging museum personage, conducting some ancient couple into the room, was jawing about the value of RP's prints -- the couple seemed prospective buyers and I was amused to think of them trying to decide if they wanted to buy the piece with the biggest boobs or the biggest dick.

Walking through the exhibit the wrong way also took some of the suspense out of the retrospect: we got to see the "joke paintings" in their fully evolved form (the entire joke, not just the punchline, layered colors, a surface pasted with decorative personal checks -- I liked the ones with Hendrix on them, you?) and the more colorful fiberglass castings of car hoods first. As we spiraled down, we got to see the joke paintings become "monochrome jokes" -- usually just a punchline and a canvas of one color -- and the car hoods become less car-like, more like monochromatic pieces of fiberglass.

Here and there were series of photographs: pictures from the back of biker mags of biker chicks and biker hosses . . . studies of landscapes that showed us how, when RP left the Big City, he found a kind of rural desolation. Gee. One picture I did like a lot: a basketball net in a completely overgrown field. It looked like a totem from some lost civilization. And I will say this on behalf of the car hood pieces: they too looked impressively totemic. I don't know how many times one has to see it to be struck by it, or why, having made one impressively totemic car hood, one would be compelled to do another and another, but I suppose it's a contrast between "the art object" and the factory-made object. The wall text tried to tell us that the "jokes" in the joke paintings are a kind of "found object" of popular culture that "reveals" (once the jokes are on the museum wall, apparently) how bigoted and sexist and aggressive our humor is. It makes you think. I won't bother making the comparison of joke texts to pretentious wall text, but, yeah.

There was another room which had photos of celebrities, many autographed. I was amused by a poster, author photo and book cover for Leonard Nimoy's I Am Not Spock. RP, it seems, collects Americana and memorabilia. In that same room were first editions of things like Dharma Bums and a book by Lenny Bruce. I thought of maybe stenciling a statement on a big canvas, RP-like:

YOUCANKEEPALLTH
ESUPPOSEDARTBUT
WHATDOYOUWANTF
ORTHATCOPYOFTAR
ANTULAYOUCANKEE

Anyway, I do want to comment on the one joke painting that, at whatever stunning year for the history of the world -- sometime in the '80s -- it appeared, at least carried a point. It's a monochrome brownish color (I think) and the writing is sort of yellowish (as I recall) and it says, stenciled across the center of the canvas: "I didn't have a penny to my name, so I changed my name." The pause in the line, I think, was marked by a place where what appeared to be two canvases were joined. In any case, these technical matters (color and placement, etc.) really don't matter as far as I can see. They're arbitrary, not significant. The point of the joke paintings is that nothing signifies. But at least this one example makes a significant gesture, arguably, out of not signifying. Or at least that's what I think because, being a text person as I am, I can't help reading that one-liner as not only funny but as commentary.

Most of the other jokes don't work as jokes (not particularly funny), nor as commentary (they aren't "captions" to "our moment" in any decisive way). But this one might be. In one sense: the "struggling artist" without a penny to his name, changes his name: becomes "a name," a celebrity. In another sense: art, which is morally and aesthetically bankrupt, changes its name -- in the sense the joke means: I was worthless, so I changed my name. Now I'm not worthless any more. If only by the law of non-identity. If only it were that simple. But, the joke being on the speaker, of course one's name and one's lack of funds are not logically related -- nor causally. Changing my name to Donald Trump doesn't do anything for me financially. So when art changes its name to "commodity" or to "fetish" or even to "totem" it doesn't by that fact become those things (nor does a bad joke become worthwhile by becoming bad art). It's still worthless, no matter what we call it. But of course, it's worth a lot of money, and so, no longer penniless, it has changed its status in changing its name. So, who is the joke on?

I thought of quoting Elvis Costello from "How to Be Dumb" -- but I think I'll just end with the words of another prince, the one from Denmark:

Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars' shadows. Shall we to th' court? For, by my fay, I cannot reason.

"AND 'UT PICTURA POESIS' IS HER NAME"

The last double feature of the semester for me was a well-paired viewing of Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and Derek Jarman's Caravaggio (1986). Both filmmakers began their careers as visual artists in a medium other than film, and both films riff off visuals from paintings -- for Jarman it's Caravaggio, of course, while Greenaway has some fun with motifs from Vermeer paintings.

The Jarman film is much easier to get a handle on: it's a fantasy of the life of Caravaggio, presenting events that might be "behind" certain paintings, or dramatizing situations that the painter's artistry and unorthodox lifestyle involve him in: the contumely of patronage, erotic dallying, homosexual and heterosexual, with models -- particularly a couple played by Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton -- the artist in extremis, with voice over stream-of-consciousness, while being attended by his devoted and mute assistant. The staging of the dramatic vignettes at times leaves a bit to be desired, and any scenes that involve actual painting seem travesties of Caravaggio's art when we see the lumpish mess on the canvas he's working on. But what Jarman excels at is recreating the paintings cinematically: he is able to create tableaux that strikingly render certain Caravaggio paintings.

There were other striking visuals as well: as when the male model (Bean) is, through Caravaggio's maneuvering, released from prison -- jailed for the crime of killing his paramour (Swinton) because she was leaving him, with their child, to become the mistress of a cardinal. Caravaggio believes he's innocent, but turns out he's not. So Caravaggio slits the man's throat in a scene set anachronistically against a car from a '30s gangster film, and the scene is shot in a kind of livid filmic light.

But the scene that elicited a gasp from me was late in the film: Caravaggio's in his death throes and there's a vision of him, as a youth garbed as an angel, in the company of the man, Pasquale, who may have been his first lover. They walk into a room and gaze out of the screen at us; then we see what they're seeing: a faithful rendering of Caravaggio's Deposition from the Cross, with the painter in the role of Christ. The composition in Caravaggio's painting is dramatic and powerful: all the diagonals of the bending men, rough and peasant-like, over the body of the dead Christ, prodding downward in the left hand corner like the rudder of a ship, create a sense of timeless stability while their faces and stances suggest a snapshot's spontaneity. Presented so starkly and suddenly in the context of the film, the image leaps off the screen, rendering at once the sense of the painter's passion and suffering while at the same time -- one of the key elements of the film I'd say -- aestheticizing the pain but not anaesthetizing it: the pain of the scenes we watch become canvases of remarkable beauty, a beauty that hurts.

Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts ("ZOO") is much harder to summarize. It's a meditation on death and "freaks" of nature delivered via a theater of verbal and visual puns, stunningly filmed by Sacha Vierny, the man behind the camera on most of Greenaway's films. This film boasts, like his later masterpiece, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989), the over-packed tableaux, the tracking shots synched to the haunting music of Michael Nyman, the stylized dialogue, the painterly compositions, the studious mis-en-scène of Greenaway's signature style. Here, perhaps more than in any other Greenaway film, it's all at the service of odd proliferation of coincidence: visual, verbal, narrative.

It's much like a Nabokov novel in the way that patterns run the show: Alba Bewick, a woman driving a white Mercury, is in an accident involving a collision with a pregnant swan. Her passengers, two women, are both killed. The women, also pregnant, were married to two brothers, Oliver and Oswald Deuce, a pair of zoologists, who, we subsequently learn, were Siamese twins at birth. Alba (a "buick driving a Mercury") has her leg amputated; later, she loses the other one, under strong suspicion that the doctor advised it for the sake of the symmetry. The doctor, we're told, is a descendant of Van Meegeren, the man who forged Vermeer paintings. Meanwhile, the brothers, in their stark grieving for their wives, take to activities like: watching an endless nature documentary that traces the existence of life on the planet from the earliest, simplest forms up to man; or hiring the services of "Venus de Milo" (known as Milo for short), a prostitute who is also involved with an unsavory fellow who deals in black market obtainment of animals.

The brothers, in their obsession with a) how the odd confluence of swan, their wives, car and driver could have happened, and b) the rate and nature of decay in dead bodies (there is much fascinating footage, in speeded-up time-lapse photography of various organisms decaying: from fruit to prawns to fish to a swan to an alligator to a zebra), drive the film as though it were a demented game of cat-and-mouse with death itself: to uncover the secrets of how we came to be, as a species, to why we die as we do, and what becomes of us then.

 The brothers also begin, separately, sexual relations with Alba, and one has a tendency to free animals from the zoo where they work. There are fixations with certain recurring motifs, such as black and white stripes, the song "The Teddy Bear's Picnic," abecedaries (Alba has a daughter Beta and wants to have children to name for all the Greek letters), snails, Vermeer's "Lady in a Red Hat" and "The Artist's Studio," symbols of fecundity, maternity, and of course mortality, and the most oddly beautiful use of repellent things that one can imagine.

The movie doesn't so much follow a narrative as offer a series of tableaux and vignettes, each taking as its starting point some matter already portrayed. When whatever is ailing Alba claims her life, the brothers want to photograph her body's decay; they are thwarted by Alba's new husband, a legless man named Felipe Arc-en-Ciel, and so enter into a death-pack for the sake of research that is in its turn thwarted by snails in a scene so meticulous and compelling in its control that it comes to seem a high-art rendering of the failure of ingenuity before sheer process: the mechanical click of the endless camera shutter vs. the instinctual swarming of hundreds of snails, and beneath it all the clockwork process of decay.

Morbid and sordid as all this may sound, the film is mordantly amusing, wearing the trappings of allegory as the means best served to dress up the death's head. When I saw it in NYC last spring, it elicited amusement; with the Yale crowd, fresh from a series of papers on Painting and Cinema, the film's oddly buoyant audacities seemed to deflate like a recently deceased zebra carcass.

"THE INSANE ROOT"

"Wylie came a little closer to Murphy, but his way of looking was as different from Murphy's as a voyeur's from a voyant's, though Wylie was no more the one in the indecent sense than Murphy was the other in the supradecent sense. The terms are only taken to distinguish between the vision that depends on light, object, viewpoint, etc., and the vision that all those things embarrass."
--Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

The key word here is "embarrass": Beckett is invoking its French meaning: to obstruct, to hinder, even to burden. But as a word in our more common English sense it floats into conjunction with "indecent," as one might be "embarrassed" (made uncomfortable) by what one sees. In other words, and Beckett's writing is so precise that it becomes a struggle to imagine "other words," the voyeur is the one who sees objects and is not hindered or encumbered by them -- and, though Wylie's view is not indecent, a voyeur of what is indecent is not embarrassed by what he sees, insofar as he wishes to see it, that "seeing it" is the point. The voyant, however, cannot but be encumbered and burdened by any object of vision -- and, indeed, made uncomfortable by it. Because Murphy, as voyant, doesn't want to see anything, particularly. His ideal state is one of monadic solipsism. The world, that "embarrassment of riches" to borrow someone's phrase, only encumbers us. But it's well to note that Beckett insists that Murphy is no voyant in the sense of "a visionary." He is not seeing, in place of the mundane world, a spiritual world of true forms, or essences, or the veritable Ding an Sich. Murphy's vision -- or the vision he tries to maintain -- is only and ever of himself: ". . . before he could see it had to be not merely dark, but his own dark. Murphy believed there was no dark quite like his own dark."

Reading this book, Beckett's first novel, after break, it struck me that what Beckett formulates in that distinction between voyeur and voyant is the difference between the novelist of what Joyce calls somewhere "the sensible, edible, gnosible world" and the novelist of his own dark -- it could be, indeed, the difference between the early Joyce and the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. The one for whom light and object and viewpoint are the controlling dynamic, the design-giving factors, of the representation of something like life; the one for whom only the play of verbal pattern has any ability to captivate -- and not because it makes the fictive seem real, but because it keeps at bay the real, makes the real beg admittance to the mind through only one portal: not sight, but language.

"Were such things here as we do talk about?" Banquo asks Macbeth after the encounter with the three weird sisters. Whether they were or not, they are no longer there when they become the topic of conversation. And generally whatever we speak of is not in fact in the room with us, is not happening at that moment, except maybe conceptually. And so what we would clarify, with our words, is, in Murphy's terms, our sense of our own dark. We must find words to convey the phantoms that cloud our minds. If we succeed, the persons we speak to will go away beclouded by the phantoms we have caused to inhabit their minds, if only fleetingly. They will be embarrassed, in the French sense, by our words and may even chose to see (if they be realist novelists, perhaps) our words as objects seen from a "certain point of view" -- as the saying goes (approximating the idea that any pair of eyes which encounters the world must encounter it from a unique vantage point).

For the Wylies of the world, one's vantage point is simply the accidental position from which one views the object of one's attention. One may move about to find other views, one may try to imagine the viewpoints of others. For the Murphies of the world, there is only one object: Murphy. What he looks at matters very little for it is always Murphy who looks, and that viewpoint, in its emphatic acceptance of the Murphyness of its vision, makes of the world not a reflection of Murphy but a "not Murphy" that Murphy must reflect upon, in his dark.

Beckett's fiction goes further and further into that dark. It's one of the most striking odysseys in all of literature. In the novel, Murphy finds use as an attendant in an insane asylum. Murphy envies his charges their species of dark, seeing that only the mind that is lost has a chance of escaping the world.

"The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament."

If we cannot lose our minds, perhaps at least we can make up our own world. If only for the fiction of it.

"WHAT A DRAG IT IS TO SEE YOU"

This weekend I saw Todd Haynes' much ballyhooed I'm Not There -- an attempt to render homage to the Dylan mystique at plus two hours length. Maybe we've all been tempted by the idea of a song or a novel or movie "about nothing" -- an experience subjective and elusive, tied to no particular narrative purpose, but rather committed to poetic utterances, expressive gestures, the bits and pieces of fragmented interior reality, the kinds of glowing random nonsequiturs and bon mots that Dylan lyrics, at their best, seem composed of. Which is to say, I expected the film might be "a mess," but I hoped for "a mess with a method," or at least a mess that would startle me at times with a glimpse of how someone else -- someone operating as an artist outside the tangents of my own subjective universe -- interprets the ramblings of the Ragged Clown.

The only thing I'm startled by is how dull the proceedings swiftly became, subsumed into the yawning pit that swallows up Dylan's career and belches forth the same tired drivel. Most of Haynes' ideas for how to communicate this well-trodden material falls somewhere between Eric Idle's hilarious take-off on The Beatles: The Rutles: All You Need is Cash and the kind of ersatz rendering of the glam era that Haynes treated more freshly in Velvet Goldmine. In other words, INT would be better, perhaps, if it were satiric toward its subject, in the gentle and affectionate manner of Idle's TV special, or if it were able to muster up a fictional story that would simply be reminiscent of a certain folksinger turned rocker turned country crooner turned actor/director turned carnivalesque showman turned Vegas style retread turned Born Again sermonizer turned MTV-dazed has-been turned never-ending performer reinventing himself nightly turned living legend with more lives than Solomon had wives. And if Haynes sensibly restricts himself to only six of those incarnations, fine. But he stacks the deck toward the Dylan that is best known and most indelibly familiar (in part because of Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and the more elusive Eat the Document), the young iconoclast of the 1965-66 period, and even there he misses important nuances and gives us instead, in most of his askew presentation, what is the cinematic equivalent of a tin ear. In other words, the director starts to seem like perhaps the creepiest Mr. Jones of them all -- eyes in his pocket and nose in the ground, etc.

There were a few laughs -- most notably that little romp with The Beatles à la Hard Day's Night, or Pete Seeger grabbing an ax to cut the power at Newport, only to be wrestled down by Albert Grossman no less, or Christian Bale's straight-faced delivery of the bemused and oracular Dylan of the Born-Again period, or Cate Blanchett's spot-on recreation of the glib and hip Dylan once again surrounded by questioners without a clue, flaring into recrimination when his bubble starts getting bruised. There's also the wandering traces of a few good ideas, not quite realized, as in Marcus Carl Franklin as the young black kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie and affects a rootless hobo-like existence: his segments estrange us from the Dylanesque mannerisms the other actors adopt and give us glimpses of that film "almost but not quite" about someone "like" Dylan that we were hoping for.

The problem in general is that not a single one of these alternative Dylans is a character. If this were a documentary about Dylan we would say that it doesn't get at the man but only the familiar surfaces; as a fiction, it doesn't give us anyone "behind the shades." It may be a nice working ambition to render the lack of a center, to give us scenes and no story, to refuse to make the six "add up" and to refuse to make any one of them real -- but as a viewing experience that refusal (or inability) simply cheapens the actual convolutions of Dylan's career, a career that Haynes has nothing to tell us about, except that, like many onlookers, he saw it go by -- it went thataway.

Dylan 1: Franklin as the Guthrie wanna-be: this is Haynes' best concoction, but it fails because the big lesson the boy faces is: "be of your own time." The idea should be that he takes this truth to heart, drops the Dustbowl mannerisms and emerges from the seething cauldron of Greenwich Village as "voice of his generation" etc etc. Instead we get:

Dylan 2a: Bale as the stern and humorless Jack Rollins. The humor here is aimed at Jack -- because, the film seems to be saying, this phase of Dylan, the one championed by the folkies, is not the real Dylan but a poseur. Julianne Moore's stint as a fatuous Joan Baez figure (Alice Fabian -- heh heh) drives the point home -- these people are the Judases, the fickle followers who abandon their hero when he drops their mantel.

Dylan 3: Ben Whishaw as Rimbaud. Yeah, not the best of all possible ideas. You see, Dylan had to become a poet, so let's take his actual pronouncements -- in interviews from that fertile '64-'65 period -- and put them in the mouth of the poet who brought us "je est un autre." It's corny and for Haynes the necessary transition toward the "Dylan hero" of the electric incarnation. The problem, for those who followed Dylan's career, is that the brooding intensity of the faux Rimbaud doesn't recall at all the wily, wary, and youthful balderdash of the Dylan of this period. Self-importance begins to rear its hackneyed head.

Dylan 4: Blanchett as the androgynous rocker, hipster, wigged-out seer teetering on the verge of becoming a reactionary. This is the heart of the film because it's the Dylan Haynes is most concerned with and because Blanchett is riveting. But ultimately it becomes a drag for three reasons: the musical performance of Ballad of a Thin Man, as musical performance, pales beside the actual performance caught on film by Pennebaker and caught on tape as the so-called "Royal Albert Hall" show; the visuals that go with the song -- featuring that earnest reporter who has to stand in for Mr. Jones AND Pat Garrett (later) -- are more feeble than anything Julie Taymor came up with for her Beatles videos in Across the Universe; all Haynes can script for this particular Dylan are vituperations against the press, or against his faithful (a funny put-down of the Neuwirth-guy), or ad nauseam pronouncements about folk music. Sure, Dylan did say some version of most of those things about folk music -- but not in one two hour period. Methinks the lady doth protest too much about not protesting. Dullsville.

Dylan 5: The most yawnsome of the entire proceedings: Heath Ledger with no direction home as an actor who has to live out some so thin it looks like Saran Wrap version of the "marital difficulties" era of Dylan. There's no there there, big time. Haynes either knows nothing about this period or doesn't want to know, or has no way of making the songs of this time -- some of the most fascinating self-portraits of Dylan's career -- come to life. It doesn't help that Charlotte Gainsbourg -- the wife -- looks so much like Patti Smith (and is French): we expect her to start spouting Smith's histrionic new wave Rimbaud-lite in response to Heath's boorish comments about "no chick being able to be a poet" or whatever. Every scene in this segment is dreadful. Come back, Renaldo and Clara -- your sins are forgiven!

Dylan 6: As adrift as Ledger is, he's no match for Richard Gere as . . . as . . . well, it's kinda like if we took Kris Kristofferson's part as Billy the Kid in the movie version by Sam Peckinpah, took away everything that made Kris' part work (to the extent it did), such as rascally charisma and a few pages from the James Dean school of picturesque brooding, and then tried to make the remainder -- aging outlaw -- be a stand-in for the Dylan who mythified the West and "Old Weird America" and all that while living in some frontiertown that Mr. Redevelopment (in the form of Pat Garrett who once was his friend) is threatening (it would've been funny to have, amidst the efforts to reference Dylan lyrics -- there were guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children in one scene -- someone crooning a Leonard Cohen song from McCabe and Mrs. Miller). The only thing I liked about this part was the rendition of "Going to Acapulco." To say that Haynes has no feel for the Western is to be very polite.

Dylan 2b: Jack's back and this time he's got Jesus. This incarnation of Dylan is pretty much played for laughs, as the outcome of that oh-so-serious young man who everyone expected to change the world. 'Good and bad I defined these terms quite clear, no doubt, somehow' -- yup, that boy's primed to do the work of Jesus, praise God. In chronological terms, this should be the last Dylan, but Haynes fudges it by making Jack undergo his Born Again period in '74, four or five years before his alter-ego did.

So, the film says, the Dylan of our day is the figure of mythic America -- which is true enough, perhaps -- but it's also significant that neither Dylan 5 nor Dylan 6 perform any songs. In other words, Dylan's voice, as a going concern, even in the mannerisms of his alter-egos here, has been silenced. The film can't break out of a cookie-cutter version of the '60s and its morph into those directionless '70s and who needs that, again, and again -- as the man himself said: "somebody is out there, beating on a dead horse."

I said "Oh, no! no!
I been through this movie before!"
--Bob Dylan, "Motorpsycho Nightmare" (1964)