Einstein disguised as Robin Hood

“I’ve got my Bob Dylan mask on … I’m masquerading.”  - Bob Dylan, Halloween, 1964

Going Electric, the working title of a new Bob Dylan biopic, will apparently focus on his fabled conversion from ‘voice-of-a-generation’ folk singer to rock ’n’ roll icon. Perhaps director James Mangold and lead actor Timothée Chalamet will make an interesting film that introduces Dylan’s music to a new generation of fans, but it’s difficult to imagine what fresh interpretation could be brought to an episode in popular music history already so well documented and mythologised. A straight-up portrayal in the same vein as Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, or Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, for example, would surely feel trite, even cringeworthy. There’s lots of performances, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of mid-60s Dylan on tape, so why bother with a rehash?

There’s also already been an excellent fictional dramatisation on screen of Dylan’s career. Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007) pays faithful homage to Dylan’s cryptic persona by avoiding close characterisation. Instead, six actors, including Marcus Franklin, a ten-year old African American, and actress Cate Blanchett, depict Bob through various archetypes, representing different stages of his life or composites of Dylan’s own influences. 

The film is effective because it recognises that Dylan’s career is defined by his spurning of a single, fixed identity in favour of many ‘selves’. From the outset, Dylan was an ‘actor’ who sought to channel and embody his heroes. The partly self-conscious creation of a philosophical identity, symbolised in his change of name from Robert Zimmerman, has preceded a series of high-profile and controversial changes in image and artistic direction. 

In the context of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, Dylan's deep immersion in the folk canon paradoxically allowed him to assert his individuality by surrendering it. As he writes in his memoir, Chronicles (2004), “Most of the other performers tried to put themselves across, rather than the song, but I didn’t care about that, it was about putting the songs across”. He reveals that as he made the transition to writing his own music, he started to “feel like a character from within these songs, even beginning to think like one”.

Robert Shelton commented in a 1961 New York Times Review that Dylan “has been sopping up influences like a sponge”. The reviewer observed that Dylan's early performance style owed as much to his theatrical flair as his musical talents:

Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik…(Dylan) is consciously trying

to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his

porch… Mr Dylan is both comedian and tragedian. Like a vaudeville actor on the

rural circuit, he offers a variety of droll musical monologues…In his serious vain, Mr

Dylan seems to be performing in a slow motion film.

In the liner notes to Dylan’s debut album, Shelton expands upon this widely held impression among fans that Dylan’s ‘acting’ was elevating his performance. While also likening Dylan’s harmonica playing to Sonny Terry and Walter Jacobs, and his guitar-picking to Merle Davis, Shelton writes:

Devotees have found in him the image of a singing rebel, a musical Chaplin tramp, a

young Woody Guthrie, or a composite of some of the best country blues

singers…After seeing many Chaplin films, Dylan found himself beginning to pick up

some of the gestures of the classic tramp of silent films…you can see Dylan nervously

tapping his hat, using it as a prop, almost leaning on it, as the Chaplin tramp did

before him.

Shelton’s comparison with Chaplin, the most physical of actors, is revealing. Dylan was not just vaguely reminiscent of these performers, he was the very “image” of them, imitating them in body. While all artists naturally take inspiration from their influences and incorporate or reflect them in their own output, this appears to have been true for Dylan to an uncanny degree. As Grant Maxwell argues, Dylan was drawn to these individuals in the first place because he felt they “embodied a submerged part of himself”. Dylan seemed to see his own soul reflected in the icons he idolised. When describing discovering Woody Guthrie for the first time, he remarks, “I even seemed to be related to him…He looks not unlike my father in my father’s early days.” Similarly, discussing the fellow luminaries of Minnesota who had gone before him, including Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis, Dylan comments, "each one of them would have understood what my inarticulate dreams were about. I felt like I was one of them or all of them put together."

In Chronicles, he describes being introduced to the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose philosophy chimed with Dylan’s own recognition of multiple others in himself.

I came across one of (Rimbaud’s) letters called “Je est un autre”, which translates into “I is someone else”. When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier. It went right along with Johnson’s dark night of the soul and Woody’s hopped-up union meeting sermons and the “Pirate Jenny” framework.

Dylan was able to apply Rimbaud’s logic to his own deep identification with the mythology of Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie, and the “raw intensity” of “Pirate Jenny”, a song from the play The Threepenny Opera. The adoption of the name “Bob Dylan”, and its flexibility to simultaneously embody these numerous selves, was thus in part a self-conscious construction. Dylan explains that, after arriving in New York:

My consciousness was beginning to change too, change and stretch. One thing is for sure, if I wanted to compose folk songs I would need some kind of new template, some philosophical identity that wouldn’t burn out. It would have to come on its own from the outside. Without knowing it in so many words, it was beginning to happen.

Dylan needed an external persona that would transcend the limitations and trappings of his own name and past. Arriving in New York City with a new ‘self’, he was able to invent his own story and imagine a different future. In the bluesman-at-the-crossroads tradition, Dylan mythologised his own past, claiming he was an orphan, and fabricating tales of an adolescence spent drifting from New Mexico, South Dakota, and Kansas to performing music at a “rough-and-tumble strip-tease joint” in Colorado.

Robert Shelton fell for Dylan’s tall-tale that “when a serious illness struck him, he got an indelible insight into what those death-haunted blues men were singing about.” Introducing Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, Pete Seeger announced that he had been “brought up in a little mining town, he ran away from home seventeen times and got brought back sixteen” (to which Dylan responded, “I think you have the wrong man!”).

The notion that when you are someone else, you can go anywhere, defines Dylan as an artist. Possibly his most famous song, “Like A Rolling Stone” (1965), captures the very essence of this idea. In the chorus, Dylan cries with cathartic release:

How does it feel?

To be on your own

With no direction home

A complete unknown

Like a rolling stone

While the message is delivered in a sneer to a high-society girl fallen from grace, the song is also a celebratory expression of the liberation that comes with being stripped of all the baggage of duty, reputation, and expectation. In lines which encapsulate the sense of freedom Dylan must have experienced when starting off in New York, he sings:

When you ain’t got nothin’

You got nothin’ to lose

You’re invisible now

You’ve got no secrets to conceal

Throughout his career, Dylan has sought to maintain this sense of anonymity and mystery; to evade definition by anyone else or have his reputation precede him. Robert Zimmerman’s adopted persona has complemented his constant reinvention of image and musical style, from Guthrie impersonator, protest poet, iconoclastic rock star, country crooner, confessional singer-songwriter, born-again gospel singer, and grizzled bluesman, among others. Dylan has taken on many additional aliases throughout his life too. Barely out of High School, he adopted the name Elston Gunn to play piano in Bobby Vee’s rock ‘n’ roll band; in the 1960s he recorded an album under the identity of Blind Boy Grunt; while as member of the Traveling Wilburies in the 1980s he became Boo Wilbury. More recently he has self-produced albums using the pseudonym Jack Frost, and as Sergei Petrov he co-wrote the screenplay for the 2003 film Masked and Anonymous.

On Halloween night in 1964 at a Philharmonic Hall concert in New York, he quipped, “I’ve got my Bob Dylan mask on … I’m masquerading.” At a 1986 press conference, he remarked, “I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be”, and when asked who he was the rest of the time, replied, “Myself”. During the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975/76, Dylan literally disguised himself by painting his face white.

In his destabilising of identity and self, Dylan might be considered a distinctly postmodern artist. As social theorist and theologian Elaine L. Graham asserts, “The most abiding motif of postmodernism is the death of the subject…the boundary between the rational and non-rational is not certain; nor is the subject a fixed self”, rather it is “finite, contingent, and embodied”. In Death of the Author (1967), one of the defining essays in postmodernist and poststructuralist theory, Roland Barthes emphasises the author’s persona rather biographical self, to elevate the text above the author and their “intention”, arguing that the interpretative scope and meaning of the text is restricted otherwise. Barthes view is reminiscent of the saying ‘trust the art not the artist’. As a musician well-known for his attempts to resist analysis of his songs and speculation over his supposed artistic intentions, Dylan fits this paradigm well.

Dylan’s representation of identity as contingent and malleable is consistent with wider trends in his songwriting towards the depiction of multiple personas and realities, and the relativity of truth and perspective. On Highway 61 Revisited (1965), for example, Dylan mixes around with guises beyond his own identity; all the characters in his songs seem to wear ‘masks’. In Chronicles, Dylan explains that “I have a problem remembering someone’s real name, so I give them another one, something that more accurately describes them.” In tracks such as “Tombstone Blues”, “Highway 61 Revisited”, and “Desolation Row”, Dylan interweaves a host of contemporary, historical, literary, and biblical characters in chaotic, carnival-like scenes. The eleven-minute epic “Desolation Row” features, among many others, Bette Davis, Romeo, Cain and Abel, and "Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower". Perhaps "Einstein disguised as Robin Hood" is Dylan himself  in the early part of his career: a genius who masqueraded as a man of the people. In the last verse, Dylan reveals:

All these people that you mention

Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame

I had to rearrange their faces

And give them all another name

The implication here, as well as in the quote from Chronicles, is that there is some greater truth to be found in pseudonym, allegory and surrealism, than in more easily understood, ‘realistic’ verse. A similar idea is expressed in “Gates of Eden”, on Bringing It All Back Home (1965). Imagery like ‘the curfew gull’, ‘the cowboy angel’, ‘the lamp post stands with folded arms’, and the ‘motorcycle black Madonna two-wheel gypsy queen’ conjure a disorientating and hallucinogenic world. Yet the song concludes:

At times I think there are no words

But these to tell what’s true

And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

Dylan thus gives the impression that the ‘real’, human world, 'outside Eden', is itself incomprehensible, and that there is greater resonance in an alternate reality. Particularly in the mid-1960s, Dylan’s songs subverted notions of clear-cut, tangible ‘truth’, and black-and-white judgements of society and politics, in contrast to his earlier so-called topical or protest songwriting.

However, while acknowledging a change in emphasis, Dylan rejected the notion of a fundamental distinction between his earlier, more grounded, folk songs and his new allegorical, even absurdist, material, suggesting he was carrying on in the same tradition: "The main body of (folk music) is just based on myth and the Bible and plague and famine and all things like that which are nothing but mystery and you can see it all in the songs".

Recalling his fascination with folk music in his youth, Dylan says that “The songs…were filled with everyday leading players like barbers and servants, mistresses and soldiers, sailors, farmhands and factory girls”. This description sounds rather like the panoramic cast of “Desolation Row”, with its factories and circuses, calypso singers and fishermen, fortune-tellers and a “beauty parlour filled with sailors”. Despite notoriously being branded “Judas” and a “sell-out” by the folk community for turning himself into a rock ‘n’ roll star and allegedly a commercial commodity, Dylan in fact stayed true to one of the folk movement’s key philosophies by remaining steadfast to self-expression and artistic sincerity.

There is a consistent trend throughout his work towards the pursuit of that “reality of a more brilliant dimension” which he identified in folk music:

I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom.

In recent years especially, Dylan has self-consciously subverted the notion of fixed authorship, obscuring the boundary between a received and original thought. The album “Love and Theft” (2001) - his best in 25 years - and memoir Chronicles (2004) blur the distinction between the artist and his influences. On “Love and Theft”, Dylan makes lyrical allusions to Tennessee Williams, The Great Gatsby, Don Pasquale, Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza, Henry Timrod, and many more, often lifting lines verbatim from the original texts. These references are set to music borrowed almost wholesale from folk and blues artists such as Charley Patton, Clarence Ashley, and Dock Boggs, and classic renditions of rockabilly, country swing, Tin Pan Alley pop, driving blues-rock, and “minstrel show” music. Even the title of the album is taken from the name of an American history book by Eric Lott, who notes that Dylan “wryly implies his thievery in the album’s name, and with scare quotes calls attention to the thievery of the name, Similarly in Chronicles, Dylan borrows lines from several novels, and even from issues of Time magazine from the 1960s when describing some of the social phenomena of that decade. 

Whether plagiarising or paying homage, whether premeditated or accidental, what is clear is Dylan’s recognition of his profound debt to his artistic forebears, as well as his seamless absorption into the fabric of American music and culture. Dylan has only consolidated the paradoxical sense of his own absence, as he increasingly draws on sources which pre-date his own work. To bring it all back home, I’m sceptical about any “Bob Dylan” retrospective which tries to neatly condense his identity, with an actor striving for likeness and accuracy, attempting to imitate his voice and mannerisms. The abstract I’m Not There captures the Dylan odyssey much more effectively than a conventional biopic ever could. Yes, he’s exceptional, but it’s partly because he carries all these other voices within him.