In praise of Masked and Anonymous | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

In praise of Masked and Anonymous

24 May 2021

Words by David Jenkins

Three men in outdoor clothing, one wearing a blue patterned jacket, another in a black leather jacket, and the third in a grey coat and cowboy hat, standing together in a mountainous landscape.
Three men in outdoor clothing, one wearing a blue patterned jacket, another in a black leather jacket, and the third in a grey coat and cowboy hat, standing together in a mountainous landscape.
Bob Dylan’s famous­ly mis­shapen and maligned rock satire from 2002 is deserv­ing of a re-evaluation.

I had a friend at uni­ver­si­ty who got me into Bob Dylan. We’ve prob­a­bly all had a friend like this, who oper­at­ed as a kind of unso­licit­ed Bob Dylan PR man­ag­er, foist­ing themed Mini­Disk com­pi­la­tions onto you, para­phras­ing the var­i­ous doorstop bio­graph­i­cal tomes which attempt to dis­sect his lyri­cal intent, and quot­ing the many apoc­ryphal tales from Dylan’s sto­ried career.

We once took a trip to his fam­i­ly home (the friend’s, not Dylan’s) to see one of his most val­ued pos­ses­sions in the flesh: the bat­tered tape copy of Blonde on Blonde that was a fix­ture of his child­hood car jour­neys, and which instilled with­in him a par­tic­u­lar­ly vir­u­lent strain of Dylan fever. But his enthu­si­asm was endear­ing rather than cloy­ing, and so I bought into Bob lock, stock and barrel.

It was actu­al­ly nice to be able to cul­ti­vate a friend­ship around mutu­al appre­ci­a­tion of this folk-rock demigod. We didn’t spend so much time dis­cussing the exist­ing work, but rather mythol­o­gis­ing and spec­u­lat­ing about Dylan’s life and per­sona – what he was like in aver­age domes­tic cir­cum­stances. I knew things had got­ten seri­ous because my taste was start­ing to tran­scend the canon­i­cal clas­sics such as Blood on the Tracks, Bring­ing It All Back Home, Time Out of Mind and Desire, and onto some of his less­er-known and cooly received discs such as Self Por­trait, Saved and the trag­i­cal­ly maligned Under the Red Sky (it’s good!).

Lar­ry Charles’ Masked and Anony­mous, released in 2002, was an event movie for which we were both unspeak­ably excit­ed, to the point that it was hard to believe that there was a film on its way which Dylan didn’t just co-write, but also starred in and also played a light­ly-fic­tion­alised ver­sion of his already light­ly-fic­tion­alised self. This was a triple lot­tery win, or at least it looked to be. Then came the wait. The long, ardu­ous wait. We had to sus­tain our­selves on frag­ments of oblique gos­sip that would flow from the edi­to­r­i­al pipeline, each one mak­ing the film sound ever more strange and intrigu­ing. And then, final­ly, we had some­thing con­crete that was acces­si­ble to a slather­ing pub­lic: an Ama­zon pre-order link for the orig­i­nal CD soundtrack.

To add a lit­tle con­text, Masked and Anony­mous was (if the rumours are to be believed) the cin­e­mat­ic prod­uct of Dylan writ­ing down dis­joint­ed lines of dia­logue while ful­fill­ing his end­less tour­ing detail. Erst­while Sein­feld writer Lar­ry Charles, when meet­ing with Dylan, was pre­sent­ed with a cas­ket of paper scraps which he was giv­en the task of for­mu­lat­ing into, per Dylan’s request, a slap­stick movie” (Bob was appar­ent­ly a big fan of Jer­ry Lewis). As this cre­ation process drew to a close, Dylan decid­ed that he actu­al­ly want­ed to make a seri­ous dra­ma, and not a slap­stick opus, and so all the mate­r­i­al was retooled and trans­formed into the star-stud­ded fan­ta­sia we see today.

And that film is a cacoph­o­nous, chaot­ic and allur­ing spec­ta­cle – a man­nered, genre-reject­ing spelunk­ing mis­sion into the mind of a cre­ator who has always exist­ed at a tan­ta­lis­ing remove from the high kings and queens of the mod­ern zeit­geist. Dylan stars as Jack Fate, a dis­graced, mono­syl­lab­ic folk rock­er dressed head-to-toe in a beige Sta Pressed safari suit, who is sprung from prison to head­line a tele­vised TV ben­e­fit con­cert that is set to syn­chro­nise with the death of the tin­pot dic­ta­tor who lords over a US that has been trans­formed into a dystopi­an slumland.

Own­ing the sound­track was a way to vic­ar­i­ous­ly expe­ri­ence the prospec­tive plea­sures of the film, almost in the same way that an advance sin­gle offers a wee taster of the album to come. This wasn’t a com­pi­la­tion of new mate­r­i­al, more a set of rad­i­cal, latin-inflect­ed remix­es of top best of” cuts, some by oth­er bands and oth­ers by Dylan him­self. I remem­ber think­ing to myself that none of it bod­ed well for the final film, as this music sound­ed like an awk­ward­ly dilut­ed ver­sion of the pure Dylan expe­ri­ence, not one that had nec­es­sar­i­ly been designed to appeal to as broad an audi­ence as pos­si­ble, but also one that didn’t feel as if it sat very com­fort­ably with­in his hal­lowed and high­ly dis­tinc­tive domain. Almost like a try-hard mis-inter­pre­ta­tion of Dylan lore.

The wait for the film end­ed up being ago­nis­ing, main­ly because it nev­er actu­al­ly received a cin­e­ma release in the UK. We end­ed up hav­ing to import a US Region 1 DVD to have the chance to lay our eyes on it. And this was after the full-scale crit­i­cal maul­ing it received from the US arts press, so our enthu­si­asm was some­what dimmed by this point. I remem­ber first see­ing it, and ini­tial­ly feel­ing a sense of awe at just being in the pres­ence of a Bob Dylan who wasn’t per­form­ing a song. The very notion of him act­ing oppo­site this huge ensem­ble of Hol­ly­wood A‑listers was daunt­ing. When the real­i­ty final­ly hit, it would prob­a­bly be a stretch to describe what he does on screen as act­ing” in the tra­di­tion­al sense, but that’s not to say he doesn’t grab and hold the atten­tion like a reedy-voiced old vice.

Revis­it­ing the film now, it def­i­nite­ly would ben­e­fit from a bit of abso­lu­tion. Look­ing back, it also comes across like a clas­sic case of crit­ics blithe­ly accept­ing the easy tar­gets they were hand­ed as a way to con­struct their enter­tain­ing pans. The film’s so-called weak­ness­es are extreme­ly front-and-cen­tre, so you have to active­ly choose to work hard and sup­press some of your con­ven­tion­al crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties to engage with the film on the lev­el it demands. Which, admit­ted­ly, is not always an easy thing to do. It’s about try­ing to judge whether the film deserves it, and a good many peo­ple back then thought: clear­ly it doesn’t.

Among its faults” are a gar­bled (avant garde?) plot, a sur­feit of char­ac­ters and the ardu­ous task of deci­pher­ing its ulti­mate pur­pose. On my ini­tial view­ings, I chalked it up as a like­able putting on a show” fol­ly, worth­while if only for Dylan’s wonki­ly enun­ci­at­ed line-read­ings (“You got­ta be BORN on my side, Sweet­heart.”) But actu­al­ly, the film has aged remark­ably well, as both a prophet­ic vision of moral and polit­i­cal decline in Amer­i­ca, and as an anti­dote to the chron­ic phe­nom­e­non of the juke­box musi­cal which has some­how achieved wide­spread dom­i­nance in the cul­ture at large.

Inter­est­ing tit­bits include: the reunion of The Big Lebowski’s very own Jeff Bridges and John Good­man; a bizarre cameo by Val Kilmer, who pre­sum­ably made it to the cast ros­ter as a result of Dylan’s love of his film Tomb­stone; some elec­tric musi­cal per­for­mances of set-list main­stays such as Cold Irons Bound’, as well as a ver­sion of Dix­ie’ that is per­formed to a room of slack-jawed stage hands; and many ref­er­ences to the type of Amer­i­can cul­tur­al arcana that would lat­er pro­vide the meat for Dylan’s own extreme­ly delight­ful Theme Time Radio Hour’. Ed Har­ris sud­den­ly turns up dressed as a min­strel in black­face – a shock­ing, dis­cur­sive dream where Fate is con­front­ed with the anti­quat­ed cul­tur­al predilec­tions of his late father.

By the time of the film’s sec­ond half, a dra­mat­ic pat­tern emerges that you either need to ful­ly embrace, or you just need to get out of the pool, get dried and go home. It goes a lit­tle like this: one of the main co-stars will go off on a lengthy, some might say over-writ­ten mono­logue while Jack Fate looks on with a blank expres­sion on his face, like he’s wait­ing for a real­ly shab­by bus. After a while, there will be a pause for the reac­tion, and fol­low­ing a few awk­ward beats, Dylan will deliv­er a glib rejoin­der, turn and walk away. Through­out, an audio-bed of Bob’s nasal breath­ing pat­terns is the only thing we can hear from his mic. It’s almost Hitch­cock­ian in its sim­ple dynam­ic, as if we’re wait­ing and wait­ing for a bomb to explode. When Dylan even­tu­al­ly does say some­thing, it’s not like he’s act­ing or talk­ing or pre­tend­ing to be a char­ac­ter with­in a con­trived dra­mat­ic sit­u­a­tion – he intones these words in a rhyth­mic way, as if he’s singing them, because that’s all he knows.

Dylan’s small, imper­fect­ly-formed career as a screen actor has com­prised of arty be-ins (Renal­do and Clara), cameos in slight­ly trashy genre runarounds (Den­nis Hopper’s Catch­fire) and 80s emo dirges (Hearts of Fire). The lat­ter is prob­a­bly clos­est in spir­it to Masked and Anony­mous, in that both paint Dylan as a dyed-in-the-wool rebel and truth-speak­er even when his own brand of arti­sanal lit­er­ary rock is decid­ed­ly out of favour. Yet his char­ac­ter Jack Fate per­haps car­ries the ethe­re­al, out­sider aura of David Bowie’s humanoid alien Thomas Jerome New­ton in Nico­las Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth – both men appear­ing to inhab­it a pri­vate real­i­ty that is inac­ces­si­ble to the oth­er per­form­ers in the film.

I’m fair­ly sure my pal, who I haven’t spo­ken to in a good many years, still holds a torch for Masked and Anony­mous, such is his abid­ing rev­er­ence for all things Dylan. Maybe he sees it as more than an iron­ic curio too. What­ev­er its inten­tions – and its ques­tion­able lev­els of suc­cess in artic­u­lat­ing those inten­tions – it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing film about fan­dom itself, as it show­cas­es one of the most revered peo­ple on Plan­et Earth as he is sur­round­ed by actors whose are both bemused and enthralled at the prospect of being in his mere pres­ence. And the lengths that Bob Dylan fans will go to to defend their idol.

Masked and Anony­mous screens on BBC4 in the UK on Thurs­day 27 May

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