Revisiting Bob Dylan’s Masterpiece — “Masked and Anonymous” It was in March, 2006 — while taking Robert Levinson’s Bob Dylan class at the New School in New York City — that several class members met the guest speaker that night for dinner at a coffee shop before the session began. He was Richard Thomas, director of graduate studies and professor of classics, at Harvard. Dr. Thomas is quite an expert on Dylan, having written a book and lectured on his performance artistry and such esoteric subjects as “the Aesthetics of Pastoral Melancholy from Virgil to Dylan.” But that night, what I mainly remember, was our discussion of Dylan’s 2003 feature film, Masked and Anonymous. On the surface, most critics said the film was about how a singer, whose career had gone on a downward spiral, was forced to make a comeback to the performance stage for a benefit concert. Those critics totally missed what the film was really about. It was immediately panned as another clueless Dylan effort, which if they didn’t understand, no one else possibly could either. Thomas, of course, wasn’t one of those critics. He got the film immediately. “In three hundred years, when people look back at the entire Sony motion picture catalog of that era, only one film will be remembered as truly important and will have stood the test of time,” Thomas said. “That will be Masked and Anonymous.” Over the years, I have watched Masked and Anonymous many times and each time I glean new information from what I consider a Dylan classic. This was a film that was never intended to be commercial, but a multi-layered puzzle with the viewer as one of the pieces. Larry Charles, the film’s director, put it this way in an interview with Trev Gibb: Bob Dylan is “somebody who’s seen more than you have and knows more than you know and if youre wise and you listen, he will tell you everything you need to know. “But youre gonna have to do the work of interpreting it and that’s how the movie is also, its like Bob is telling you everything. This is Bob telling you everything about himself also, but it’s not laid out clearly. You have to do the work of putting the pieces together.” That, in a nutshell, is why I think Masked and Anonymous is so intriguing and continues to live on in the minds of the viewers who have embraced it. It’s also important that the film was conceived outside the system. “There was no commercial consideration in making this movie,” said Charles. “This was a purely instinctive process which is really an anathema to the making of movies today.” Dylan told Charles that critics would never get the movie, but the audience would if they had a chance to see it. “I think the critics are now, for the most part, part of a larger system — a more corporate system,” he said. “And this (the movie) just doesn’t fit into any niche that they can really relate to. They don’t have time anymore, there’s not that kind of serious film criticism that there was 20 or 30 years ago.” Part of the initial hype surrounding the film was a sensationalistic aspect of media today. “People thought, we’ve caught Bob Dylan somehow. But instead what they did was — and this is why the story fell apart — because it was so much more complex and so much more enigmatic and ambiguous then the way it was presented, that the media couldn’t handle it after a while,” Charles said. “It’s like, if you really want to enter this world, the world of Bob’s head, you better put on your shoes and get ready for a long journey.” The beauty of time is that movies are now far easier to access. If you’re a Bob Dylan fan and haven’t seen Masked and Anonymous, shame on you. It’s a genuine cinematic adventure packed with deep meaning and great actors. Perhaps the definitive Dylan film of all time. Watch it during the snow storm...
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 06:04:08 +0000
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