A Series of Dreams:
The Recent Videos of Bob Dylan

December 13, 2006

This past weekend Slate premiered the new Dylan video for "Thunder on the Mountain." It was a poor man's video, drawing clips from an archive of Dylan footage, linked together to give the illusion that in all these different stages he is singing the same song. It is hard to know the extent to which these videos stem from Dylan's imagination.. but duly noting that cuidado, it is curious to reflect on the disjunction between the portrayal of Dylan's career in this video, and the way it must actually exist in his memory.

That may seem like an odd thing to speculate about.. but here's what I mean: the new video gathers together clips that are all generally recognizable to Dylan fans.. they sum up the public visual history of the man. But what does Dylan see when he closes his eyes and thinks about the past? Like everyone he thinks about friends and family.. children.. personal moments.. all those details or private life. But in essence, the new video asks us to see Dylan as a unified figure whose past and present is aligned and whose life is summed up by the public visual history.

These thoughts started skipping around in my head a month or two ago when I first saw the video for "Series of Dreams".. now viewable on YouTube (see below). This time the public images accompany a song that is genuinely reflective on the past.. a rarity for Dylan.. as if his private dreams were somehow indexed to public views of his career. I always thought that the whole point of entitling a song "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" was that we had to assume 114 that were not recorded.. and that is where we could locate private life. In recent videos that imagined space is gone.

Add one more element into this mix of public and private memories: his recent video for "When the Deal Goes Down".. starring Scarlett Johansson. The video manufactures a private world of memory. The fiction is that we are back in the 50s with a super-eight camera, getting clips of the fleeting personal moments that two lovers share. It is a nostalgic and beautiful video, in its way.. and if nothing else it is interesting for its fuzzy and warm version of private memories. Indeed, this is the way private memories work.. these are the kinds of things a person sees when thinking back on the past.

Private memories are things over which Dylan exercises the most stringent protection.. He assures someone on Modern Times: "I won't betray your love or any other thing.." and it may as well be a promise to keep private things private. He has two strategies for dealing with private memory: 1) to offer fictional versions of it, or 2) to present public images of his career as if they really did encapsulate his private world. But the actual series of private dreams remain a mystery, and Dylan is not about to dip into his personal stash of memories for the sake of a video.

A Series of Dreams: