"I Is Someone Else": Bob Dylan and
His Public Identity

October 7, 2007

After reading the cover article about I'm Not There in today's New York Times Magazine, I can list myself as officially interested in seeing the movie. If it works.. and it is an ambitious film.. it may remind me of Hart Crane's "The Bridge". I make that comparison because the film sounds as if it is an excavation of America by means of the stages in Dylan's career. Crane presents America through significant moments and places in American history.. and achieves a similarly kaleidoscope effect. On the other hand the film could just fall flat.

One element in the article immediately leaped out: the possible relationship between this film and Chronicles. The relationship is not what one might guess, either. The pitch for this film was OKed by Dylan in the summer of 2000 while Chronicles was released in 2004. A leading element of this pitch was a quotation from Rimbaud:

[Todd] Haynes began his one page with a Rimbaud quote, Rimbaud being a subject he figured he and Dylan were both familiar with. It was a quote that if he were pitching a film in Hollywood might have killed the project: "I is another."

Now a funny thing is that exactly that same quotation turns up in Chronicles.. toward the end of the book:

To go with all of that, someplace along the line Suze had also introduced me to the poetry of French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. That was a big deal, too. I came across one of his letters called "Je est un autre," which translates into "I is someone else." When I read those words bells went off. It made perfect sense. [288]

I wonder if it is not the case that the bells went off much later when he read the treatment of his life that began with these words. What is funniest is that if this is true, even as Dylan cites a line that distances the self, he is citing someone else's reading of himself. The "I" really is other.. or at least constructed by another.

We know Dylan is impressionable when it comes to figuring out his own past. His great later albums from Time Out of Mind to Modern Times may have been influenced by the image of Dylan cobbled together by Greil Marcus in The Old Weird America.. and perhaps now this seemingly postmodern tale of Dylan from multiple perspectives is giving Dylan a different lens for understanding himself.

As I have written previously in commenting on Barack Obama, celebrities have a constant pack of people out there trying to make sense of their lives.. to put all the confusing strands together. I find the idea of delivering my personal storyline to a public machine horrifying.. but if one is going to be a celebrity then obviously some level of comfort and playfulness with respect to the self is helpful.