I've been meaning to write about the new Dylan documentary for a while, but I got busy, and now Slate's David Greenberg has beaten me to my insight, which is this:
"Dylan, for all his efforts to keep living his life and making new music, remains trapped by our '60s fetish, with even serious, well-intentioned directors like Martin Scorsese complicit. In one scene in No Direction Home, a young folkie, peeved that Dylan has gone electric, sniffs: 'I like his earlier records � but this I just can't stick.' The audience is meant to feel superior to this shortsighted purist, knowing as we do that Dylan was then creating his greatest work. But although the film can offer ironic distance on this stooge, it betrays no awareness that at some level it shares the same blinkered vision."
Had I actually written about this before Greenberg got around to it, I was going to compare "our" smug superiority to those who supposedly booed Dylan at Newport (a myth that the new film apparently encourages despite its having been debunked) to our refusal to even deal -- more than 25 years later -- with the people (i.e., "us," if you're a boomer, which I'm not) who really did boo him at his "born again" concerts. Why is it cool when Dylan challenged people's expectations of him by going electric, but not when he went religious? By making a film that stops in 1966, Scorsese can't even begin to answer that question, or countless others that arise out of Bob's critically neglected middle and late careers.
Related:
Eclectic and insanely great Dylan links.
An iMix of 244 songs mentioned in Chronicles Volume One.
