A town called Riddle: excavating Todd Haynes's I'm Not There
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 51; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjp051
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
ResumoIn the weeks after the release of Todd Haynes's film inspired by ‘the music and many lives’ of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There (2007), a consensus emerged that of the seven different ‘Dylans’ portrayed on screen, it was Richard Gere's ‘Billy the Kid’ that was the least successful. Critics had qualms about it, on the Internet Movie Database fans consistently gave Gere low marks, and the press leaked accounts that distributor Harvey Weinstein had wanted the sequence cut from the film.1 Gere depicted Dylan from his Basement Tapes period, when the mercurial singer mined what Greil Marcus has called the ‘old, weird America’.2 Though opaque to many viewers, this section of Haynes's film has much to tell us about techniques for visualizing popular music, and challenges us to make fresh connections between Dylan's career, the history of recorded sound, and the role of phonograph records in collective memory. Haynes turns Dylan's most obscure recordings into a cinematic place – a town called ‘Riddle’ – and in the process demonstrates the importance of mise-en-scene in screen adaptations of recorded music. But the name Riddle points to earlier fictional American towns with close ties to the record industry. Excavating those layers of reference enables us to situate both I'm Not There and Dylan's Basement Tapes within a larger history of media memory.
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