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December 21, 2007
Suppositions On A Film Concerning Billy The Kid
It's been exactly a month now since Todd Haynes' I'm Not There opened; I watched it twice in the space of that first week, and wasn't sure if the residual feeling that I should see it a third time was out of deep admiration for the film or an uncertainty as to whether or not it actually worked. I haven't gone back as of yet, and seeking out such a decision within the film itself, I think, might be something of a Sisyphean task.
What strikes me as problematic about the film is that it is an impression of a character bound to the story of a life. The film runs two and a half hours, but it could have just as easily been ninety minutes, or ten, or five, and been just as successful as it is at its current running time, because its ultimate success is not in its narrative but in its dialectics: the synthesis of its contradictory personae into a more encompassing understanding of its subject.
This is the reason, I think, the segment in which Richard Gere plays an aging Billy the Kid is the one that resonates the most with me; it's the most removed from the literal life of Bob Dylan, an entirely figurative depiction of his retreat to a basement in Woodstock after his 1966 motorcycle accident. That basement becomes a sleepy, smoky little town (with the bit-too-thick name of Riddle) that seems lost in some Appalachian time warp, full of farmers and circus folk and Civil Warriors, beset upon by an encroaching highway that brings with it the threat of the public eye. The sequence has too much plot for the amount of screen time it's given, but it is beautiful and haunting, and there's a richness, a power to the imagery that runs deeper than simple metaphor. It is a hyper-realization of what the very term 'folk song' connotes, and when applied to its true subject, it reveals precisely what the rest of the sequences in the film do not (at least not as effectively): a perception of a state of being. Those other Dylans are more immediately recognizable, easier to categorize into a linear biographical mold and by such degrees diminished in importance. The Billy The Kid segment, in its essential timelessness, sticks.
Posted by David Lowery at December 21, 2007 12:18 AM