Last night, I finally watched I’m Not There, the rather surreal take on Bob Dylan, with 6 different actors portraying him.
It was surprisingly good. Surreal and confusing, but good.
First of all, I didn’t realize that none of the characters play Bob Dylan, per se–they all play ASPECTS of him, a Woody Guthrie-idolizing kid, a superstar unable to sustain his marriage, a folk singer passionate about protest songs, the solitary old man carving out a place in the wilderness of imagination, none of whom are named “Bob Dylan” (although some are more or less him, with Cate Blanchett’s spot-on portrayal of Don’t Look Back–era Dylan coming the closest to real).
The real enjoyable part of the movie was how hard it made you work to try to synthesize the different aspects of his life, particular the Cate Blanchett/Don’t Look Back Dylan vs. the marriage-centric storyline of the superstar/Heath Ledger Dylan.
The tension between the timeliness, the impossibility of one timeline turning into another gets at the movie’s thesis, namely that Dylan is a sort of purposeful schizophrenic, living any number of lives all at once, a shape-shifter that may or may not be healthy (the implication near the end of the film may be that such schizophrenicism may not be unhealthy, but is certainly incompatible with the culture at large and that the only recourse for such a person is escape, to flee).
I’d argue that the film largely succeeds at its thesis, its biggest weakness being that to truly understand the film, you need to know a bit about Dylan’s backstory–you have to have done your homework ahead of time. I’m not convinced that expecting that much out of the audience is necessarily a bad thing, but more than once I thought, “oh, if I didn’t know such-and-such, I’d be totally lost right now.”
I did, though, get lost in the wild-West-Riddle-Missouri/Richard Gere parts of the film. The overall idea of these parts is fairly apparent: that Dylan (now?) lives in a rich, imaginative, some-what dark world where giraffes wander the streets of the old West and slightly insane children shoot their horses, and that world is constantly under attack (from whom?).
But it leaves more than a few questions:
- What’s with the dog, Henry?
- Why do we get Billy the Kid waking up over and over?
- Who’s the dead girl in the casket on stage while Jim James knocks “Going’ to Acopolco’ out of the park?
- Pat Garrett? I’m not sure this means what they think it means
- Why does Billy get taken to jail?
- Giraffes? Halloween?
If I could wrap my mind just a bit more around that part of the movie, I think I could feel a lot better about the whole thing.
Still, I enjoyed it–it was great.
Calling Creative Risks ‘Good’
I read, today, an excerpt from a book called Nurturing Artists in your Local Church by a guy named Joshua Banner.
This line stuck out to me:
This idea that the church needs to call more of our artists’ creative risk ‘good’ is really interesting (and I think, true).
Most Good Poems Start Out As Really Bad Poems
To be honest, I think this is why we don’t see much art right now in the typical church–because to make really great art, you’ve got to be willing to take some creative risks. That’s not to say that every piece of great art is particularly risky, but rather that if you don’t feel like you have the freedom to take any risk, you will feel boxed in creatively. And whether or not those risks are successful isn’t particularly important–the important thing is that you’ve got to try a lot of different things to find the RIGHT thing.
Or to put it another way: you’ve got to write some really bad songs before you can write some good ones.
Or maybe even another way: most good poems start out as really bad poems.
Normalizing Creative Risk
Unfortunately, we don’t see much of that approval of risk from the church, and in particular, the pastors of churches. In some cases, this is because the pastors just aren’t artists. Most aren’t. They may be preachers (preaching may be valuable, but it isn’t art anymore than medicine is) or teachers, singers, administrators or even, well, pastors, but very few are the kind of people who are taking these creative risks themselves. And because of that, they don’t understand those risks, they don’t get what’s going on there. That’s not an excuse for them not to be reaching out to artists, but unfortunately that’s how it often works.
Moreover, I think too many pastors are afraid of those risks, are afraid of taking those risks because they can be misinterpreted. Above, I described these risks as a way to get the bad notes out so that when it really matters you’re only left with the good ones, but that’s not entirely true–sometimes these risks involve things like writing a book title The Weakness of God or a song with profanity in it, writing a poem questioning God’s very existence. Sometimes the best art’s connection to the Gospel is not immediately apparent.
For a pastor to put his blessing on something like that, to call it “good” can be troubling, troubling for the pastor (I speak from experience here) and troubling for their congregation (and thus for the pastor’s career). Such a “good” risk may not be just risky for artist–the pastor puts his reputation on the line for the sake of the artist by endorsing their work.
That’s a sacrifice, I think, more of our pastors need to make, to endanger their own well-being for the sake of the people struggling to reveal the face of God. For that’s what I think all art struggles to do, to lift the veil of the immediately apparent and reveal the really true (True?) thing underneath. Pastors have a call to draw all people into their communities–normalizing those creative risks as part of our congregations is an vital part of what the people who get paid to be pastors, and those of that don’t, have a responsibility to do.