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Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 20:10:37 +0100
Reply-To: The Bob Dylan Discussion List
Sender: The Bob Dylan Discussion List
From: Christian Zeiser
Subject: Bob Dylan's Hollywood - Part 1
Okay, I've done it. I've translated the first chapter of the book "Bob
Dylan's Hollywood". And the one thing that is for sure is that I'm gonna
have a shower now!
Some remarks on the structure:
- All typos are mine
- Comments in square brackets are mine
- Comments in round brackets are not mine, but used to be footnotes in the book.
- Asterisks indicate that something was printed in italic letters originally.
I would appreciate a few comments on whether I should go on translating the
book or not. Okay, that's it. Here you go:
Susanne Koheil, Bob Dylan's Hollywood, (c) 1995 Rose Valley Books,
Rosenthal, Germany
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ALLUSIONS AT CINEMA
Well my telephone rang it would not stop,
It's President Kennedy calling me up.
He said "My friend Bob, what do we need to make a country grow?"
I said "My friend John, Brigitte Bardot,
Anita Ekberg,
Sophia Loren"
(Put 'em all in the same room with Ernest Borgnine!)
Already in 1963 Bob Dylan showed his particular faible for cinema. What's
impressing in the early songs like "I Shall Be Free" is mostly the playful,
funny way he hints to the dream factory Hollywood. Without restraint, he
makes fun about this world of its own:
I make love to Elizabeth Taylor...
Catch hell from Richard Burton
In the two songs "Tombstone Blues" and "Desolation Row", both written in
1965, a number of playfully mixed persons meets in seemingly absurd
collage-like situations. In "Tombstone Blues" they reflect social chaos:
Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill
I would set him in chains at the top of the hill
Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after
These lines ironically describe the American's tendency to make a show out
of everything and to stage themselves. Examples for this are the
operetta-like equipped movies of American director Cecil B. DeMille, in
which even death becomes an entertaining show.
In "Desolation Row" Dylan compares the gestures of the character Cinderella
with those of American actrice Bette Davis:
Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one", she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
Bette Davis was as famous for this gesture as Humphry Bogart was for
thoughtfully playing with his ear lobe.
Twenty years later one sees a cynical Bob Dylan who, in his song "Clean Cut
Kid" from the album "Empire Burlesque", takes a position agains the Vietnam
War: "The only game he could play was Russian Roulette". Shortly after this
it says: "He went to Hollywood to see Peter O'Toole". In this "dirty war"
the "Clean Cut Kid" is hanging in the balance somewhere between the Vietnam
horror of the movie "The Deer Hunter" - Russian Roulette is a central motif
of the movie - and Peter O'Toole's insane hero adventures in "Lawrence Of
Arabia"
Of particular meaning is the surrealistic "Farewell Angelina" from the year
1965, in which all important movie related features of his later songs are
already present:
King Kong, little elves
On the rooftops they dance
Valentino-typred tangos
While the make-up man's hands
Shut the eyes of the dead
Not to embarrass anyone
The weaving of multiple levels of reality, the movie world and the "real"
world, is already clearly visible here [This will be discussed in a later
chapter of the book, UM]. In the first verse Bob Dylan trickily mixes the
well-known King Kong scene on the Empire State Building and a self-invented
plot. Although King Kong is a sound film, the *talkies* had just stated to
exist when it was shot in 1933, so the silent film elements dominate, which
also can be said about "Farewell Angelina". By connecting grotesque and
erotic elements, Dylan creates a subtle, seemingly natural balance. The
immense difference between the elve's size (apparently an allusion at Fay
Wray, the leading lady in King Kong) and the giant ape is unimportant in
this moment. The characters of the dream-like scene, however, don't seem
grotesque at all while they dance the erotic, from today's viwpoint rather
ridiculous Valentino-typed tango. This is because the connecting elemt in
all three lines is "love", which also is the basic topic both in the
original release of King Kong and the silent movies of American sex symbol
Rudolph Valentino. The scene is in crass contrast to the following lines in
which the make-up man acts. The glance behind the scenery during the
shooting of a fictional King Kong scene already hints at the attempt to use
cineastic ways of expression on the songs. The following verse from
"Farewel, Angelina" aswell shows a film-like setting:
See the cross-eyed pirates sitting
Perched in the sun
Shooting tin cans
With a sawed-off shotgun
And the neighbours the clap
And they cheer with each blast...
The western is, besides gangster movies and the film noir, surely the genre
that influenced Bob Dylan the most. The motives and, above all, the intense
visuality of the western genre mirror in this verse. Michael Gray proposes:
"Perhaps the attempt to explain 'Angelina's' relation to other Dylan songs
by means of a movie analogy is the clue to its very singulaity..." (Michael
Gray, Song And Dance Man, p. 147). The path of examining poetry with the
help of movie analytic means has been walked on before. There are obvious
parallels between the two forms of art:
Among the modern forms of literature, poetry often seems closer to film
than any other, especially in such matters of technique as the use of
imagery and the use of associational logic. (Robert Richardson
Literature And Film, Cinema Classics, p.24)
In the fourth verse of "Farewell Angelina" Dylan distorts a typical western
movie cliche by replacing the bandits by the historically older pirate
characters. With this, the western movie setting is time broken. Possibly
Dylan displays the pirates as cross-eyed to hint to a popular pirate movie
cliche. One there often sees one or more pirates who wear artificial limbs
or attract attention because of other physical damages. Eye caps cover
injuries, wooden legs or iron hooks replace missing limbs. In this case,
one cliche would have been replaced by another. The cross-eyed pirates in
"Farewell Angelina", however, can also base on Dylan's detailed knowledge
of the western movie. There are two popular "cross-eyed pirates" in the
western movie, those being the silent movie comedian Ben Turpin and Jack
Elam, who often played supporting roles [e.g. later in "Pat Garrett & Billy
The Kid", UM]. The pirates with their sawed-off shotgun again pick up the
aspect of violence that dominates "Farewell Angelina" and is already
introduced in the first verse. Uncommon weapons have always been important
in the western movie. In the song, violence is mostly covered by an
apparent peace, like in the fourth verse. This illusion is at first created
by the seemingly harmless and peaceful pirates themselves. They're lying
lazily in the sun and waste time shooting tin cans. Still, the basic
readiness to commit acts of violence is already indicated. The phonetic
metaphores also refer to war and violence. Sounds like "clap", "cheer" and
above all "blast" disturb the apparent peacefulness of the scene. [...]
The use of visually intense movie cliches enables the listener to
understand the topic "war, violence and apocalypse" more easily. However,
Dylan's use of images or imagery doesn't stop at the visiual picture.
Looking at Dylan, images like the one of the "cross-eyed pirates" are an
often returning way of expression: many of his lingual images create movie
images, here even explicit sound movie images. The English writer and
critic [!, UM] sees the creation of images as the actual task of
literature:
If you ask me to give you the most distinctive quality of good writing,
I would give it to you in this one word: VISUAL. reduce the art of
writing to its fundamentals and you come to this single aim: to convey
images by means of words. But to *convey images*. To make the mind
see. To project onto that inner screen of the brain a moving picture
of objects and events, events and objects moving toward a balance of
reconciliation of a more than usual state of emotion with a more than
usual order. (Robert Richardson, Literature And Film, p. 13)
The here described process during the reading of poetry introduces another
important topic. The projection of images on the "inner screen" of the
reader in the end means that the young art form called film adresses the
senses more easily than poetry that has to take the detour over the
reader's ability to associate to take him back to the image and thus to
seeing.
In his songs, Bob Dylan develops images that can be understood by many
people. With a western cultural education as a background, the recipient
immidiately associates the western movie by the cross-eyed pirates. One can
assume that the recipients all have something like a "smallest common
cineastic association potential". The flood of images in "Farewell
Angelina" is described by Dylan himself as a "chain of flashing images"
(The Bootleg Series, Booklet, p. 39). This flashlike change of chained
contrasting images creates a tension-laden chaos that is of nightmare-like
unrealisticness and describes rather a general (emotional) state than a
concretely describable incident. The narrator feels menaced by a world
having gone insane ("I must go where it is quiet") Robert Richarson sees a
similar effect in Rimbaud's "Le Bateau Ivre":
So Rimbaud... could construct a vivid terrifying collage of images which
might indeed be meant as images of a state of mind, but which could not
exactly be explained. (Richardson, Literature And Film, p. 28)
The idea of "chaos" is one of the basic themes in modern lyric and in film
and mirrors reflects for example in the often used image of the "Waste
Land":
The loss of inherited values, the chaotic fluidity of social order, the
weakening of once firm theologies, sciences, and intellectual
methodologies, the disappearance of goals, and the dubiousness about
identity are both symptoms and causes of a widespread sense of disorder.
(Richardson, Literature And Film, p. 104)
In modern lyric, the "loss of order" phenomena expresses itself at first in
the works of T.S. Eliot or Yeats. With regard to the movies, it's for
example "Das Cabinett des Dr. Caligari" (Robert Wiene), "Un Chien Andalou,
and "L'Age D'Or" (Bunuel/Dali), and later on above all the movies of
Frederico Fellini, especially "La Dolce Vita".
In "Farewell Angelina", Bob Dylan evokes the "loss of order" by chaining
precisely weighed, partly totally opposite images. These then develop a
logic of themselves. Director Sergej Eisenstein states that the result of
such a chaining - aswell in poetry as in film - is not their sum, but
reaches a whole new quality. In "Farewell, Angelina", Bob Dylan equips the
cliches used by him with new elements. By such a breakage, the cliche
itself stays visible, but does not seem worn-out. This distortion offers
completely new perspectives and surprises in many Bob Dylan songs.
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