By Louise Banks
“He’s not the same as he was at first,” says a dissenting fan in one of the more unforgettable scenes in Todd Haynes’ 2007 postmodern Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. In “Pastiche Called Pastiche,” Richard Dyer defines and defends pastiche as a productive critical response to the disconnect between popular media representations and ‘real’ life. He writes that art, ‘reality,’ and consciousness all mediate each other, and that pastiche can transcend late-stage capitalism’s curse of ‘the copy.’ In other words, it produces “a reality as much…within the writer as within the things” (Dyer 61). In I’m Not There, Haynes deploys pastiche multifariously and daringly through six iterations of Bob Dylan and their respective stylistic citations of various film genres. In our first official glimpse of Cate-Blanchett-as-Jude-Quinn, s/he turns a machine gun on us, the audience, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (I’m Not There 0:45:00-0:48:12). This scene at once pastiches the direct cinema style of the acclaimed Dylan documentary Dont Look Back (1967), the buzz surrounding Dylan’s infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance, and the persona and mannerisms of an iconographic mid-60s ‘electrified’ Dylan.
Yet none of these sources are Dylan ‘himself’—that subject of history, Robert Allen Zimmerman, who lived the career being portrayed on screen. Instead, these renditions present versions of him that have been mediated by the press, the faults of memory, and his own performativity. If the difference between pastiche and parody is that between critical homage and mockery, this scene has a foot in both doors. As pastiche, it inhabits each reference, while also exaggerating them beyond plain mimicry. Yet, Haynes toys further with Dyer’s warning against “too much exaggeration” by using machine guns. Far from metaphorizing Dylan’s lamentable loss of musical innocence, this scene mocks the fact that our perceived familiarity with Dylan is simply a familiarity with highly constructed versions of him.
According to Dyer, pastiche collapses the critical distance inherent to other modes of analysis and instead comments on the referent text from within the text’s own style. Keeping with the fragmentation and multiplicity of postmodernism, Dyer specifies that “a pastiche imitates its idea of that which it imitates” (55). Through simultaneous likeness and deformation, pastiche investigates the way that culture can skew ‘reality’ through “individual memory,” “shared and constructed remembering,” or “a perception current at a given cultural-historical moment” (Dyer 55). In its deformation, pastiche “selects, accentuates, exaggerates, [and] concentrates” the referent text, acting as a “kind of synecdoche” (56-57). Far from uncritically disfiguring the original reference, these purposeful discrepancies serve to “remind the reader that the text is not to be taken straight-facedly and reinforce the sense of the stylistic flow of the text by the very departure from it” (58). This is perhaps pastiche’s most compelling and paradoxical function: its ability to add nuance to a text through a deliberately twisted imitation of it. Dyer acclaims pastiche for allowing the audience to experience the reference through the pastiching author’s own perception of it—in this case, Todd Haynes’ own perception of popular culture’s obsession with Dylan (60).
At the start of the Newport Folk Festival scene, we are affectively underwater: a methodical, thumping heartbeat is sonically foregrounded, while the diegetic festival commotion is relegated to the background. As we struggle to puncture the auditory surface of the image, the first shot of Quinn comes visually barred by a fence (I’m Not There 0:45:20-0:45:25). When Quinn and his band mount the stage, the previous direct cinema film style—in which the camera navigates the audience, panning and zooming with dexterity and a sense of pacing that belongs to realism—is interrupted. The scene becomes highly directed and surreal, as the extra-diegetic heartbeat sound cuts out, fast-paced montage shows Quinn unlatching a mysterious case, and the camera zooms out as the band opens fire on the audience (0:45:53-0:45:57). A cut to black precedes the fade-in of an electric rendition of “Maggie’s Farm,” staging the use of assault weapons as metaphor for Dylan’s so-called harsh and rebellious betrayal of acoustic folk. After a set full of boos and sabotage attempts, the camera walks among Quinn’s disappointed fans, ultimately pulling back to pan a line of angry folkies who stand in glaring direct address (0:48:00-0:48:12). Here lies the first layer of pastiche: while the scene alludes to the black-and-white documentary aesthetics of Dont Look Back, the highly directed and surreal elements shows how “the style stands out qua style” (Dyer 58). Since the imagery resembles Dont Look Back enough to evoke it, but not enough that it “belongs naturally, effortlessly” to that body of work, we are invited to meditate on the taken-for-granted ‘realism’ of the referent (Dyer 58).
The second layer of pastiche at play is the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as an event in the public collective memory. At face value, the machine gun element seems an obvious parody of Dylan’s venture into electric music, clearly breaking the boundaries of pastiche. Yet we must remember that this scene pastiches not the event itself, but the cultural narrative surrounding it: Haynes is challenging us to investigate the public’s obsession with Dylan being booed. Considering how this historical moment has been reinvented by melodramatic retellings, this scene illustrates how the myth of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival eclipsed the ‘reality’ of what happened. From this perspective, the machine guns symbolize not the figurative assault of going eclectic — a hyperbole beyond the engineered subtlety of Dyer’s description of pastiche—but instead the dramatized cultural narrative surrounding the event: the way the event was talked about, remembered, and thus (re)constructed as such.
Pastiche is wielded similarly on a third register in the scene’s reference to the Dylan persona, or Cate-Blanchett-as-Jude-Quinn. As Dyer notes, Quinn “selects” Dylan’s “characteristic” traits, an act that inherently “deforms the original [and] makes the trait appear more present and insistent” (57). For instance, Quinn’s cat-like quality of movement, sarcastic yet cryptic apology, and insistence on unapproachability via sunglasses are all mannerisms taken directly from Dylan himself. Blanchett overperforms these mannerisms, letting them synecdochally define Quinn, and further strengthening the phallic link between the wielded machine guns and Dylan’s womanizing tendencies. Just as the press, who was so obsessed with Dylan’s elusiveness, failed to extract anything profound and ‘meaningful’ from him in interviews (à la Mr. Jones), this scene operates from the joined perspectives of the audience and an investigative press figure, roaming the festival grounds without betraying any real insights into Quinn’s own subjectivity or motivations. This pastiche of Dylan’s iconographic rock persona thus draws on the former two layers of pastiche to critique celebrity mythologies and the delusion of assigning stable identities to them. It is not that a ‘true’ Dylan can be parsed by amalgamating these pastiched fragments of his career, but rather that Blanchett’s non-Dylan, for example, has just as much claim to ‘truth’ as Dylan himself has—which is to say, none at all.
Resultantly, the machine gun hyperbole expands the repertoire of pastiche while supplementing the scene with an extra punch of deformation that reminds the viewer of what is actually being critiqued: not Dylan, not his folkie fans, but the assumption of great value in trying to represent ‘reality.’ Haynes pairs an already postmodern project with a notoriously elusive and mythologically constructed subject, thus preventing all viewers, no matter their cultural capital, from extracting every single one of the film’s allusions and inside jokes. Thus, the ultimate joke is on those viewers who, like Mr. Jones, strive earnestly to know and understand the film—and Dylan—as a ‘whole’ (whatever that means).
Works Cited
Dont Look Back. Directed by D. A. Pennebaker, Leacock-Pennebaker, 1967.
Dyer, Richard. “Pastiche Called Pastiche.” Pastiche, Routledge, 2007, pp. 52-63.
I’m Not There. Directed by Todd Haynes, Killer/MGM, 2007.