Bob Dylan and the New Journalism
Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue film leaves viewers with some great Dylan performances, and a lot to think about.
Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review was a wildly romantic gesture that was haunted equally by the recently released Blood on the Tracks and the filming of his epic psychodrama Renaldo and Clara. Collecting musicians, friends, supporters, poets, and various counterculture performers it was a bit like Ken Kesey's bus trip across America: ragtag, messy, boisterous, and loaded with possibility that somehow didn't quite manifest. If life is a carnival, the Rolling Thunder Review was meant to be the funhouse, holding up a distorted mirror to audience and performers alike.
Martin Scorsese is getting some flak for injecting a few fictional elements into his newly released Rolling Thunder Review: A Bob Dylan Story. The fictional elements involve an interview with fictional congressman Jack Tanner, a character (not an actual congressman) drawn from Robert Altman's '80s HBO series Tanner '88, an appearance by a real producer playing the tour promoter, who discusses the financial failure of the tour--except that he was never involved with the tour, and a fabricated narrative by Sharon Stone about how she ended up following the Rolling Thunder Revue Tour around, when it never actually happened at all.
These sleight of hand elements of the film are breathlessly reported by The New Yorker's film critic Richard Brody, and by Variety writer Owen Gleiberman, among others. Gleiberman, who reviewed the film just a few days beforehand, seems most upset, and his tone suggests that it is largely because he was taken in by these pieces of false narrative:
"In the movie, all this stuff is executed with deadpan drollery, in a spirit of high malarkey, that sounds harmless and fun. And maybe it is. Yet the fact that I was nearly seduced into palming off a blatant fabrication as fact kind of bugged me. It rubbed up against my journalistic instincts and made me bristle. I didn’t feel delighted — I felt played."
Fair enough. On the other hand, Scorsese does signal his intention to create a film that is less documentary than his previous Dylan film, No Direction Home. His use of "A Bob Dylan Story" in the title seems meant to convey that we are being presented with an artistic vision that we hope gets us closer to the truth than the mere recitation of facts can. In an interview, Dylan discusses the use of masks on the tour (a device also used in Renaldo and Clara) and he mentions the idea of someone who wears a mask being truthful, while an undisguised appearance is perfect for telling lies.
Scorsese's techniques here are reminiscent of the New Journalism that was practiced by writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Hunter S. Thompson in the 1970s. The idea was to apply the techniques of fiction to non-fiction: full record of dialogue, third person narrative, emphasis on the writer's view of the scene, composite characters, and sometimes making the writer part of the story.
One of the most well known stories of New Journalism liberties revolves around Nik Cohn's celebrated New York Magazine article "Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night" that became the basis for the movie Saturday Night Fever. Cohn published the piece in 1976, the same year that the Rolling Thunder Review finished its second leg in a decidedly less magical manner than the 1975 portion. Twenty years later Cohn confessed that the article had been a largely fictionalized account, with most of his characters composites, some modeled not on the working class Italians he supposedly talked to, but on mods that he encountered as a rock writer in London. But the fact that Saturday Night Fever became a major part of American popular culture begs the question: did it really matter if Cohn fudged his facts if the story he told said something that was essentially true?
By the 1980s, the New Journalism was being declared dead and Tom Wolfe was writing a serialized novel in Rolling Stone. But I would suggest that it never really went anywhere. I think we've become used to some of these techniques and find them acceptable in conveying a story that is represented as factual. Composite characters, for example, can provide a better narrative by representing multiple thematic threads without having to introduce and explain characters who may only be tangential to the story. The genre of creative nonfiction applies these exact techniques to books about historical and sociological subjects and has proven very successful: non-fiction books have outsold fiction for the past five years.
Miles Ahead, the 2016 film loosely based on Miles Davis' period of retirement in the mid-1970s, used a fictional story about Miles trying to recover a stolen session tape with a young reporter. The project, with a screenplay by Don Cheadle and Steven Baigelman, was approved by Davis' estate, with Davis' nephew Vince Wilburn, Jr. serving as a producer. Though it was criticized by some for its fictionalized aspects, the film shows that New Journalism and its techniques never really disappeared and are somewhat allowed in works dealing with pop culture and especially the music and entertainment industries.
There is one more fictional conceit that Scorsese uses which may not be so benign. Much of the raw material for Scorsese's work--especially the concert footage that makes up around half the film--was shot for Renaldo and Clara by Chicago independent filmmaker Howard Alk. Alk directed the counterculture films American Revolution 2 and The Murder of Fred Hampton, but he is best known as a collaborator with Dylan. Alk accompanied Dylan on tour and shot photos and film footage. He served as an editor and cinematographer on every Dylan film project from Don't Look Back through Renaldo and Clara. Alk filmed the television special Hard Rain during the second leg of Rolling Thunder Revue.
Scorsese completely ignores the existence of Renaldo and Clara or the filming that was constantly being done for it during the Rolling Thunder Tour and so he concocts a story about a European director, Stefan van Dorp, who does not exist but appears in interview segments talking about how he shot all of this footage that was never used.
Alk does receive a cinematography credit and of course Scorsese and his crew have done a great deal of editing and other work on archival footage by Alk and others to create their film, just as any documentary film maker does. But the most of the audience will never know this. Most will probably accept the van Dorp character and his stories out of hand, or else they will discover that he is not real (portrayed in the film by Martin von Haselberg, a performance artist who is Bette Midler's husband) and never stop to consider that an actual filmmaker shot this footage of a major event in rock and roll history.
New Journalism, fake news, deep fakes--the embellishment of facts and the telling and retelling of stories that may or may not be true are part and parcel of rock and roll and the mythology of many of its stars. Martin Scorsese has created a film that seems to give a very palpable feel for the Rolling Thunder Revue sideshow in all its glory and which documents some great Dylan performances. The question viewers, now and in the future, will have to ask is whether the New Journalism techniques employed by Scorsese get us closer to the truth by embellishing it, or not.
Bonus Tracks:
Rolling Stone ran an article outlining all of the real vs. fake pieces of Scorsese’s film, as did many other music and culture outlets.
1972’s New Yorker piece by Tom Wolfe on the birth of New Journalism
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