ideological criminal

Sometimes, albeit rarely, you walk out of a movie feeling like you’ll never be the same again. There is a distinct changedness feeling that I’ve experienced so many times after first seeing some movies. Even more rarely does this feeling actually hold over time. For me, those in the latter category include movies like The Battle of Algiers, Crumb, Opening Night, The Elephant Man (which I vividly remember seeing at a young age with my mother—in hindsight, too young, given the disturbing adult themes of that PG flick). The former are more difficult to recall, obviously, and although emotionally effective, not nearly as important.

Other times you can come away from a movie with tepid indifference, only to find the film gnawing at your brain weeks and months later. Blue Velvet comes to mind. It’s hard to think of others, but perhaps that’s because my brain is currently the subject of the gnawing of Masked and Anonymous, which I saw a few weeks ago. At first I didn’t really know what, if anything, to make of it. It seemed a bit silly and incoherent—some of it I thought simply didn’t work, but it has stuck with me; it occupies my thoughts from day to day, either during the moments before I fall asleep, or as I ride the train, or take a shower.

The story is set in a contemporary, post-revolutionary US that exists in some alternative universe. The country is ravaged by civil war and poverty. Bob Dylan plays Jack Fate, a prodigal son of sorts, born to the now dying President, who has spent his life in a subterranean prison cell, presumably, for having an affair with his father’s mistress (Angela Bassett). Fate is sprung from prison by Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman), who, together with Nina Veronica (Jessica Lange), is organizing a “benefit concert” sponsored by the government. In actuality, it is a propaganda piece, evidenced by the government’s behest that Fate play songs making a mockery of resistance by their pop-culture ubiquity; Elvis’s Jail House Rock and the Beatles‘ Revolution, The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again, and MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, to name a few. Sweetheart hopes to use the concert to line is own pockets and settle outstanding debt which has begun to violently catch up with him.

The script was written by Dylan and Larry Charles, the famed Seinfeld writer, and Charles directs. Penélope Cruz’s character, Pagan Lace, says of Fate, “I love his songs because they are not precise—they are completely open to interpretation,” and as Charles aptly points out on the commentary track, the same could be said of the film itself.

Fate is a short fictional distance from the real Dylan. As one actor says, Goodman maybe?, Fate is basically Dylan, with a little Jesus thrown in (biblical allusions feature prominently in the story, as pointed out by Charles on the commentary track and by others in their reviews). Fate’s music is Dylan’s and features prominently throughout the movie, performed by Dylan/Fate as he prepares for the concert. It also comprises the soundtrack as well, often covered by other artists such as the Dead, the Ramones, Los Lobos, and others. Foreign language versions of his song can be heard, too, including at least Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. At one point muzak renditions of Dylan songs are used.

The atmosphere of this alternative reality is, sadly, created through very real images. Televisions play scenes of violence, armed struggle, revolution, oppression, and so on from actual footage amassed from the BBC’s video library (BBC Films was the production company for the movie). The desolation and poverty of the city is created by footage shot in poor sections of Los Angeles without the need for art direction. Panning shots show row after row of makeshift shelters propped up by the city’s homeless. The multilingual aspect of the movie is amplified by overdubbing several different languages at once to television scenes of violence from around the world. One gets the impression that this alternative world is one in which all of the world, and all of its languages, cultures and conflicts, have been amalgamated into a single land. As it supposedly says in one of the screenplay scene synopses, “Signs and speech are in every conceivable language, every alphabet”.

At one point in the commentary, Charles talks about the process of filming the movie, which was shot in 20 days. He discusses how, for him, the process was much more important than the end result, and that he wanted it to be first and foremost an experience for all those involved in its creation. The comment reminded me of things I’ve read about John Casavettes, another director fond of the ambiguous and the real. Much of the film reminds me of Casavettes style, and Dylan strikes me as a perfect Casavettes actor (the rest of the cast, however, would be the last people I’d expect to see in a Casavetes movie).

Much has been made of Dylan’s acting (or lack thereof), just as much has been made off-screen of his singing talent (or lack thereof). Both are dubious, in my opinion. Dylan gives a convincingly real performance in this movie. Others have simply said he is just not acting; the Fate we see on screen is just Dylan under a different name. First of all, it can’t be overstated just how difficult it is to be on camera while “not acting”. On screen, Dylan is soulful and empathetic—and mesmerizing to watch. Sure, much of this can be attributed to his tapping into his own self—the man is nothing if not a master of understanding human motives and emotions—but, this “tapping into” and ability to connect the fictional with the actual is precisely what fine acting is all about. As for his singing, well, I think the two are parallel issues. For Dylan, the music should be effective and real, not pretty and technical. Again, people miss the incredible ability he has for creating something that is flawed by design. (Shortly after writing this, I came across the following comment from Larry Charles in an interview: “he very much embraces the imperfect, and the beauty of the imperfect, the beauty of the flaw and he’s not afraid of that. And that’s part of his courage as an artist. Also, you know, he recognizes the illusion of perfection…”).

(Just as an aside, I’ve seen Dylan play only once, at a small venue in downtown Houston on my 16th birthday. I was given four front row tickets that night, along with my first car. The show was incredible and it was maybe the best birthday I’ve ever had—easily preferable to my 20th, the day my girlfriend at the time decided to dump me).

As Fate prepares for the concert, he is joined by Bobby Cupid, an old friend and comrade of Fate’s, played by Luke Wilson. Of the cast, Wilson’s performance is the weakest. He simply is not a talented actor, just a pretty face (unlike his brother Owen, who I think is a decent actor with not quite so pretty a face). It’s unfortunate since I met Wilson when I was in high school. I was showcasing my video work at the ISAS Fine Arts festival in Dallas. This was after Wes Anderson’s 13-minute short, Bottle Rocket, had been picked up at Sundance and recently made into a feature length film, his first. The festival was hosted by Wilson’s high school, St. Mark’s School of Texas, and since Bottle Rocket was Wilson’s first role, he was still relatively unknown and had the time and inclination to sit down with high schoolers and talk about movie making for a couple hours. It was a treat for me.

Perhaps I’ve been a little too harsh on Wilson, after all, I think his roles in Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenenbaums were well done. He was also fine, although it was a minor, almost cameo appearance, in Rushmore. In other words, he is a fine actor under the direction of Anderson, who casts him as a fairly flat, quiet character, to wit:

Stacy Sinclair: You seem really complicated.
Anthony (Wilson): I try not to be.

(from Bottle Rocket)

His persona in Masked and Anonymous is an eager and soulful man, uncanny in his ability to judge other’s character. It just doesn’t work.

I learned from the commentary track that Wilson was the first actor, outside of Dylan, to sign on to the project. Apparently he caught wind of the film and sought out Charles, saying he wanted to work with Dylan. I doubt that he would have been involved in the film had he not imposed himself and he sticks out with mediocrity among the rest of the excellent cast.

At the other end of the spectrum, Giovanni Ribisi gave the most outstanding, if brief, performance of the movie. Ribisi plays an unnamed passenger on the bus with Fate as he rides from prison to the concert site. Ribisi shares his story of involvement in the revolutionary forces and how his family abandoned him after his decision to fight. He later became disillusioned with the revolutionaries and joined the counter-revolutionary forces and even later still, the government militia. He was sent on a mission by the government to destroy a small village, supposedly a revolutionary stronghold. He recalls finding only women and children, who they subsequently massacred, and then he reveals to Fate that it was in fact his own village. At that point, the bus is intercepted by armed counter-revolutionaries. Ribisi takes his large automatic machine gun and exits the bus to confront the militants. He is immediately gunned down, allowing the bus to speed off.

Ribisi’s character is trapped in a horrible world. He has tried to fight to make things better, only to find that he has perpetrated the horribleness. Tormented now by his condition, he seeks escape in his dreams—he has no worldly recourse. When the bus is stopped, he has lost any fear of death; he has lost everything but his own life, an absurd condition, which frees (or bounds) him to walk into sure death. (Absurdity is a common theme of the film—it would please the French existentialists for sure).

Fear of death, and knowledge of death, is another common theme throughout the movie. Fate, arriving at the concert site, encounters a misanthropic “animal wrangler” (Val Kilmer), who launches into a rant on the beauty of animals, as compared to humans—the “lowest form of existence”—who live lost and in fear, knowing that one day they will perish. He goes on:

I avoid looking at human beings. They disgust me so much with their atom bombs and blow dryers and automobiles. They build hospitals and shrines to the diseases they create. Human beings are alone with their secrets. Masked and anonymous. No one truly knows them.

As I said before, the film is open to interpretation, which in itself is enough to make the movie a refreshing departure from so much that appears on the big screen these days. Even amongst independent and avant-garde films, rarely do things go unexplained—as if every part of a movie must be at once necessary and sufficient.

But even with its imprecision, some of the movie still just doesn’t work. After arriving at the concert site, Fate checks into a hotel. In his room he walks by the closet and has a flash back. We see the same hotel room, but now from the point of view of someone hiding in the closet. The person witnesses a young man and the President’s mistress enter the room, walk over to the bed, and begin to kiss. Suddenly two men, hired muscle types, enter the room, grab the young man and mistress, and open the closet to reveal the person hiding (we’re still viewing the scene from this person’s POV). The young man is led into a staircase and thrown down a flight of stairs, ending the flashback.

You’re supposed to come away understanding that the young man with the mistress was in fact the young Jack Fate and that the scene depicts the incident which estranged Fate from his father and perhaps is responsible for his years in prison and his “jail pale”. Of course, I totally missed all of this on first viewing. I had to re-watch the movie with Charles’s commentary for this to click when he said how difficult it was to cast an actor who looked like a young Dylan. Needless to say, understanding the scene is crucial to the plot. Without it, it’s not clear exactly what the beef between Fate and his father is, nor what exactly is going on when Fate returns to visit his father’s mistress so many years later. I made the ridiculous mistake of assuming that Fate would flashback to his own point of view (the only POV perspective used in the movie). Silly me. It’s just like in real life when you flashback to someone else’s memories of viewing the younger you. As for who the hell’s eyes we’re peeping through in the closet, I still don’t know: the father’s is my best guess.

I would chalk this up as a major flaw in the plot. I have a hard time thinking of other movies with a structural problem quite as bad as this one. Maybe I’m just an idiot and it was obvious to everyone else. But idiocy aside, even with such a fundamental compromise, the film still stands. The plot was never that central to begin with.

Much more important are the movie’s themes, language, and philosophy. There is a sort of kaleidoscopic coherence to it all. The current that seems to run throughout is that the reality we live in is the reality we create, no more or less abhorent or splendid than we choose. By setting the movie in an alternative reality, we are able to digest this more thoroughly, while at the same time seeing that this “alternative” is very much the world we live in—the scenes of violence and poverty are all real, Dylan and his songs are real, the diversity of people, cultures, and languages, are all real—real, as in literally real. Moreover, the themes and situations of the film are symbolically real. We deal with the same issues of political power, corruptions of justice, betrayal, and deception.

The film is sprinkled with little commentaries on reality. At one point a ranting voice, played by Larry Charles, can be heard on the radio saying:

The only power the government has is to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals you make them. You make so many things a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws.

As the father dies while Fate plays the benefit concert, power passes from him to the Vice-President, Edmund (Mickey Rourke). Edmund, who throughout the movie has been waiting to assume power from Fate’s father, was himself an illegal alien from a humble background. He views his rise to power as a legitimization of his worth. When the President dies, Edmund proclaims a new era of peace and end of “stupidity”, shortly before announcing invasions, occupations, and the coming police state. We see war in the name of peace, the powerless become the powerful, the illegitimate become the legitimate, and the oppressed become the oppressor.

After the concert, Wilson’s character, Cupid, who servers as the voice of reason and morality, is ultimately the one who turns to violence, killing Tom Friend (Jeff Bridges), a cynical journalist, by brutally stabbing him in the throat with the neck of a broken guitar. Cupid flees the scene, but when government militants arrive, Veronica fingers Fate as the culprit. He rides off in custody, and reflects with the following inner-monologue as the film concludes:

I was always a singer and maybe no more then that. Sometimes it’s not enough to know the meaning of things, sometimes we have to know what things don’t mean as well. Like what does it mean to not know what the person you love is capable of? Things fall apart, especially all the neat order of rules and laws. The way we look at the world is the way we really are. See it from a fair garden and everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau and you’ll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.

The world of Masked and Anonymous is, at the same time, our world and something different than our world. For example, it is a world where art has been outlawed; Rodin’s Thinker is masked and shackled in the lobby of Fate’s hotel (the only permissible images are those of the President). This may seem a far cry from our own free society, until you hear why we don’t see the sculpture in the film—the makers couldn’t clear it with the legal department. By entangling the real with the fictional, the film becomes a powerful critical reflection on our society. I came away thinking that, fundamentally, the movie is about the interconnectedness of all of us, and the false factionalism we’ve saturated our world view with. When we betray others, we betray ourselves, and yet, we go through life asking, who’s side are you on? It’s not such a silly thing to have gnawing on your brain after all.