No Direction Home Part II

Part II of Scorcese's No Direction Home, a documentary about Bob Dylan aired on PBS last night. After seeing both parts, I feel conflicted. To counter my first part about this documentary, I don't think Scorcese was following Dylan's own autobiography, Chronicles, because he only focused on the 1960's Dylan. In Chronicles Dylan takes us up to the 1980's and his work with Daniel Lanois on No Mercy. Anyway, I'm struggling to figure out the point of Scorcese's doc.

He focused strictly on Dylan's life and work from 1960-1966, right after Dylan went "electric." Hasn't this already been covered? I'm not sure why he chose to only focus on this transformation. I was left feeling like it wasn't so much a documentary about Dylan's work, as it was about how Dylan essentially killed folk music, or protest music, when he turned his back on it and plugged in his electric guitar. So, all in all, it was flawed, and if people want to know about this era in Dylan's life and work, I would suggest the documentary by DA Pennebaker, Don't Look Back, which was released in 1967.

Even though I can't endorse Scorcese's film, it did leave me pondering this notion of Dylan killing folk music. Thy guy started out idolizing Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and began his career as a protest singer, but once he started writing his own songs, he went out of his way to disassociate himself from this ilk, and to even deny his protest song past. Why? Is this a case of an artist strongly opposed to co-optation, and extremely fearful of being pigeonholed as an artist? Dylan also seemed to go out of his way to avoid being "the voice of his generation," a designation he abhorred, during the turbulent time of civil rights, the vietnam war etc etc. To my knowledge, once he went electric , he never spoke or wrote about political issues again. Should we fault him for this? Do we need to hold him to a higher political standard because of his position? I really don't know, but in the 1960's many people were pissed that he turned his back on protest music (Scorcese's film makes this point, again and again) and its message of community and the envisioning of a better world. Dylan, it would seem to me, was writing about the world as it actually existed, rather than as it could be. A world where people were on their own, "with no direction home, like a complete unknown." An individualistic take, yes, but perhaps a realistic one.

JB