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09/27/2005 Archived Entry: "No Direction Home II"

No Direction Home II
Scot begins the talk on last night's airing of part I of No Direction Home.
I love the allusive nature of Dylan as interviewee. The way he avoids telling the interviewer what he wants to hear:
"Just because you take someone's side who's oppressed, that doesn't mean you're political."
"I know the stories about why I took that name. I don't know if they're true. The name just came to me. I was from nowhere being no one."
"They're just songs. They don't mean nothing."
There is no direction here; rambling, associations, turns, stops. This is the opposite of the celebrity interview the Howard Stern show ends with most days - a mockery of cliché and trite interviews set up to promote a new film: "How was it working with X?" "It was so wonderful. X is such a professional!"
SNORE.
Our best moments are often found in allusiveness or moments which lack a meaning we can pinpoint or clarify. Why did my parents bring home Blonde on Blonde for me when I was 12? Why were they going to a record store anyway (my parents in a record store?). It's an allusive personal moment - a moment tied explicitly to popular culture and my own sense of identity. I can’t explain it, but I remember it, I use it, I work within it.
In No Direction Home, I see a lot of that process at work. “Something is happening/And you don’t know what it is…” Whether Dylan fakes it or not doesn't matter to me. No matte how hard Scorsese tries to frame Dylan in a cliché way (Civil Rights/the ‘60s/Newport/Baez), Dylan somehow sneaks back in as the weird, drifting figure who is not really beyond all this; he's just not a part of any of this.
Another way of thinking about this title: HOME is the comfortable dwelling place(s) we choose: Our ethos. Dylan is a comfortable home for American culture when he is framed as champion of the ‘60s/”Blowin’ in the Wind kind of folk hero.
But that’s nowhere, man!
Nowhere home is the uncanny experience of not having this fixed dwelling, of not giving a damn about the ethical/ethos experience. It is allusive-identity formation.

Posted by The Platypus @ 09/27/2005 02:59 PM EST