Must genius be selfish in order to flourish? Must one respect an individual in order to respect his work? Is Bob Dylan a product of his times or did he shape an era? Or is he just an ornery jerk?
These are some of the questions raised by Martin Scorsese’s recent documentary “Bob Dylan: No Direction Home.” Sponsored by major corporations including Apple and Starbucks, the film was broadcast in conjunction with the release of the DVD, the publication of “The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1956-1966” (Simon and Schuster), and came not too long after the first awards for Dylan’s autobiography were announced. Touted as a new look at Dylan, the press releases declared the film a revelatory and revolutionary look at one of the most influential, famously elusive, contrary performers of the 20th century, a man who turned profound and palpable alienation into a form of charisma. Indeed, the film itself was declared “history” by Arena, one of the companies that produced it. 

Dylan and Scorsese seemed a dream pairing, and for diehard Dylan fans, the resulting film offers many rewards. The opportunity to compare the hesitant, unsure nervousness of Dylan before he reached stardom, and the self-assured, smooth Dylan evident in the color footage of 1966 concert that Scorsese uses as a counterpoint and base for the rest of the film, is a pure pleasure, an opportunity to visually track Dylan’s emergence as a mature artist. And the previously unseen footage from the Dylan archives is striking: powerfully alive, often intimate, it reveals a Dylan who is usually only tantalizingly hinted at in most stock footage from his career. And for all fans of folk and protest music, the rough footage from small folk clubs has a raw power seldom seen in an era when live performances are often limited to the overpriced and crowded vacuums of large arenas. In fact, were it not for the benefits to aid victims of natural disasters, we might not even see footage of live performances on television. We certainly can forget, as Peter Yarrow says in the film, the way that small performances can create intimacy or a feeling of community.

Unfortunately, those looking for any new knowledge or insight into Dylan will have to look elsewhere. The first 30 minutes rely on a routine analysis of the Cold War culture of small town America, a story that has been recounted in virtually all written histories and documentaries about this era. Scorsese includes all the clichéd images: schoolchildren scrambling under their desks in practice for a coming nuclear holocaust; hometown parades triumphantly displaying the ascension of the military-industrial complex; the vacuity of consumer culture. Similarly, there is nothing remarkable about noting the influence of the literature of the Beats, the iconic images of Brando and Dean, or nuclear terror on the baby boomer generation. At times the film resembles a visual album of the “Greatest Hits of the 1960s,” including such classics as the Kennedy assassination, King’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and Mario Savio’s passionate indictment of the “odious machine” during the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech movement.

This in itself would not necessarily be a problem—after all, you can’t argue with the importance of accurate historical context. But Scorsese uses such footage to explain why Dylan was Dylan, and this makes Dylan seem as if he was no different from any other lonely, alienated and dissatisfied teenager looking for some meaning in life during a time of great social upheaval. And yet: Dylan was hardly average, and to suggest that Dylan was merely influenced by such events, and was not a pivotal part of them, is to play fast and loose with history.

This is shockingly evident in Scorsese’s casual use of major events to frame Dylan’s life. Scorsese places Dylan’s political awakening within the context of the civil rights movement and the emergence of the New Left. Fair enough—it would have been impossible to be in Dylan’s position in the folk world and not be influenced by such events. However, Dylan was not merely a moved bystander of events at this time. For example, after Savio’s speech in Berkeley, which Scorsese uses as an example of the events that influenced Dylan, Joan Baez appeared in front of the students and sang “The Times They Are a’Changin’”—a Dylan song. Scorsese does not include this in his film. Recognition of the simultaneous dynamic of Dylan as both influenced and influencer would have illuminated the particularly important relationship his creative work had with the era. Its omission, however, leaves the viewer with no other option but to agree with Dylan’s steadfast insistence that he was not a topical singer (which he of course also contradicted in an early interview by arguing “all my songs are protest songs.”) It’s an interesting choice for Scorsese: by adhering to Dylan’s vision of himsel,f he elides important historical questions about the complex relationship between an artist and his or her era and skips out on his responsibilities as a documentary historian.

Other more serious and important issues are similarly avoided here. As has been pointed out by other reviewers, Scorsese shows Dylan accepting the Tom Paine award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee soon after the assassination of President Kennedy, but does not include footage of Dylan declaring to the audience that, although he didn’t understand the actions of Lee Harvey Oswald, “I … saw some of myself” in Oswald. Dylan said this in the context of discussing his—and apparently Oswald’s—opposition to what many felt was an unreasonable U.S. policy toward Cuba, but the audience booed him to the point that Dylan had to remind them that the Tom Paine award was generally viewed as a free speech award.

Dylan’s proclamation of an ideological kinship with Lee Harvey Oswald was a shockingly dangerous thing to say at the height of the Cold War. Why doesn’t Scorsese include this footage? Is he so swayed by his reverence for Dylan, and Dylan’s insistence that he was apolitical, that he chooses to be silent on this issue? Or does he not trust his audience to handle the implications of radicalism that such a statement raises? Is he cowed by fears that such controversial aspects of Dylan’s career will result in fewer DVD sales at a time when political criticism is met with cries of treason, just as it was in the 1960s?

Such questions may be answered by the way in which Scorsese handles Dylan’s habitual lying. Dylan’s contradictions and deliberate misrepresentations are legend. Scorsese’s inclusion of Dylan’s deliberate lies about his background are interesting not because they are newly exposed here, but because they are, again, left unexamined. A profoundly alienated man who says of his youth “I didn’t feel I had a past” and who makes no mention of his family, Dylan is also the same man who serenaded girlfriends under their windows, betraying a romantic side that belies his more well-known cynicism—unless one or the other is a pose. It would be interesting to probe this contradiction, because it again positions Dylan within his generation, a harbinger of the alienated youth who later formed the counterculture and, by the middle of the decade, routinely changed their names and their backgrounds, perhaps believing that a reshaping of the past would inevitably lead to the creation of a new future. Dylan certainly hoped that his future would be different from his past, and his lies helped him create that future. Again, though, Scorsese fails to really probe his subject.

These failures—and Dylan’s lies—exist in direct counterpoint to the honesty of Dylan’s songs, which though usually verbally oblique are always brutally emotionally honest.

If Dylan’s music proves anything, it is that there can be a tremendous honesty in ambiguity. This honesty is also why he is infuriating: it usually operates only one-way. In a compelling and revealing scene included in the film, Dylan chastises a young fan for asking for his autograph, saying, “You don’t need my autograph. If you needed it I’d give it to you.” This lack of empathy for his fans comes from a man who traveled half-way across the country to sit by the bedside of a dying Woody Guthrie, because he needed something from him, to be near him, to somehow grasp the essence of the artist he so admired—to take from him, as Dylan sang in “Like a Rolling Stone,” “everything he could steal.”

Of Guthrie and the end of Dylan’s visits to him in the hospital, for which many have criticized Dylan as a cold opportunist, all Dylan says is, “I knew I would not be going back there.” This rejection of full disclosure is either a product of Dylan’s contrary nature or again the kind of selfishness that he needed in order to protect and nurture his creativity. Perhaps Dylan, if he had he kept visiting Guthrie, would never have been able to eventually break away from mimicry to develop his own singular style, and had he never stolen Guthrie’s records from his friends in the first place, he might never have developed into an influential singer and songwriter. Those from whom he stole seem to have reconciled themselves to this possibility, laughingly recalling Dylan’s acts of thievery and manipulation. Even Joan Baez, in her brutally honest and direct terms, reveals that she was hurt by Dylan’s refusal to call her onstage on his European tour, but also defends Dylan, suggesting that he had to publicly repudiate her to continue on his creative path, which soon included a repudiation of the pure folk idiom Baez represented. In the end, the consensus is that Dylan, and perhaps all artists, need to be selfish, careless of the feelings and needs of others, in order to best serve their own muses. History is rife with tales of artistic creativity mingled with casual and sometimes extreme abuses of the goodwill of others—any mere survey of Picasso’s life will reinforce this—and Dylan seems, for good or ill, to have done much the same to those in his life.

But Scorsese never directly engages with this issue, and fails once again to really get at Dylan, to actually make this film the revealing look it is hyped to be. This is a case where the PR doesn’t do the film justice, in both good and bad ways. And the critics have generally agreed with this assessment. David Yaffee, in his Slate article, calls Scorsese’s documentary a “whitewashing” of Dylan.

I think there’s more to it than this. Rather than a simple case of idol worship, Scorsese may be exhibiting the same inability to trust today’s audiences with complexity and political controversy that is all too common lately in politics as well as entertainment. We live in the worst of times for political expression, a period of political, social and individual oppression, when a brutally cavalier federal administration routinely shirks its responsibility to truth and justice, preferring to patronize us with empty, knee-jerk reassurances and platitudes. This is a time when the FCC OKs the nude butts of actors on the fictional television show “NYPD Blue” and gives permission for the dying Dr. Mark Greene to yell “shit” as part of his cancerous death throes on “ER,” but censors the real words of real people, including, in a particularly galling example during the PBS broadcast of this film, the words of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America.” Ginsberg’s line, “America go fuck yourself with your atom bomb,” is strategically bleeped out during the PBS broadcast. Yet in 1957 these words helped bring down artistic censorship in the precedent-setting “Howl” obscenity trial, when Ginsberg’s banned works were legally found to be of “redeeming social value.” Apparently, we have changed our standards regarding what is of social value, and as a society have allowed artistic expression to be eclipsed by entertainment value and corporate economies. At the very least, PBS has bowed down before an administration that has allowed this.

“Bob Dylan: No Direction Home” raises important questions about history, the way we remember the past, and the relationship between the creative and personal life, but it leaves many of these questions unanswered. Just like Dylan.