Bob Dylan’s twilight is an iconoclastic one, but a twilight nonetheless. Agreeably, he appears on the awards shows, blinking like Ishi. He says something inscrutable and wanders away again. Examine his career of the past 20 years or so, and you can be repelled at the stridency, the carelessness. See him in concert, and you may be greeted with a compelling performance — or an indifferent one.
Dylan turns 60 Thursday. Is he sad? Pathetic? Mighty? Indomitable? It’s tough to tell. You can think about Dylan in any number of ways on any given day or at any given time. Start with the five verses of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” his first epic songwriting effort. It’s a simple story: A guy gets up, goes out, comes back. What did you see? his father asks. The singer tells him. What did you hear? What are you going to do now?
In the decades since he wrote it, Dylan has retold that tale several times, with all sorts of twists — it’s the story of “Tangled Up in Blue,” his most exhilarating love affair, and of “Isis,” his most murderous one.
I left; I saw stuff; I came back. Dylan — a paragon of self-invention if there ever was one — has had a lifelong thing for doubles, mirrors and doppelgängers: The person who comes back is changed, in essence a different person, a double. His recurring use of the tale of the journey lets Dylan leverage that double in all sorts of ways. In “Hard Rain,” the singer, grandiose and full of himself, becomes a prophet in a time of torment. In much the same way, Dylan himself became an uncertain, and perhaps unwilling, spokesman for a restless, migrant generation, one more self-consciously aware of itself as “special” than any other.
Yet it’s important to remember that Dylan was slightly detached from his generation, imbued as he was in both ’50s rock and the pre-rock ‘n’ roll Dust Bowl poesy of Woody Guthrie. He was once Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., and unquestionably hardened by his own abrupt departure from home, family and childhood in his late teens. By 1966, the rechristened Bob Dylan was 25 and already fully reinvented when a great wave of kids embraced civil rights, free speech and the fight against the Vietnam War.
But he understood the urge to move.
Dylan saw the transformation of his own life and those of the fans before him; he understood that you leave behind a version of yourself when you go, and that a new one is created along the way. The idea sang in his head, and reverberated in a generation’s. In “Hard Rain,” the most immature of journey songs, yet still the most visionary, he takes this to an extreme. Hidden in a catalog of nuclear horror and social breakdown is something more prosaic: an adolescent’s dream of adulthood, when a father is turned into a straight man so the child, newly adult, can tell of the wondrous things he’s seen and, not least, brag of the things he’s going to do to make everything all right.
Is that the point of the traveler’s yearning for home? To experience it as a different person, to change the past by bringing to bear new skills and knowledge against it? A trip like this is a species of self-hatred, a rejection of self, something most everyone goes through on the road to adulthood. It also contains echoes of that American jones — the journey west (fueled by a hunger for what’s just out of view), finding an extreme, running until you can’t go anywhere else.
The career of Bob Dylan — 40 years, 40-plus albums, hundreds and hundreds of recorded songs, 1,500 or more live performances — is broad enough to encompass anything from the trivial to the minute. Dylan is a rocker, a visionary, a poet; a persuasive student of folk and blues, a beautiful songwriter, a rebel; the coolest, most detached of stars, and maybe the cruelest. And among other things he’s the man who first burst pop’s optimistic bubble, who told the audience something it didn’t want to hear.
Dylan is the most unstarlike of all of rock ‘n’ roll’s unquestioned giants, fighting and dampening his fame with an uncompromising, matter-of-fact fury for nearly 40 years now. He is also the oddest star: His life is more bizarre than Elvis Presley’s. He may also be the best. No one has written songs so charged, beautiful, complex, unforgettable: songs like “Hard Rain,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Visions of Johanna,” “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Hurricane.”
His career, four decades on, is huge, contradictory and impossible to grasp. Something as trite as “the journey” makes no sense of it at all.
Until you consider this: In the early 1980s, after 20 years of fevered, nearly unrelenting activity and insistent controversy, Dylan slowed down. He barely made American concert appearances during this period, and when he did it was in the form of grinning, easy outings with crutches like the Grateful Dead or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He also spent too much time recording forgettable albums, such as “Down in the Groove” and “Knocked Out Loaded.” It was plain that after a quarter-century career, Dylan was winding down. If not bringing his journey to a complete halt, he did, for a time, switch on cruise control.
But then, in the summer of 1988, he formed a small combo and went out on a real tour. In four or five months he played 71 shows, Dylan’s remarkable online chroniclers tell us. In 1989 he kept the groove going: He played 99 shows. And in 1990, he performed 96. He worked at this pace consistently through the 1990s — in 1999 he played 116 shows.
In 1988, Dylan turned 47. Since then, through the decade of his 50s, he has spent nearly half of his days on the road. No other major star performs anywhere near as often. It’s probable that over the past 13 years he has played more concerts than all but a handful of performers in the history of popular music — 13 years spent traveling from city to city, night after night, on planes and buses, in limos and taxis, across America and the world.
What sort of a trip is this? Where did it start? Where is he going? And where will he be when it ends?
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Songwriters created complex, nuanced, bloody, undeniable songs before Dylan, but never in such a torrent; with such arrogance and authority; with such seemingly limitless volubility, symbolism, ambition and grace; and in such a giddy whirlwind of exploration, bravery, dissonance and pain.
Some of it was speed- and marijuana-induced dime-store surrealism, of course. There is filler, nonsense, in jokes, blather. Many of his early famous “protest” songs (“Masters of War,” for example) are callow; what are supposed to be love songs are mean-spirited; and some of the tracks on the softer albums from the late 1960s are merely passable. The stoner anthem “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35″ is unforgivable; it ruins what would otherwise be rock’s perfect album, “Blonde on Blonde.” “Self Portrait,” a forgotten release from 1970, is an inexplicably stultifying two-record set of covers and throwaways. (Columbia Records released an even worse collection, “Dylan,” a few years later without Dylan’s consent.) And his first album, “Bob Dylan,” is, well, a first album.
That said, Dylan’s work between 1962 and 1977 or so is without parallel. Even the most superficial songs ask to be taken seriously, and the vast part of the work is nonpareil. Many albums’ worth of compositions (“The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Live 1966,” “Blonde on Blonde,” “The Basement Tapes,” “Before the Flood,” “Blood on the Tracks” and arguably “Planet Waves” and “Desire”) must be addressed in any serious account of the farthest and most compelling ends of rock ‘n’ roll. Dylan is one of rock’s most eloquent, sexy and unpredictable singers. And one of its angriest. He is capable of delightful expressiveness on the harmonica; he’s an insistent, possibly underrated melodist. And let’s not forget that among other things, while he took no production credit on his recordings from this era, he oversaw, in the course of a consistent 15-year period, the creation of what remain rock’s most astonishingly evocative and shudderingly atmospheric acoustic-based albums.
He showed up on the New York folk scene in the late 1950s; the chubby youngster on his first record jacket soon became lithe and wiry. Similarly, he began as a conventional folkie and immediately became unconventional, transcending the genre. His second album, “Freewheelin’,” contains among other songs “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Of these, “Don’t Think Twice” is the slightest, but as late as 1999, reworked and expanded, it became a coursing, rueful, unforgettable anchor of his live shows. His third record, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” has the undeniable title song; a frightening rural Gothic, “Ballad of Hollis Brown”; possibly the most focused and precise and persuasive of his protest songs, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”; and, finally, “Boots of Spanish Leather,” an abstract classic and one of the purest, most confounding folk songs of the time.
A lesser, “relationship” album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” contains “Chimes of Freedom,” Dylan’s lovely hymn to “the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse.” After this, he grew into his talents; between March 1965 and May 1966 he released eight album sides — “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and the two-record “Blonde on Blonde,” not to mention “Positively 4th Street,” the meanest top 10 single in the history of rock. He outwrote, outsang and outperformed everyone.
“Bringing It All Back Home” begins with his first electric track on an album, “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” It also includes “Maggie’s Farm,” a loping, laconic look at the service industry; “Mr. Tambourine Man,” rock’s most feeling paean to psychedelia, all the more compelling in that it’s done acoustically; “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” the uncharacteristically straightforward love song that begins, “My love she speaks like silence/Without ideals or violence”; and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” which someone once said is to capitalism what “Darkness at Noon” is to communism. (The song also contains a fair collection of Dylan’s most famous lines: “He not busy being born is busy dying”; “It’s easy to see without looking too far/That not much is really sacred”; “Even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked”; “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”; “If my thought-dreams could be seen/They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”)
After he released that album in 1965, he went on a short tour of Europe, chronicled in the documentary “Dont [sic] Look Back.” He returned to find a pop audience polarized over “Subterranean Homesick Blues”; he played with a full electric band at the Newport Folk Festival and in Forest Hills, Queens, and was booed for his trouble.
Amid this jet stream of work, he married Sara Lownds (or Lownes or Lowndes) in late 1965. They had four children over the next four or five years: Jesse, Anna, Samuel and Jacob, later Jakob, now successful with his band the Wallflowers. (For 30 years, amusingly enough, Dylan’s biographers have been giving the children various ages and names, as well as spelling Sara Dylan’s name from her previous marriage in various ways; most of the biographies don’t mention her real name, which was apparently Shirley Nowinsky.)
“Highway 61 Revisited” starts off with “Like a Rolling Stone,” a pretty good song. Dylan once accepted a civil rights award at a swanky dinner and coldly told the well-dressed crowd, “My [black] friends don’t wear suits.” In “Like a Rolling Stone” he bites an even bigger hand that feeds him, portraying an entire youth generation as a slumming sorority girl — and that’s just the first verse. Then he gets nasty: The rest of the song is the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of one of those scenes in “The Sopranos” in which a mobster systematically kicks the bejesus out of someone who’s already down. Is “Like a Rolling Stone” the most powerful, difficult, unexpected and unrelenting performance in rock? Got another candidate?
The song “Highway 61 Revisited” may be Dylan’s most disturbing composition, a tone poem of brutal capitalism, incest, biblical farce, warmongering and family entertainment, all set to a carnival beat that to this day gets his yuppie fans up to boogie at his live performances.
On “Blonde on Blonde,” his singing alone is a catalog of the human emotion genome, excepting perhaps mercy. One of the great joys of the CD age is listening to that epic tale uninterrupted from start to finish. Dylan swaggers, brags, sighs, loves, loses, smiles, grieves, pleads, lusts, swoons and trips — and that’s just on “Pledging My Time” and “Visions of Johanna.” The album contains “Just Like a Woman,” a love song so elegant and confused it’s not clear today, nearly 35 years later, whether it is insufferably condescending or startlingly loving. Another picaresque, “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” has his most canny female character — Ruthie, who tells him that his debutante just knows what he needs, but she knows what he wants. The album ends with a song that took up an entire album side back in the vinyl days, a love song to Sara Dylan, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” more feverish and disturbed than even Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.”
Dylan was in a motorcycle accident in 1966; it has never been clear how badly he was hurt. The next few years he spent playing with the Band in Woodstock, in upstate New York, and releasing calmer, subtler albums — “John Wesley Harding,” “Nashville Skyline,” the benighted “Self Portrait” and then finally, “New Morning,” a blithely titled and performed redux.
In the mid-’70s he really came back. Alone among his ’60s counterparts he accomplished an extended burst of creativity equal to his first. From 1974 to 1977, Dylan released “Planet Waves,” a spare but twisted collection of songs recorded with the Band; “Before the Flood,” a ferocious, loud and harsh double live album with the Band from the acclaimed 1974 tour; “The Basement Tapes,” a five-year-old, much-bootlegged collection of Americana recordings from his Woodstock Gethsemane; “Blood on the Tracks,” an epic and disturbing romantic song cycle; and “Desire,” a shambling, often ferocious rock album.
He then organized and carried out the Rolling Thunder Tour, an aggregation that included Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Ronee Blakely, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, T-Bone Burnett and many other old friends and musicians. He later directed a four-hour feature film based around the tour, called “Renaldo and Clara.” This period wound down with an amazing and peculiar hourlong TV concert memorialized on the live album “Hard Rain”; “Street Legal,” an often-derided collection of post-Rolling Thunder songs; and “At Budokan,” a two-record live set immortalizing Dylan’s failed attempt to go Vegas on a worldwide scale.
The apogee of his career is perhaps “Blood on the Tracks.” In his infrequent interviews, Dylan snaps when people ask if the record is the account of his breakup with Sara. In any case, with 15 years of fame behind him and the failure of a decade-long marriage in front of him, it is true that Dylan on this album looks at the world through blood-spattered glasses. The losses he is singing about seem fatal; his anger on songs like “Idiot Wind” is Lear-like. “Blood on the Tracks” is his only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion, written and rewritten, formed in a way his songs almost never are. It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-’60s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years.
“Early one morning the sun was shining,” the album begins. Dylan’s voice is quieter and silkier than it ever sounded, or ever would again; each line, each word, on the record is articulated and, seemingly, meant. More than 25 years after its release it provides unexpected and moving moments. A title like “You’re a Big Girl Now” seems as if the track will be of a piece with his most condescending love songs; yet it turns out to be arranged, performed and sung in the gentlest of ways. Two lines in, Dylan sings, “I’m back in the rain,” and a minute later, at some last emotional end, he whispers, “I can change I swear” — an ineffable moment in his most vulnerable song.
“Idiot Wind” is about truth, love, hatred and the Grand Coulee Dam; “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” is a meticulously constructed abstract western. The last track, “Buckets of Rain,” is a throwaway — rain imagery permeates the album. It seems innocent, until you listen closely and hear the easygoing guitar line that anchors the song echo and break, the strings buzzing against the guitar neck, the guitarist’s hands snapping off the frets. And then you notice the album’s over.
After “Blood on the Tracks” came a long decline. The problems played out in such debilitating fashion on that album eventually cost the couple their marriage; despite a seemingly genuine plea on “Desire,” in a song called “Sara,” the pair divorced, nastily, in 1977. He was 36.
Dylan, born Jewish, went Christian in the late 1970s, and recorded two albums of largely devotional songs. Like many other Christians, he became a bore on the subject. “Slow Train Coming,” his conversion album, has a production veneer courtesy of the famous R&B producers Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett, but the songs are often puerile. On “Saved,” the follow-up, the pair couldn’t stop him from sounding shrill and even more intolerant. In 1979, Dylan toured with a gospel aggregation and refused to play any old songs, to a round of catcalls from his audience. A year later he went on the road again, toning down the gospel and deigning to play some unexpected gems from his scrapbook.
The 1980s were a difficult period: There are pretty songs, but many more goofy and unpleasant ones. Successive albums seemed slapdash and unconcerned. They had ugly covers and indifferent song selection; they lacked production values, even production consistency. “Shot of Love,” in 1981, has the pretty “Every Grain of Sand.” A lot of people like “Infidels,” which Dylan worked on with Mark Knopfler, of Dire Straits; while the songs are mature and complex, melodically they are similar sounding and the affair as a whole still has echoes of his crackpot Christian days. He seemed particularly upset at the idea of space travel. “Jokerman,” which is supposed to be the album’s major work, has extended nonsense passages and what appear to be gnomic biblical in jokes. It must have cracked them up down at the revival hall.
“Desire,” in 1976, had the jocular credit “This record could have been produced by Don DeVito,” but in the mid-1980s, Dylan took the joke to heart, overseeing production of most of the albums from this period himself with the help of various recording engineers. The results sound amateurishly bright, or have vocal tracks with a sophomoric amount of echo; there are myriad other irritants as well.
But then, it’s not as if he was ruining great compositions. “Empire Burlesque” (1985) has one intense and lovely song, “Dark Eyes.” “Knocked Out Loaded” has a 16-minute epic co-written with Sam Shepard, “Brownsville Girl,” that’s fun to hear once. (As a sort of joke, Dylan put it on “Greatest Hits, Volume 3.”) Another throwaway album from this period, 1988′s “Down in the Groove,” sees Dylan outclassed as a lyricist by the Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter. The canniest marketing move Dylan ever made was touring with the Dead in 1987 and, on “Groove,” having Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir sing on one track (“Silvio”). Deadheads with beatific smiles on their faces would populate Dylan’s shows forever after on the “Never Ending Tour”; “Silvio,” unfortunately, became one of his most frequently played live songs.
In the ’90s, he continued to drift, but finally hired some producers. Don and David Was brought in a raft or two of studio pros and gave his first album of that decade, “Under the Red Sky,” a disastrous sheen. The drums are mixed up so high you want to shoot Kenny Aronoff. For the assembled stars Dylan wrote songs with titles like “Wiggle Wiggle” and “Handy Dandy.” “Oh Mercy” was taken over by Daniel Lanois, master of a shimmering and distinctive electronically processed guitar sound; it is overdone and it’s irritating to hear Dylan’s songs so manipulated, but there are sufficient nice tracks — “Most of the Time,” “Shooting Star,” both simple and direct, among them — to make this by far the most coherent and listenable collection of his own songs Dylan has released since “Desire.”
Finally, essentially giving up, in the early 1990s Dylan recorded two albums of folk songs, “Good as I Been to You” and “World Gone Wrong”; it’s a testament to his unpredictability that the first of these is tedious and the second is a signal document, a mesmerizing and sanguinary walk down the blood-soaked history of folk and blues. It also has his best liner notes since the 1960s. (“By the way, don’t be bewildered by the Never Ending Tour chatter. There was a Never Ending Tour but it ended.”)
In 1997, he released “Time Out of Mind,” in which he finally managed to marry a classy studio sound to an appropriately mysterious collection of songs. The record is enormously overrated (it won the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop Poll of the nation’s rock critics that year), but boasts a powerful and original lead-off song, the scary “Love Sick,” and one or two other “Oh Mercy”-level tracks, like “Not Dark Yet.” (“Things Have Changed,” the song from the film “Wonder Boys” that won an Oscar last year, sounds like a “Time Out of Mind” tune but was actually recorded two years later.)
Yet Dylan ends the record with a trying, 16-minute-long composition called “Highlands,” which sounds and reads like a Dylan parody:
It must be a holiday, there’s nobody around
She studies me closely as I sit down
She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs
She says, “What’ll it be?”
I say, “I don’t know, you got any soft boiled eggs?”
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In some ways, Dylan deserves a lot more contempt than he gets. He’s everybody’s darling these days, but most people who talk about him, or give him Oscars and Grammys, barely bother to plow through the scores of bad songs he has recorded (and released! and sold to an unsuspecting public!) in the past 20 years, or see many of his indifferent shows.
Yet for all that, he’s still underappreciated. A few days listening to his albums fills your head with a cacophony of words. It’s the sound of lovers and heroes, charlatans and assholes, the heroic and the downtrodden — and someone who was once a very young boy with unspeakable ambitions — fighting for your attention:
“Darkness at the break of noon”
“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks/When you’re trying to be so quiet?”
“And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it”
“Spanish boots of Spanish leather”
“And them Caribbean winds still blow/From Nassau to Mexico”
“A million faces at my feet/But all I see are dark eyes”
“I can’t help it if I’m lucky”
“Her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls”
“Ma, take this badge off of me”
“‘Twas then that I knew what he had on his mind”
“Pistol shots ring out in a barroom night”
“Oh, Mama — can this really be the end?”
“I got blood in my eyes for you”
“I’m going out of my mind/With a pain that stops and starts”
“And never sat once at the head of the table”
“There’s seven people dead in a South Dakota farm”
“Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin’”
“Turn, turn, to the rain and the wind”
“Come in, she said, I’ll give you/Shelter from the storm”
“Stayin’ up for days at the Chelsea Hotel/Writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you’”
“How does it feel?”
In this cacophony, songs that seemed impenetrable and inscrutable now and again come into focus. Take “Desolation Row,” from “Highway 61 Revisited.” Winding through the beat poesy, the litany of famous names, the off-kilter, almost Latin rhythm and the nightmarish scenery is a star in an absurdist theater of fame. The singer places himself firmly on Desolation Row at the song’s beginning, and, more than 100 lines later, at the end tells us that we can’t expect to criticize him if we don’t know what he’s going through. (“Don’t send me no more letters, no/Not unless you mail them from/Desolation Row.”)
Dylan, it’s important to note, wrote the song before his vivid electric era. So whirling was his mind at the time that he could effortlessly create prescient passages:
Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row
Funny how you can see Dylan today, point at the stage and think of those words. The Never Ending Tour, beginning in 1988, took him out of his recording doldrums; for years he played with just three backing musicians, led by G.E. Smith, the weird bandleader from “Saturday Night Live.” It turned out that Smith was just what Dylan needed — someone to wrangle a wound-up-tight backing combo that would let Dylan wander into any song on whim. (On one of the opening nights of the tour Smith walked over and actually wrapped his hand around the neck of the guitar of Neil Young, who was sitting in on a couple of songs, when Smith wanted him to stop playing. How many supporting players still alive can claim to have done that?)
The first months of the Never Ending Tour began each night with “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a song Dylan had rarely played live before; from there the set list was extravagantly varied almost every night — over the course of just a few months he played nearly 100 different songs. Soon the small band he played with would have twice that in its repertoire. (In a typical Rolling Stones concert, by contrast, the band will rehearse, say, 20 songs for a tour, with two or three others on deck to inject a hint of wacky spontaneity into the show.)
The tour’s first concerts were frantic and articulate and fun; as time went on, and as the years went on, Dylan became stranger and stranger. You could easily see him once, twice, three times a year if you wanted to. You could see good shows, bad shows, indifferent shows. Shows in which he whined his way through a tune — a famous song, a classic song — for minutes before a half-heard snatch of lyric allowed the audience to figure out what it was listening to. Those who follow his touring closely say that calendar years could go by without him saying a single word to the audience.
But the interesting thing was that you could see Dylan. As time went on it became a defining issue. That’s what Bob Dylan did: He played live — year in and year out, in good health and bad. (Even a severe infection near his heart that hospitalized him in 1997 did not slow him down.) In New York and Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Berlin, sure, but also, night after night, in the middle of nowhere: in Davenport, Iowa; Rochester, Minn., and Bristol, Tenn., to pick three random dates from 1994; in 13 cities in Spain and Portugal, to pick a small leg of his 1999 tour. This year, he has already played 13 shows in Japan, nine in Australia, 15 in the South and Midwest of the U.S. — with several dozen concerts scheduled in Scandinavia and western Europe from June onward.
It seems obvious, in retrospect, that in 1988, when Dylan began his endless tour, he felt subterranean still, and homesick yet again. That’s why the journeys in “Hard Rain” and “Tangled Up in Blue” have such resonance, and why, 35 years later, the words that hang in the air when you hear “Like a Rolling Stone” are “no direction home.”
Dylan today is the last moving target of the dream that was ’60s rock. Mick Jagger shills for Budweiser and Tommy Hilfiger, while respected new stars like Moby sell entire albums’ worth of songs to corporations that grimly purvey youth culture to itself. Dylan makes great money (particularly overseas); he takes home $5 million to $10 million a year for his five or six months of work annually. But he could earn that in a few weeks on a quick stadium tour with Neil Young or the Stones; or he could take a page from David Bowie’s or Pete Townshend’s book and do a farewell or “Greatest Hits Live!” tour every two or three years. He could feed the attendant hype and walk away with five times what he does now, while investing a fraction of the time.
Is the Never Ending Tour a journey away from that, or toward something else? It’s easy to be the sort of pop star who grins for the public, and tells it what it wants to hear. You certainly wouldn’t have anyone around urging you to do it differently. It’s much harder — and it takes a greater psychic toll — to be true to a voice inside and spend your life trying to communicate it faithfully, whether people listen or not, whether people like it or not.
That’s what Dylan is doing. Those other stars are in effect moving farther and farther away from themselves, while Dylan’s headed in the opposite direction. Elvis died at Graceland, true, but no star ever came to an end further from his real home. Bob Dylan, at the close of the Never Ending Tour — at the end of this unforgettable, undeniable, incredible career, and a journey no star like him has even contemplated — will be somewhere else: a point quite close to the uncompromising, limitless, clangorous place he started.
Bad art is supposed to be harmless, but the 2008 film “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” about the notorious child-sex case against the fugitive director, has become an absolute menace. For months, lawyers for the filmmaker have been maneuvering to get the Los Angeles courts to dismiss Polanski’s 1978 conviction, based on supposed judicial misconduct uncovered in the documentary. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that if Polanski, who fled on the eve of his sentencing, in March 1978, wanted to challenge his conviction, he could — by coming back and turning himself in.
Espinoza was stating the obvious: Fugitives don’t get to dictate the terms of their case. Polanski, who had pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, was welcome to return to America, surrender, and then petition the court as he wished. Indeed, the judge even gave Polanski more than he deserved, saying that he might actually have a case. “There was substantial, it seems to me, misconduct during the pendency of this case,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Other than that, he just needs to submit to the jurisdiction of the court.”
Polanski deserves to have any potential legal folderol investigated, of course. But the fact that Espinoza had to state the obvious is testimony to the ways in which the documentary, and much of the media coverage the director has received in recent months, are bizarrely skewed. The film, which has inexplicably gotten all sorts of praise, whitewashes what Polanski did in blatant and subtle fashion — and recent coverage of the case, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and elsewhere, has in turn accepted the film’s contentions at face value.
For now, the Los Angeles judge has injected a dose of reality into the debate. But “Wanted and Desired” seems to have inserted into the public consciousness the idea that Polanski, an irrepressible European, had been naughty during a colorful time, and that he has been toyed with by a monstrous legal system. Creepy and disturbing, the film does show us a few of the director’s moral warts. But it leaves the strong impression that Polanski was a wronged man, jerked around by a cartoony, publicity-hungry judge to the point where fleeing was his only viable option.
“Wanted and Desired” is directed by Marina Zenovich. Previously she had made well-received documentaries about the Sundance Film Festival and France’s charismatic Bernard Tapie, who owned a chain of health stores and sponsored a famous cycling team, which included Tour de France winner Greg LeMond. Tapie later got into trouble with the law for fixing soccer games, and after spending time in prison, became an actor.
In “Wanted and Desired,” Zenovich casts Polanski, whose face repeatedly fills the screen with a Byronic luminosity, as a tragic figure, a child survivor of the Holocaust haunted by the murder of his wife, the actress Sharon Tate, at the hands of the Manson family. His friends are uniformly supportive: “This is somebody who could not be a rapist!” one exclaims.
As for the judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, why, he’s a risible self-promoter. If Polanski is Byron, the judge is an Oliver Hardy or a Billy Gilbert, all but twiddling his tie in a series of ever-more-comical photographs. He actually kept a scrapbook about the celebrities who came through his Santa Monica courtroom. He had two girlfriends.
Now, that’s one way to portray those two men — and one that Polanski’s current lawyers would prefer. But there’s another way, too: You could show one as a child-sex predator who drugged a 13-year-old girl with quaaludes and champagne; lured her to pose for naked photographs; ignoring her protests, had sex with her; and then anally raped her.
The other could be cast as a canny jurist — possibly a brilliant one, smart enough to have gone from high school directly to Harvard Law and graduated so young he wasn’t allowed to take the bar exam — who may have gone too far in his intent to block off the legal escape hatches celebrity wrongdoers use.
The truth is somewhere in between, but it’s probably a lot closer to the second version. Yet that initial stark contrast — the tragic hero, the goofy jurist — permeates the film. Documentarians should have a wide leeway to argue their case the way they want, but there’s a point at which ethical lines are crossed. Zenovich, like many other chroniclers to the stars, seems to have been blinded by her contact with Polanski.
Here’s an example: The word “sodomy” is briefly referenced in Zenovich’s documentary, but it’s a somewhat ambiguous term, and it’s never explained. Zenovich has fun flashing bits of the victim’s grand jury testimony on the screen, but she never gets around to using this exchange from that testimony, which was made public in 2003 and published by the Smoking Gun:
“Then he lifted up my legs and went in through my anus.”
“What do you mean by that?
“He put his penis in my butt.”
In the girl’s grand jury testimony, which is slightly sickening to read, she also said that she had repeatedly told Polanski no, but that she was too afraid of him to resist.
It’s a drag to include a scene of anal rape of a 13-year-old in your moody documentary about such a Byronic figure, but it’s also fairly relevant.
At the same time, Zenovich doesn’t have time to tell us about the exceptional back story of Rittenband. In other words, she withholds the most damaging bit of information about Polanski from her viewers, and the most favorable bit of information about the judge.
Zenovich seems to have a tin ear when it comes to sexual politics, too. The film spends a lot of time telling us that Rittenband apparently had two girlfriends, using some goofy graphics to underscore the point. Zenovich doesn’t say the judge was married, so it’s not clear exactly why this information is relevant. But given what Polanski is accused of, the irony seems to be that the judge was a womanizer, too.
But Polanski, of course, wasn’t on trial for womanizing. He was on trial for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. The director’s ear, here as elsewhere, seems a bit … continental when it comes to such issues.
In “Wanted and Desired,” it’s weird how detached Zenovich stays from the victim, and how she undermines her in subtle ways. The tone is set early on, when a friend of Polanski’s tells of being woken up and informed that the director had been arrested. The moment is actually played for laughs, with interspersed shots of a worried Mia Farrow using the phone in a scene from “Rosemary’s Baby.”
A filmmaker attuned to the psychological undercurrents of the characters in her drama might have been conscious of the state of a 13-year-old girl, who had just been drugged and raped and had spent the next period of time at a police station reliving the incident; and shaken by the story of “Rosemary’s Baby” — that, too, about a horrifically abused woman.
But the scene isn’t used to illustrate the victim’s story — it’s about poor Roman. He’s the person making the desperate phone call. It’s an odd juxtaposition when you think about it. That’s when the friend, having just been told Polanski has been arrested, says, “This is somebody who could not be a rapist!” Here again, Zenovich is playing with semantics. It’s obvious the friend was saying he couldn’t imagine Polanski, say, following a woman down the street and grabbing her in an alley.
If Zenovich wasn’t tipping the scales in Polanski’s favor, she could have asked the guy, “Well, what about statutory rape, having sex with an underage girl? Could you imagine him doing that?”
We also hear people note, meaningfully, that meeting someone like Polanski could help a potential young actress’s career. Such a remark about a grown woman would be slightly offensive; about a 13-year-old it’s exceedingly so. The girl told police at the time she had repeatedly told Polanski no; on the screen Zenovich runs a line to that effect from the girl’s grand jury testimony, but immediately follows it with a quote from Polanski’s: “She was not unresponsive.” This creates a subtle he-said-she-said dynamic that, in a case in which consent isn’t a issue, represents another bit of moral prestidigitation.
It’s strange to see a female filmmaker anchor her documentary’s arguments with such atavistic attitudes. It gets worse: In the media circus of the time, some of the European press reported that the victim hadn’t been a virgin. We then get to watch as Polanski’s attorney, Douglas Dalton, stands in front of a gaggle of media, Polanski nodding by his side, to say, “The facts indicate that before the alleged acts in this case the girl had engaged in sexual activity. We want to know about it, we want to know who was involved, when, we want to know why these other people were not prosecuted. It’s something we want to fully develop.”
A more feminist-minded director might have used her interviews with Dalton to explore some of the Neanderthal ways he was prepared to wage the case, had the director gone to trial. But, of course, the director didn’t go to trial. As the film shows, Polanski accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to the formal felony charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor; he and his lawyer knew he could face prison time. Polanski also stood in front of the judge and admitted what he did and that he’d known what he was doing.
In the wake of that, Rittenband was trying to figure out how to make sure Polanski was punished; he was apparently concerned that the director would act contrite, get a short prison term and then assemble a pack of legal wolves to get him out of trouble. And the film makes a decent case that Rittenband ultimately went off the rails.
But even this isn’t exactly a revelation; Rittenband got in trouble for his actions at the time, and was ultimately removed from the case. But by that time the director had already fled, which lost him whatever legal high ground he might have obtained.
Flash forward 30 years, and Polanski has to try to make that very old issue seem new. His lawyers are also basing their case for dismissal on two other, lesser issues. Rittenband, who Polanski has said was playing with him like a mouse, was actually nice enough to the director after the guilty plea to let him go to Europe to make a movie, an option the L.A. courts system, one suspects, affords few other accused child rapists, then or now. While there, he had the misfortune to be photographed carousing at an Oktoberfest in Munich. One of the district attorneys in the documentary says he called the judge’s attention to the photo and suggested that Polanski was making a fool out of him.
(This photo, which Zenovich attacks with the zeal of a Kennedy assassination conspiracist examining the Zapruder film, is exhaustively analyzed, with multiple interviewees testifying in all sorts of ways that Polanski really wasn’t having fun — an assertion the victim was never allowed to make unchallenged about her photographic experience with Polanski.)
Polanski’s lawyers have tried to paint what the D.A. said as an example of an inappropriate communication, but the D.A. mentions it openly in the documentary (it’s not a “revelation”) and has said it was no big deal.
Finally, the lawyers are incensed that the L.A. court responded to a press inquiry by saying Polanski had to surrender before anything was going to happen with his case. Polanski’s lawyers say this was “ruling publicly” on a matter before the court. It could be that. It could also be called “stating the obvious” — which is what Judge Espinoza did Tuesday.
The coverage of Polanski’s legal maneuverings in the last year took its cues from Zenovich’s documentary. The charges against Polanski were often vaguely described; though the charge of sodomy was in the original case, and the Smoking Gun posted the girl’s wrenching grand jury testimony in 2003, these issues were almost never mentioned.
The New York Times finally did a detailed story on the charges last month. But the story still concentrated on supposed “troubling” and “uncomfortable” issues raised by the film. Just listen to this portentous passage: “For the elder Mr. Dalton, who urged Mr. Polanski to pursue redress after reviewing the documentary, however, the issue turned from the original crime to questions about the way authorities here handled it.”
Dalton was given a lot of time in the documentary to spin wildly for his client, so it’s hardly surprising that he managed to convince himself that he was correct after seeing it — or that, given the fairly incontrovertible facts of the case, that he would like to turn the issue just about anywhere other than “the original crime.”
Polanski has had a wrenching life, of course, but it is overplayed in “Wanted and Desired.” I think it’s true to say that there are many people who survived the Holocaust who don’t drug and rape children, for example. More apposite and logical questions, in turn, aren’t explored. For example: Polanski was photographing the girl for a photo spread for a European edition of Vogue. Someone could have asked him, or his lawyer — just for the record — if he had drugged and raped any other of his photo subjects.
The girl in the case is now in her 40s; she has said the case is behind her and that she has forgiven Polanski. (The documentary waits until the end to note that this came only after she settled a civil case against the director.) But the issue here isn’t Polanski being left alone; he’s the one trying to get his case dismissed.
The movie tries to drum up sympathy for Polanski by playing up the media firestorm he was at the center of; but that’s Polanski’s fault, too. (Before they rape children, celebrities should consider how the media attention sure to result will have adverse consequences for their victims, as well as themselves.) Celebrities complain about “the dishonesty of the media,” as Polanski does repeatedly in the film, only when the dishonesty doesn’t suit them. If the coverage helps you — a portrayal as devoted husband, say — then it’s fine, true or not. But when it doesn’t, they scream.
But that’s just the Polanski team’s legal strategy: keeping as many balls in the air as possible to make it seem as if the director has something to negotiate with, which he hasn’t. Around the time of the documentary’s release, they actually cut a deal to settle the case — but balked at the prospect of cameras in the court. This too was an irony, considering that Roman Polanski got himself into trouble with a camera so many years ago. Thirty years later, the director was still trying to call the shots.
More than 25 years on, it’s a little hard to explain “The Last Waltz.” Rock ‘n’ roll, pop and hip-hop permeate our lives. The music blasts from commercials; you can hear the Ramones in the bar of an expensive restaurant; Joni Mitchell songs anchor an episode of “Ally McBeal.” More than that, you can see rock — and see it well — on a slew of cable channels; fans can find exquisitely filmed concert footage (and fake concert footage) of virtually any artist they’re interested in. More than that, the rock video industry, unaccountably, has found itself frequently setting the standard for film technology and construction.
In that context, it seems like no big news that you can see some rock stars in “The Last Waltz,” recently released in theaters and just out on DVD. Its technical claim to fame is based on the fact that it was shot in 35mm. The group the film is about — a band called just the Band — were once somewhat famous but dropped out of sight around the time the movie was filmed, in 1976, and haven’t been heard much of since. And the music they made — today you’d call it Americana, or alternative country — is as unfashionable a genre as you can imagine, the success of the yuppie coffee-table CD that is the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack notwithstanding.
The film “Woodstock,” which came out about eight years before “The Last Waltz,” contains head-snapping performances by Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana and many others; it’s a searchingly filmed and edited documentary of a larger-than-life event and remains a larger-than-life touchstone of an era of social upheaval and a landmark in documentary filmmaking. That film aside, however, “The Last Waltz,” as the pristine DVD version attests, is the single best movie about rock ‘n’ roll and only rock ‘n’ roll ever made.
At the time “The Last Waltz” was created, the rock film was still a rarity, despite the magisterial “Woodstock” and the shockingly fun mid-1960s Beatles outings. You could see the occasional 16mm concert films — “Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii,” “Ladies and Gentlemen the Rolling Stones,” “Ziggy Stardust” and so forth — but only in theaters, and only in the cities that might have an offbeat movie house that would play such stuff. Rock appeared on TV only rarely (on cool shows like “The Midnight Special”).
So, in 1976, when it was filmed, and 1978, when it was released, “The Last Waltz” had some striking features. The film chronicled a concert in which appeared not only the Band and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Eric Clapton but also Bob Dylan and Van Morrison and Muddy Waters, many of these at something near their psychic best. The occasion of the show was the announced retirement from the road of the Band. Even back then, the group was a somewhat mysterious ensemble, Canadian save for an Arkansan drummer but uncompromisingly dedicated to the investigation of American music. After nearly a decade of tangential obscurity, the members found themselves Dylan’s electric backup band in the mid-’60s. Later they would hole away with him to make rock’s most famous bootleg, “The Basement Tapes,” and release influential records on their own, most notably “Music From Big Pink” in 1968. At their peak, they revealed a Crazy Horse-style force and Stones-like libidinousness, both leavened by a predilection for drolly fatalist Americana populated with R. Crumb-like characters and romantic losers.
The group planned its farewell at Bill Graham’s Winterland auditorium in San Francisco. The band’s leader, Robbie Robertson, knew Martin Scorsese, who was then in Los Angeles finishing up his wan tribute to the American movie musical, “New York, New York.” He was so late on that film, and so over budget, that he had to undertake preparations for “The Last Waltz” secretly. Once he took on the project, he decided to do what apparently had never been done for a serious rock movie — film it in 35mm, under controlled conditions. That meant turning Winterland from a concert venue into a film studio, with an appropriate set; stationary and moving cameras; storyboarded songs; and an intense communications network to capture what was needed to be captured — all of this for a complex show with an array of special guests, and in an era when “authenticity” was a rock byword and many musicians and concert production people were less than cooperative when it came to sacrificing spontaneity to decent filmmaking conditions.
Scorsese brought in Boris Leven, who had been production designer on “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music,” to create a set; for cinematographers he had Vilmos Szigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, cameramen of choice for the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” generation. When Winterland’s floor proved shaky, the production sawed through it and anchored the cameras in the building’s foundation. Behind the stage, Scorsese built a rolling track for a moving camera. The San Francisco Opera lent the production pieces of a set from a recent production to create a lush and attractive backdrop.
After logistical problems that must have been nightmarish, given the egos involved, the concept came off. One of the things we learn on the commentaries on the DVD is that the group sent emissaries to the invited guests to find out what songs they were going to perform, to allow the Band to rehearse and prepare the proper arrangements, which could then be used by Scorsese for storyboarding purposes — the solos, the change in vocalists and so forth. Promoter Bill Graham served the 5,000 attendees a Thanksgiving dinner; then, tables were cleared to make room for ballroom dancers. The show began with performances by the Band (“Up on Cripple Creek,” “It Makes No Difference,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, ” Stage Fright,” etc., etc.) alternating with tunes by the guests: Mitchell (“Coyote”), Young (“Helpless”), Muddy Waters (“Mannish Boy”), Neil Diamond (“Dry Your Eyes”), Clapton (“Further on up the Road”), Dr. John (“Such a Night”), Morrison (“Caravan”) and finally Dylan (“Forever Young,” “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”). There are two striking songs filmed later, on sound stages: “Evangeline,” featuring Emmylou Harris, and “The Weight,” with the Staple Singers. Then the show ends with an all-star ensemble singing “I Shall Be Released.”
All of Scorsese’s preparations combined to imbue “The Last Waltz” with a production sheen that, while never rendering the performance antiseptic or polished, gives it, paradoxically, a momentousness. Previous rock movies, virtually without exception, had been made cheaply and on the fly. This show, by contrast, was lit for high-quality filmmaking and was being shot by several of the most brilliant cameramen in the world; the performers’ faces glow, become alive. Scorsese’s extravagant plans — a network of moving cameras and refocusing lenses — combine to capture, seemingly, every nod and wink that passes between the artists. You can see the members of the Band, familiar with each other after 16 years on the road, each playing his part confidently and independently; but when others came on, you can see the members’ antennae become alert; shrugs, glances, nods and smiles drive the concert forward. Scorsese humanizes the performance in a way that is without parallel in rock films.
There are a couple of guests who aren’t that interesting, but most are spellbinding: Neil Young, spaced out of his mind on something, smolders; Joni Mitchell is a transfixing, alien-like presence; Dr. John fills the screen with wiseass geniality; even Ronnie Hawkins, the rockabilly lifer who gave the Band its start, mugs winningly. Dylan looks extraordinary with a beard, long, curly hair and a flamboyant pimp hat, and Morrison wears a spangled jacket over a purple shirt stretched tight over his barrel chest.
The Band themselves are revealed through their songs at the concert and through interviews with Scorsese that serve as a thematic intro to each song. In Helm’s eyes, during the interviews, you can see a humble Texas kid, shy and wary; onstage he becomes randy and cheerful, reaching over to shake each guest’s hand as they leave the stage. Garth Hudson, older than the others and more musically schooled, is the gruff professor. Danko, the goofy bass player, spends his time onstage rollicking, but offstage is simply unable to answer when Scorsese asks him what he will do next. And Richard Manuel, the keyboardist, has a maniacal charm; when Scorsese asks the band about women on the road, Manuel grins wildly and cracks, “That’s probably why we were on the road so long.”
Finally, there is Robbie Robertson, the band’s leader. Robertson wrote most of the group’s songs, letting Helm’s mournful drawl and Danko’s keening tenor animate them. There are a lot of ways in which the film is a love letter to Robertson, and a lot of other ways in which he is a politician; of the band members, he’s the most controlled, the most guarded; and of all of them, he remains the most unrevealed. His songs — piercing, funny, sui generis bits of cockeyed Americana — remain unplumbed. We never learn — we never get a hint — of where those themes came from. That shadow is the film’s biggest flaw.
That said, Robertson remains a smoldering, leonine, sexy presence. He’s featured in the vast majority of the film’s scenes, strange for someone who doesn’t sing. (Robertson has a rasp of a singing voice; it’s said the other members of the Band snicker at how Robertson is seen contributing backup vocals on so many of the songs in the film.) But you see him, again and again, framed with his fellows, lost in his guitar or gazing with pride or wonder at the songs played out around him, and in the end it’s hard to gainsay the film’s focus; you can feel him draw the camera to him. Indeed, Robertson stands on the stage with Danko and Morrison and Dylan and Young and Clapton and holds his own as a songwriter, musician and sheer physical presence — no small thing.
He remains a mystery on the DVD. There’s an audio track in which he and Scorsese talk over the film. Scorsese is at his rapid-fire best, discoursing on Italian directors and frankly discussing the problems he had during the production; Robertson, by contrast, offers nothing but the highest praise for everyone involved.
The second audio track is a treasure. On it, a mass of people — musicians like Dr. John, Helm, Hudson and Hawkins; critics like Greil Marcus and Time’s Jay Cocks; and various film production people — gleefully dish on the movie as it plays in front of them. Marcus, who wrote a book on the “Basement Tapes,” patiently explains some of the themes of each of Robertson’s songs as they come up; Cocks is at his best nailing the personas of some of the players, as when he calls Morrison a “half-homicidal elf.” Even this supplementary material is searchingly edited, as when a halting Hudson rhapsodizes about the saxophone — and we watch as he then steps up to the stage on-screen for a gorgeous alto sax solo.
In these scenes and a dozen others the heart of the movie beats, as well as in the rumbling Muddy Waters, the New Orleans shuffle of Dr. John, the hyperintellectuality of Mitchell, the molten Dylan, the earthy evanescence of Hawkins; yes, even in the chuckleheaded Neil Diamond. It’s partly about that olio of sound, either unshakably American or unshakably informed by American music — from Chicago blues to Appalachian gospel, from Celtic soul to Tin Pan Alley — in all its unfettered and sometimes grimy glory, played by a group of malcontents and miscreants: Canadians, British guitar gods, Irishmen, chumps from Brooklyn.
The poignancy of “The Last Waltz” is this: That while all of the major stars present were still producing impressive work, it was, in fact, the twilight of their genius. (Only Neil Young, with “Rust Never Sleeps,” would go on to record a reverberating album.) The era these acts represent is now a bygone one, however much some would like to think an act like Dylan or Young has relevance today. Still, it’s worth noting that that era did exist — not the ’60s era, precisely, because everyone knows about that — but a slightly faded and braver one. “The Last Waltz” is our best insight to a moment when the giants of the previous decade raged against time, in the shadow of an age that changed them all inalterably.
Walk through the great museums or churches of Rome or Paris and marvel at a curious thing. You don’t have to be a cultural nostalgist to admit that, if nothing else, the artists of the past seemed technical masters of their media in a way that almost nothing today approaches. The degree of precision in sculpture and painting — the breathtaking emotions and the almost hallucinatory details — seem to have no counterpart in the present age.
In the mechanical or structural sense, the modern era has its areas of precision. But these are most often hidden with a patina of sparseness or repetition, as in our great skyscrapers. There are technicians, sometimes acclaimed, at work in film (Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott) but they are emotionally crude and too often manipulative. Indeed, the modern age has come to make us view technical brilliance in the arts a bit suspiciously. Why? Are our artists today just not detail-minded? Do they lack the patience, the imagination, to work on such a precise level? Is detail on that level just not part of contemporary culture?
On the other hand, it’s possible that the people in previous eras looked at Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, or gazed on a Bernini statue, and simply took it for granted.
Perhaps today we take things for granted as well? What if the true cultural brilliance of our time existed right under our noses?
It might be something that was well liked and even respected, but might not be recognized for its mastery.
It might be something that we’d not even suspect of such artistry, precision and meticulous attention to detail. It might be a TV show. It might even be a sitcom.
It might be … “Seinfeld.”
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I didn’t watch “Seinfeld” for most of its run. I sneered at broadcast television. Friends met every Thursday to hoot over it, but I never deigned to join them.
It wasn’t until its last year on the air, sometime in 1999, that I happened to catch a scene — a rerun, as it turned out — that brought me up short.
George Costanza (Jason Alexander), Jerry Seinfeld’s schlub friend, is sitting in a car with a woman, outside her apartment, late at night. The dynamic was appreciable in an instant: A tubby bald guy with a nice looking woman, the date winding down.
You could see the emotional accounting of the moment trip through the woman’s mind, and you could see her all-but-perceptibly shrug when, in the end, the bottom line appeared, and it favored the schlub.
Sitting next to her was George, enduring the calculations; he was at an age, 30-ish, by which such moments were familiar. Indeed, he could recite the thoughts going through his date’s mind: He’s a schlub but he’s obviously willing to please; I don’t have to get up that early in the a.m.; it’s been months since I’ve been laid; I don’t have to go out with him again; my friend downstairs is out of town so there’s no chance of her busting me with him; it may be just that I had two glasses of wine but he’s not that bad looking …
The shrug. “Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?” she asked.
This seconds-long moment was already an exquisitely brutal and compressed masterpiece of conception and acting. And here we, the viewers, sighed with amused sympathetic relief for the schlub (this is how guys like George get lucky, after all; it’s not pretty, but it works for them) when George broke into our reverie.
“Coffee?” he scowled. “No! It keeps me up all night!”
The woman looked at him with a burst of disbelief, and then the quick realization that she’d lucked out — been given an inadvertent reprieve by someone who was a bigger loser than she’d appreciated. “OK,” she said, and got out of the car.
George remained in his seat, stunned at what he’d just said and marveling savagely at the urges that moved him.
That scene was my introduction to the show, and I quickly saw how a significant part of it was created along those lines: tableaux of human fecklessness imagined and presented with an adamantine clarity no less intoxicating than the smooth stone of “Apollo and Daphne,” the riotous imagery on the dominant wall of the Sistine Chapel.
There are great movies released every year, great rock albums, great TV shows. “The Simpsons” is as dense as — even denser than — “Seinfeld,” but its deliberate cartooniness and shotgun approach to humor, however devilish, limit its timelessness. “Will & Grace” and “Frasier” are both scintillatingly written and mischievously themed, but both have a too-small worldview. Only “Seinfeld” combined extraordinary writing with incredible acting and lucid direction.
“Seinfeld” was not really about how evil humanity is, though it’s about that to some extent. The show is really about the joy of charting, in exquisite, unrelenting, almost celebratory detail, the infinitely variegated human interactions that, closely watched, will ultimately tell the story of the disintegration of our species.
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The show, for those who are unfamiliar with it, features a guy named Jerry, who makes a decent living as a stand-up comic. (I’m using the present tense because it’s still viewable on a daily basis in many markets.) We never see him practice, and his interest in his work seems deliberately casual. He has some unspoken code of his art — he looks down at certain other comedians — but he’s not too edgy himself.
He doesn’t run with a fast showbiz crowd; rather, the great part of his existence is spent in the company of a loser friend of his from high school, an ex-girlfriend and an unconventional mooch across the hall.
The friend is George Costanza, who can’t keep a job and is devoid of talents or ambition in an almost systematic way — which is to say, he determinedly devotes more time and effort to avoiding work than he does actually working. He is so amoral as sometimes to seem almost a monster, ready to lie, cheat or steal to give himself a slight edge up in a world he firmly believes dealt him the worst of hands.
The ex is Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a not-unattractive woman whose laudable penchant for confrontation is taken to almost sociopath levels and who in this way functions as the closest thing the show has to a traditional male figure.
And the mooch is Kramer (Michael Richards), a gangling elf across the way who doesn’t work but seems blessed with a cosmic guardian angel, though he, like the others, is most often taunted by fate than rewarded by it. (And in the “Seinfeld” worldview, fate is nothing more than the world the characters make for themselves.)
The show’s lore has it that Costanza is a stand-in for the show’s executive producer, Larry David, a stand-up comic like Seinfeld who is generally given credit for providing the show’s mordant worldview. (David left before the last season but came back to write the final episode.) George may be the show’s most precise realization — born a white male in the most fabulously wealthy country in the history of the world, George uses nothing of what nature gave him in a resentful, infantilizing war against reality. To him, life is a very long line to get some necessity, and he views virtually everyone around him with the suspicion and hostility of a Soviet housewife waiting all day for a loaf of bread.
George is capable of eating an iclair he finds in a garbage can; pushing children and the elderly out of the way if he thinks he’s in danger; smiling when he learns his dreaded fiancie has died, taking advantage of — even physically combating — the infirm or physically handicapped; and lying and then sticking to the lie even though everyone in his immediate vicinity knows he’s prevaricating. He’s selfish and self-pitying, cheap and reflexively untruthful, and lives in a world of such flattened ambition that even his fantasies are pathetic. “I always wanted,” he says elegantly, in an early episode, “to pretend I was an architect.”
(The gaunt, acerbic David has since gone on to star in his own odd sitcom, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” While invariably amusing, the show strikes me as problematic, from its forced title on down. Most particularly, what makes George tolerable — even, in a slightly twisted way, noble — is that we all know that in the brutal calculus of the modern urban environment, he is a loser; life isn’t fair, and there are a lot of nice fat bald guys out there who aren’t getting a break.
(“Seinfeld’s” uncompromising take on him, of course, is that George has a largely unattractive personality in addition to his genetic complaints; this gives his character its almost unwatchable pathos. David, by contrast, plays himself in his new show — it’s about the wacky situations the co-creator of “Seinfeld” gets into in the celebrity-driven world of Los Angeles. David jousts against many of the same dragons George did, but the difference is that, in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” David is an unthinkably wealthy guy, who spends his time hobnobbing with actors and studio execs. Too much of the humor is merely illustrative of the fact that rich and famous guys can get away with a lot.)
Anyway, “Seinfeld” watches the four cast members go about their lives, debating the tiniest of life’s details: The first lines between Jerry and George in the show’s very first episode are a fabulously reductionist sample of Jerry’s stand-up humor, as he takes aim at a new dress shirt George is wearing: “To me, that button is in the worst possible spot. The second button literally makes or breaks the shirt. Look at it, it’s too high, it’s in no man’s land. You look like you live with your mother.”
What followed was eight seasons of this stuff. Jerry and George pitch a sitcom about nothing to NBC. Elaine plots to rid herself of her reputation as the office skank. Jerry and George plot to help Jerry break up with a girlfriend and date her roommate. Some episodes are now legendary for the existential punch — the four spend an entire episode waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant, or looking for a car in a parking garage. In perhaps the slyest of these, George tells the merciless parents of his late fiancie that he has a house in the Hamptons and then finds himself driving the implacable pair out there to see it, even though both he and they know that it doesn’t exist.
As in the set piece with George and his date, over and over again we saw modern man agonistes, swept up by banal urges about the most minor of comforts as they solidly trump once-stronger and more atavistic ones. Jerry, relentlessly chary of germs, tosses clothing items that touch bathroom fixtures and could never again kiss a woman whose toothbrush he saw fall into the toilet.
Nothing was too small-minded for Seinfeld and David to tackle, from discussions of the most minute of human behaviors to … well, to other minute behaviors. Constipation and masturbation, evasion and prevarication; the pettiest envies and the most banal euphemisms. George tries to give Elaine a sweater he got cheap because it had a spot on it; Jerry forgets the name of the woman he’s dating; another he drugs, not to rape her but to play with her toys — her real toys, not metaphorical ones.
The emotional relations between friends and lovers are a bottomless abyss of ontological inquiry. What defines a male friend (going to the airport? helping them move? being a “come with” guy who goes to the laundromat?) and what doesn’t (calling him to say thank-you for hockey tickets and washing your underwear together, among other things).
In a remarkable scene early on, Jerry and Elaine, determined to sleep together again, rationalize it in a hysterical discussion about “this” (i.e., their friendship) and “that” (i.e., sex). Foreplay is reduced to a ballet of sophistry.
In the late 20th century, Seinfeld and David argue, man is unmanned and woman unwomanned by these new urges. Once rampant and fecund, we are now epicene and unwanted, not only solitary but increasingly genetically forced into solitariness.
We don’t make war, we shove for position; we don’t mate, we bump around in the dark. And in place of the big pictures and magnificent vistas seen by those who built our society, we are obsessed with the small and the trivial, even the microscopic. We are at once appalled by procreation and strangely drawn to the act that produces it.
You don’t have to agree or disagree with this thesis to enjoy the show; but you must marvel at the Herculean ingenuity that created the set pieces that follow the characters’ moral prestidigitation.
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After a while it’s hard not to see virtually everything the show did leveraged against this worldview: The characters seem to operate almost as characters in a hellish, upside-down version of a miracle play, the saints replaced by sinners, their deeds endlessly examined.
We see them doing everything they can to do anything but break out of their characters. But in “Seinfeld” we knew that the group never would succeed. For one, it was obvious that the sensibilities behind the show were much too rigorous to allow any “Friends”-like shenanigans: Elaine would not get back together with Jerry; George would never marry; Kramer would never see a brilliant idea come to fruition; and Jerry, well, Jerry would continue to hang out with his friends, eat cereal, and identify an infinite number of character flaws that would rule out one vivacious, shapely, attractive woman after another.
And time and time again, their own behavior came back to bite them on the ass. In perhaps the show’s most slicing scene, Seinfeld meets the perfect mate — Janeane Garofalo, the perfect girl, who’s exactly like him — only to discover how quickly observational humor wears thin. A woman, breaking up with George, says, “It’s not you, it’s me.” This is a line George has heard before, coming out of his own mouth. He bursts into a rage — an unattractive rage, not a mock sitcom rage — and tells her: “That’s my line. Don’t tell me it’s not me; it is me. It’s me!” She concedes the point; it’s another small Pyrrhic victory for Costanza, in a life full of them.
You can look at Seinfeld, of course, as the Ur-sitcom — a bunch of people sitting around and doing, famously, nothing. This setup was a joke from the start, and course parodied in a later story line that saw Jerry and George attempt to get a sitcom on NBC, one that would be about nothing. And the idea of “nothing” would be a sly recurring motif as the show went on.
“Nothing” is also a nice way of describing star Seinfeld’s innocuous brand of comedy. And “nothing,” too, is that vast wasteland of most broadcast TV, which was assertively supposed to be about something but most often amounted to nothing.
But even joking about how “Seinfeld” is about nothing, few actually spent time examining what the show was really about. What that something was was obvious but nonetheless disturbing. Could the show have been made — or could two characters in an actual sitcom have gotten away with designing a new show — about what “Seinfeld” is really about? Something that bleak, that uncompromising? And, once proposed, could its creators have been allowed to drive home that thesis with the densest underpinning in the history of the medium, something almost play-like in its attention to details, thematic denseness and near poetic devotion to the theme?
Could they have said, that is, We’d like to do a situation comedy about man’s inhumanity to man? The petty desires, the arrant cruelties? The lack of perspective, the meaningless hostility? The lack of commitment, of sympathy; the confusion, the hostility, the isolation; the impossibility of love; the futility of even attempting to break out of the molds we’d stuffed ourselves into?
The creators quit at the top of their game and departed with one of the most widely misunderstood works of art of our time, the final episode of “Seinfeld.”
In that now infamous episode, you will remember, the group scores a free trip to Paris on an NBC jet. A bumbling Kramer nearly causes a plane crash — a nice feint at those rumors that the show would kill off the characters. The foursome is forced down at a New England town (the cradle of spiritual individualism) and watch amusedly, as they would in New York, as a fat guy is robbed.
But they’re caught in a local Good Samaritan law, and put on trial, at which local prosecutors call in a good chunk of the supporting players of the show’s eight-year run to act as character assassins; Teri Hatcher testifies that Seinfeld just wanted to know whether her breasts were real; a virgin testifies about the group’s masturbation contest; a woman in a wheelchair tells how George gave her a cut-rate wheelchair; a woman relates how Seinfeld stole a loaf of bread out of her hand; a Pakistani immigrant tells how he was deported after Jerry carelessly didn’t give him his mail with his immigration papers in it.
And on and on. The four are convicted with dispatch and sent off to a cell together.
Jerry looks at George: “That button, it’s in the worse possible spot … ”
The group had come full circle, adding a new level of existential desperation to their predicament. They’d been in the same vicious circle already but didn’t recognize it; in an insular, uncaring world, they’d acted alone in it, as if they didn’t need or want to relate to others, and then in the end found themselves in a spot where they got their wish — and then continued on as if nothing had happened.
A downer! cried the critics. Well, duh. Scriptwriter David’s semiotic coup in this episode was to try, in a last parting burst, to get the audience to consider the implications of a show about nothing that dominated the most powerful medium of its time. Finally, almost in desperation, he criminalized the act. Sometimes, he was insisting, nothing is something.
Johnny Depp, Jean Dujardin, and a transformer from "Dark of the Moon" 
