Wednesday, March 18, 2009

I'm Not There - an end to Special Features
Current mood: overstimulated


I finally got to see I’m Not There, the film about Bob Dylan. We missed it when it came to the cinema here, or at least I did, because I couldn’t face a trip to Limoges - Limoges being possibly one of the dullest towns in Europe.

Amy brought the DVD home from her recent trip to America. Not so good as seeing it on a big screen but at least I’ve seen it – and I enjoyed it very much. The DVD wasn’t just one DVD though, it was two DVDs with more special features than actual film.

I’m alternately amused and infuriated by special features – I wish I could make a film that was about the making of a film that doesn’t actually exist. You know the kind of thing – we were having so much fun that we were beginning to think it must be illegal / if we’d had any more fun making this movie they would have had us arrested / working with (insert name of actor here) was the highlight of my career, the man's a genius… and so on.

I believe the American expression is blowing smoke up each others arses. The director yacks on for half an hour about what a blast it all was – it’s the film I’ve always wanted to make etc..., and actors are so enamoured of their co-stars that you might imagine there was more than just smoke going up arses.

Why does everything come with Special Features? If a scene has been deleted presumably it didn’t work, or, regardless of any merit it may have had, it didn’t do much to move the plot along. A scene could be deleted for myriad reasons – I know this because I’ve watched a lot of special features, enough that I consider myself to be Something Of An Expert. I've never seen a deleted scene that I wished had been kept in (except the interviews with The Folksmen in A Mighty Wind but that film is probably the exception that proves the rule).

I wish they’d just throw away the deleted scenes. I don’t want to see them. And before you start up with You Don’t Have To Watch It, yes I fucking do – I’ve paid for the DVD, it’s on offer and I don’t want to miss anything. And anyway it’s like looking at a road accident – your eyes get drawn to it.

We watched The Honeymoon Killers the other night and afterwards we were treated to a short film of a dull looking man wearing large glasses and a white sweat shirt with what looked like a rowing club emblem sewn on it. He was standing in front of some book shelves (don’t they all – it sends out a clear message and the message is I’ve read all these books so I know what I’m talking about). He blathered on in French for twenty minutes in an extremely knowledgeable manner, but all he did was relate the entire storyline of the film with a massive amount of hand gestures. It was deeply uninteresting. Mercifully the quality wasn’t very good so you couldn’t see the food particles between his teeth.

The I’m Not There special features revealed that the eleven year old actor, who I thought was really good in the film, was in reality a complete pain in the arse - an ambitious twenty seven year old in the body of an eleven year old boy. He composed his own music and really got inside the character of Bob Dylan – there was an empathy…

A person from Sonic Youth called Bob Dylan our William Shakespeare. Why does everything have to be something else? Black is the new white, thirty is the new fifty, the Beatles are the new Stones, Oasis are just the Beatles repackaged for the nineties etc. Can’t Dylan just be Dylan? He’s nothing like Shakespeare – completely different hairdo.

The Sonic Youth person was in charge of creating the music for the Dylan Goes Electric part of the film. I thought this part was let down by the music which I found somewhat uninspired and sonically out of step with the period. The Sonic Youth man was neither down with the music or up with the intellectual aspects although he obviously thought he was . He would have done himself a favour by not being interviewed for the special features. At least he would have retained some sort of mystique.

If I bought a chair I wouldn’t expect it to be delivered along with the factory and its entire workforce, all intent on explaining how they made the chair. And a collection of other chairs - one with only three legs, a misshapen one that didn’t quite work out, one that fell to bits… and why not throw in the Pirrelli calendar from the men’s room and an anecdote or two about how the ladies in Upholstery shoved the apprentice’s cock into a milk bottle. Fuck that – I just want a chair, though the rest of that scenario might be more interesting than the average Special Features.

I must be out of my fucking mind. (I’m saying that before anyone else does.) Perhaps it’s because I’m in show business so I don’t need a sneak preview, a special peak behind the scenes. Or is it because I know how much conceit goes into being creative for a living? Millions of us can feel like we’re in the know, we’ve been backstage at Glastonbury, we're on the guest list, almost pals with the actors, watching them limber up for that famous scene in this film or that film. We know, for instance, that they mounted the camera on a shopping trolley, shot the film at forty one frames per second and used a household ratchet from the hardware shop to trigger the explosion that caused bright green fibreglass to erupt from the villain’s pustulating head. (I think I’ve been watching too much TV.)

I realise that, for how ever long it took to make the film, it was the most important thing in these people's lives, but I can’t bear the smugness, the utter arrogance involved in making a film about the making of the film alongside the making of the film. It makes an unforgiveable assumption about the future importance of the particular film in cinema history.

I’ve always been a fan of bootlegs – the version of Can’t Buy Me Love before the version that became the huge worldwide hit that found its way, for a couple of decades at least, into the collective consciousness. I’m glad that the version where Paul forgets the words and makes a cunt of himself with a bit of shibooby dooby scat singing still exists. I love hearing George Harrison’s disastrous solo (the one you can still just about make out on the actual record from the spillage into the other microphones) in all its dischordant glory long after it had been replaced, forgotten, and The Beatles had packed up and gone home. But that’s because it’s The Beatles and I’d known the songs for half my life before I ever heard a bootleg. By the time I did they were history, important history, and I was ready to have their mysteries revealed to me.

Mystery and mystique are big part of it. I’ve ranted on in the past about a young English band who regaled the audience with tales of what they’d been up to on their tour bus – not as you’d hope: shagging birds, smoking opium and gambling for higher stakes than we could ever possibly imagine – no, they’d been watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I was disappointed – I wanted them to have arrived in a space craft, not on a tour bus full of bunk beds and old socks.

The purpose of culture is to fuel the imagination, to lift us out of the mundane. So I don’t care how successful a film from last year might have been, I’d like to see an end to pre-planned special features. I’d like to be allowed, even expected, to use my imagination, to learn to live with a film, to watch it again, perhaps fall in love with it and return to it repeatedly over the years, each time finding new depth and meaning hidden in its dark recesses.

And then, one day, in ten or fifteen years time, I’d love to stumble upon a film about the making of the film. But for now I don’t want to have it explained to me by blabbermouths high on creative adrenalin. I find that depressing.