The Dylans they are a-changing: representing Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" (2007)

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ film I’m Not There (2007). Bob Dylan is regarded as one of the most important musicians of the 20th Century. He rose to fame in early 1960s during the Folk Song Revival, and since then, the media and the public have attempted uncover the enigma surrounding his public personas. Many have divided Dylan’s life and art into different social identities and biographical stages: folk singer, rock star, poet, prophet, media trickster, outlaw and many more. Thus, it is a challenging task to encapsulate Dylan’s identity into a single word. Accordingly, it is even more demanding turning him into a biopic’s subject. However, Todd Haynes endeavoured to make a Bob Dylan biopic in his seventh feature film, I’m Not There (2007). Yet, the movie is far from being traditional. Haynes’ film was groundbreaking in terms of its use of postmodernism to depart from the conventions of the biopic genre. This paper explores how the director employed six different actors to portray the various Dylan’s personalities by using distinctive cinematic styles to match the historical background of the musician’s most prolific creative period. For this purpose, I will dwell on the biopic genre, and how I’m Not There deviates from conventions of biographical movies in order to capture Dylan’s constantly changing identity. Moreover, I will provide a cultural insight into the singer-songwriter that will serve as the basis to explore how the singer’s different stage personas are portrayed in the film. In sum, this paper will aim at relating biographical and cultural events to each character to appreciate how Haynes’ has re-interpreted standards of the biopic genre in an effort to imitate Dylan’s chameleonic essence.