I'm Not There (2) Billy

Richard Gere’s Billy the Kid looks a lot like John Lennon. We are in an alternate universe in which the Kid survived Pat Garrett’s bullet, and maybe one in which Lennon survived the shot that, in this world, killed him. Dylan is said to have admired Billy the Kid, but it was really Pretty Boy Floyd, the outlaw who bought thanksgiving dinners for the farmers on relief, , that Dylan admired. The Kid got thrown into the myth of the outlaw with better men, and it doesn’t really matter if we say Billy the Kid or Jesse James because we are talking about the same thing: Romanticizing the Outlaw. “He was an outlaw / That’s for sure/ More of an outlaw / than you ever were” Dylan sings about Lenny Bruce. Later in the song, he sings “Lenny Bruce was bad / he was the brother that you never had.” Without these outlaw heroes, Dylan might never have become Dylan. And without Dylan, Lennon might never have become Lennon. It is what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence.” The failure to succeed in imitating ones heroes creates an original hero out of oneself.

In Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” Dylan plays Alias, a kid who leaves his job as a newspaper typesetter to join Billy’s gang. In the beginning of the Richard Gere segment of “I’m Not There,” Billy talks to an old man who could very well be Alias grown up. Unlike the Cate Blanchett segment, which is a parody of “Don’t Look Back,” Haynes does not parody Peckinpah in the Billy scenes. He does something much more interesting by following through on a verse Dylan wrote about working on the film in his song “Brownsville Girl. “Something about that movie though, well I just can't get it out of my head / But I can't remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play/
All I remember about it was Gregory Peck and the way people moved /And a lot of them seemed to be lookin' my way.”

Peckinpah’s film didn’t star Gregory Peck. That movie was The Gunfighter.” In “Brownsville Girl,” Dylan combines the experience of watching a Gregory Peck movie with acting in the Peckinpah movie. Now Haynes adds a third movie, and his fascination, as was Dylan’s, is in the way people move. He captures the Peckinpah touch with subtle physical gestures such as the shift in Gere’s eyes as something in the distance captures his attention.

There are other movies referenced in this segment, most notably “El Topo,” with its cardboard town of misfits looking for a savior to ride in and rapture them out of the coming Apocalypse. More important, there is a reference to the music Dylan made after his motorcycle accident which, in “I’m Not There,” proves fatal. Jim James, from My Morning Jacket, is singing “Going to Acapulco,” a song from the basement tapes Dylan recorded with The Band in Woodstock while recovering from the accident. James is backed by the group Calexico, who are all dressed up and posed the way the band used to dress and pose themselves, to create nostalgic imagery of the lost confederacy…the only time when a group of discontents stood up and defied the government. Dylan has said on several occasions that the Civil War is the single most important event in American history. I might add that it is the most misunderstood, simply because the national impression of it comes from the propaganda of the Yankee victors. Before you get too upset over that statement, consider that it was after the assault on the South that the Northern armies set their face against the Native American population…and many Southerners who would not give up the fight joined the tribes to continue fighting against the Yanks.

All of this is part of the Dylan’s self-mythology. He himself is a Northerner who adopted Southern musical roots, with more than a touch of minstrelsy in his act. (The album he released on 09/11/01 is titled “Love and Theft, which is also the title of the definitive history of American minstrelsy.) I was told by Mavis Staples that he has an extensive collection of black comedy records, from which he appropriated a routine they did together as a prelude to their duet recording of his gospel song. “When You Gonna Wake Up?”

Although this story of an aged Billy the Kid living like a southern hermit who occasionally hits the road might not seem to have much to do with Bob Dylan, Dylan’s account, in his first book of Chronicles, of driving around in the South looking for inspiration during the “Oh Mercy” recordings suggests that he is not unlike this character…and Haynes found a brilliant way of representing these later years through Gere’s alternative-universe Billy.

Near the end of the film, Billy hops a freight and finds the old guitar with the legend “This Machine Kills Fascists” painted on the case. The phrase is from Woody Guthrie, who had written it on his own guitar, not the case…..and the case is something lost and left behind from the little black kid who named himself Woody, the first incarnation of Dylan who appears in the film.