By Defeating Me In This Title Game, You Have Proven My Point

No one expected Northwestern to actually win the Big Ten Championship last Saturday, but I would argue that the Wildcats managed to win the aesthetic battle by turning the entire thing into a grim, unwatchable puntfest that stymied the Buckeyes until they remembered that their offensive line is group of large, sentient dump trucks and they have a running back that transcends time and space.  In the end, I suppose, everyone got what they wanted: Ohio State gets another inevitable conference championship and berth in the Playoff, Northwestern proved they can lose to Ohio State with more dignity than all but one Big Ten team this season, and the Big Ten got its television money.

https://twitter.com/CFBONFOX/status/1340367024296521729?s=20

https://twitter.com/CFBONFOX/status/1340367024296521729?s=20

WHAT A PICK 🤯@NUFBFamily's @BrandonJoseph_1 snatched it out of the air with one hand! pic.twitter.com/6bNAsaLl9r

— FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) December 19, 2020

Northwestern's winning strategy all season-- to grab a lead and then desperately hang on as the opposition punts, throws ill-conceived interceptions in the direction of Brandon Joseph, or dies of old age-- while effective against most of the Big Ten faltered against big, bad Ohio State.  Fox television even correctly identified them the entire game. And Northwestern managed to prove a point that even though they were really bad 30 years ago, they are fine now, which remains their most important mission.

One of the luxuries in rooting for a team like Northwestern is never being in position to worry about what the Playoff Committee is up to, and so when they come out and transparently shoehorn in the teams to guarantee TV ratings into the Playoff while constructing ludicrous Rube Goldberg-style explanations for it because apparently it is illegal to outright say more people want to watch Notre Dame stumble around and get bopped in the noggin on television than Cincinnati so Gary Barta has to come out there and transcend our understanding of football to invoke a different plane of  existence that is only visible to the Playoff Committee and the people who have taken some sort of gray market psychedelic and now believe that they live in a cult compound called Fansville, it is fine to enjoy the spectacle.  In fact, in their own way they are right.  It might not be fair to the Group of Five, but I will enjoy watching Notre Dame getting crushed by Alabama while Brian Kelly turns into an undulating skin tag on the sideline.

 

The committee has correctly assumed American football sickos want to watch Brian Kelly appear to have been shot out of the Mars colony after activation of the Reactor

It has taken the Playoff Committee six years to go from an exciting novelty to an ossified institution propping up the same high-powered programs.  The playoff rankings remind me of a ducal war of succession where the prime territories are easily gobbled up by Alabama and Clemson and then everyone else needs to fight a punishing 30-year land war involving Ohio State.  College football has yet to find a way to crown a champion that does not involve some sort of outrage, but I would suggest that continually farming it out to unaccountable committees of bureaucrats who have yet to come up with a reason for doing anything that cannot be explained by assuming that they are only interested in television ratings is probably not the most productive way to do this; then again, the Committee seems completely invulnerable to shame, pressure, and even Group of Five teams festively taking matters into their own hands and crowning themselves champions (the best thing that has come from the Playoff system) and the conferences that they care about are making obscene amounts of money so it is pretty easy to assume that they do not give a shit.

The college football season is mercifully limping to an end.  The bowl system, already kind of stupid but enjoyably stupid, has completely collapsed upon itself with teams pulling themselves from contention, two-win teams getting bowl berths because of contracts, entire games getting cancelled because of team outbreaks-- the entire thing has mirrored the American coronavirus response in that there are really no rules or rhyme and reason to what is shutting down but the American Men's Sock Garter and Sock Garter Holster Company has paid good money for those naming rights so a couple of three-win teams are going to fall down on each other for a few hours unless too many of them get coronavirus.

Northwestern will face Auburn in the Citrus Bowl, which is as far as I can tell still happening for some reason.  Northwestern and Auburn last met in 2010's batshit Outback Bowl in the dying embers of the Wildcats having a recognizably zesty offense.  Because Florida is a lawless Zone, this game will feature the jarring sight of fans in the stands with a capacity of up to 13,000 maniacs in America's Deranged Vacation Capital Orlando, Florida.  Fans in attendance are encouraged to inspire the teams on third down by cackling.

As you would expect from reading this type of focused college football blog, I have not watched a single second of Auburn football this season and have no idea whether they are good.  I do know that they just fired legendary coach Gus Malzahn as part of what appears to me as some sort of booster-related coup with the type of dumb skulduggery that makes this sport so fascinating, so the Wildcats will be playing a team with an interim coach in the middle of a pandemic in Florida.  I don't think these circumstances merit as Bowl Game Winning Factors, I just hope they get through it, and if it means that Pat Fitzgerald gets to bray on a podium how Joey Galloway is a disgrace in fact the worst deal we've ever done while confetti rains down over a semi-empty stadium then that's fine and everyone can go home while I flip over to watch Northwestern's basketball teams go through the same insanity to play because they also have the temerity to be good this year.

I have enjoyed watching Northwestern play football this season in the way that it is theoretically possible to enjoy a Northwestern football game, but the entire season has been a travesty.  The Wildcats managed to get through the season without a reported Covid case (football camp was shut down over the summer after a positive case, but it was later described as a false positive), and while I am assured that everyone involved has been conforming to guidelines scrupulously, the price for having a football season has required football players and all other athletes competing this season to live essentially as monks.  If anything, this season has rendered the already ridiculous argument that college athletes are simply students enjoying a recreational activity with a billion-dollar TV contract even more impossible.  As college campuses across the country have shut down in various stages, athletes have carried on their practices and games and travel, navigating uncertainty and a risk of infection.  While I understand that players had the opportunity to opt out and many played because they really like it, that's fine-- they should also be paid.  If the NCAA does not like the aesthetics of cutting checks, they can officially deputize a bunch of guys with stupid hats driving long cars to pull up to every facility and hand people sacks of cash the way it is unofficially done, but even the vaguest gossamer strands of an already-lost argument against paying players cannot possibly be entertained unless the argument is "who's gonna stop us" which I guess is a pretty good one because no one has been able to answer it.

The one thing we have learned this season is that there is nothing that the NCAA, the conferences, and the schools will not do to get their television advertising money.  They will play in a pandemic.  They will make up bullshit "safety protocols" that involve college football coaches, the people least likely to wear a mask on the face of the earth, pretend to wear a mask but really just yank it down to scream at people or wear it around their entire face except where it should go.

Jeremy Pruitt models a mask style known as the "Oaf's Babushka"

 

They will drag themselves and everyone else over a floor full of broken glass to get these games on TV, and while that is disconcerting and an already appalling part of the horrifying broader tapestry of what Americans have been willing to ask people to get sick and die for this year, it also suggests that if anyone ever gets together and threatens to take those games off TV they just might give them anything. 

A Football Apocalypse During a Regular Apocalypse

This Saturday, Northwestern meets Ohio State in Indianapolis as a necessary blood sacrifice so that the Buckeyes get to go to the Playoff and Big Ten officials can go light up some cigars and congratulate themselves for making the decision that teams should play through a pandemic in order to get television money and reflect on how they fought through the adversity that came from teams becoming fetid Covid swamps and the many arduous phone calls they had to make.  

Now, after building an eight-game schedule with no slack, allowing Kirk Herbstreit to accuse Michigan of not playing Ohio State during a team-wide outbreak as some sort of ridiculous rivalry hi-jink on the order of stealing the Brutus head and firing it out of a bulbous air cannon, and convening an very silly emergency Ohio State Needs to Make the Playoff Meeting, all that stands in the way of their machinations resulting in that precious playoff berth is this:

 

Not only would a Northwestern victory be satisfying for winning the conference and vanquishing Big Bad Ohio State, it would also serve as a monkey wrench that would destroy the precarious house of cards constructed by the Playofff Committee to get all of their favorite teams in.  Would they have to put in one-loss Big Ten Champion Northwestern over a team from another conference that didn't hypocritically pretend that they give a shit about playing through a pandemic and they are now yelling through gritted teeth about how many games they played on their post-game zoom calls or would they have to consider putting in one of the excellent undefeated Group of Five teams that should be there? Would a potential Northwestern upset fuck up the Playoff Picture so badly that, if a Northwestern player was sprinting toward the end zone in a game-winning play, would Gary Barta himself sprint on the field to tackle him or maybe try to throw a piece of Lucas Oil horseshoe logo signage at him to knock him down before throwing down a smoke grenade and vanishing to an emergency Big Ten complex under the stadium that is filled with mirrors and potentially hundreds of fake Garys Barta any one of which could be the real one who is outfitted with a claw?  These are important considerations for the Playoff Picture.

The Playoff Committee, though, is resting easy in their hotel suites because the Buckeyes are heavily favored.  Northwestern has for the most part been winning games by playing excellent defense and holding on by the skin of their teeth through second-half puntfests.  Ohio State has star quarterback Justin Fields, and it seems likely that Northwestern will have trouble adjusting; my analogy for this is the Simpsons boxing episode where Homer has no idea what to do with superstar Drederick Tatum after gently knocking over a bunch of winded hoboes that here represent the oaf-quarterbacks of the Big Ten West.  Ohio State has obliterated every single team they have faced in the horrid Big Ten except for 2020 football heroes Indiana.  But they aren't playing the game on paper, and who knows; in this most insane year, maybe Northwestern can pull out its greatest upset yet.  "If anyone would like to say anything derogatory toward our players, please do so this week," Pat Fitzgerald pleaded, desperate in search for the next Rece Davis insult that he used to lead Northwestern to its only loss.

Don't you dare call them R*ce D*vises. (Thanks to @AceAnbender for the screengrab.)

 As enjoyable as it would be for Northwestern to destroy college football's postseason, there are no heroes during the 2020 season.  Northwestern, like all programs, has asked its players to shoulder ludicrous burdens for the Big Ten to show me ads for the Brett Favre Knee Brace and the fact that their win as an enormous underdog would also fuck up the Playoff does not mean that it was a good idea to play.  The Big Ten West Championship is both a testament to players doing something remarkable during this upheaval and an obscenity that they were asked to do it.  There are no winners here, although I want to be very clear that Northwestern winning the Big Ten Championship would be incredibly funny.   

THE HAT AND WHAT CAME AFTER

Last Saturday's victory over Illinois had no affect on the Wildcats' division championship, but there was still a Hat on the line so they had to run over the Illini.  Northwestern's dormant running game came alive in a wet day that turned Ryan Field into a mud pit, and they nearly equaled a school record for rushing yards against a Big Ten opponent that they set in 2003 that was also against Illinois.  The Wildcats have won six Hats in a row and are now only win away from evening the all-time record.  

On Sunday, Illinois fired Lovie Smith.  Smith, who I am fond of as the best Bears coach of my life who was fired after a ten-win season so they could hire a Canadian league coach who looked like a ventriloquists's dummy on the cover of an R.L. Stine book, was far too normal in my opinion for college football, the domain of maniacs.  I hope when Illinois engages in its coaching search they consider the fact that I would prefer to write about a coach that was a weirdo lunatic.  I've been able to get by for the past couple years making fun of Jim Boylen, but now the Bulls have a normal square haircut guy in charge.  Perhaps the Illini would consider hiring Jim Boylen, if he is available.  If Illinois goes with another normal coach, it may be necessary to sabotage the Bears' kicking footballs and finally push Matt Nagy over the edge of madness.

(UPDATE: It appears that Illinois is going to hire Bret Bielema, I can work with this.)

Northwestern football is also on the precipice of change.  Athletic director Jim Phillips, most often seen at Northwestern games running around like a shirtsleeved secondary mascot, is moving on to head the ACC.  Phillips will go from working for Northwestern and its boosters to a job where he will, in essence, be working for Dabo Swinney.  Under Phillips, Northwestern's sports programs have thrived in terms of winning games and raising money for ambitious real estate projects and not letting anything get in the way of that.  Here is a good post from Ben Goren about Phillips's legacy at Northwestern about his successes on the field and the costs that those entail.

Defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz will also retire after this season.  I have written before that it is strange how coordinators get so much outsized credit and blame for a team's performance and suspect that it is something fans to latch onto, especially when they are mad and want someone fired.  After all, most college coordinators move in an endless itinerant parade where they are continuously swapped with identical goatee guys.  On the other hand, Northwestern has had a very good defense for most of the time Hankwitz has been there, and whatever he is doing it has obviously been working.  Once again, Northwestern will enter a coaching search this time not to replace a reviled coach blamed for the offense's ineptitude but to replace a lauded favorite whose unit has been the heart and soul of the program.  I have the utmost confidence that if there is one aspect of American life that will remain unaffected by the pandemic it will be the football coach speculation industry with all of the attendant flight trackers and self-proclaimed message board insiders.

Finally, there have been rumors that the Chicago Bears are interested in hiring Pat Fitzgerald in a potentially nuclear mutual self-own fueled by ambition, hubris, and naiveté reminiscent of the scene in the movie The Other Guys where Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne The Rock Johnson play those types of devil-may-care badge necklace detectives who make an impossible leap off the building and plummet to the ground below or the decision to pursue an advanced degree in the humanities.  I hope this is just a rumor because Northwestern has remade its entire football program in the image of Pat Fitzgerald and I have doubts that his shit would work in the National Football League but on the other hand watching Fitz try to handle questions from the fevered Chicago football press and deal with untold legions of mustache guys that have never even glanced at Northwestern muster their forces from Kenosha to Tinley Park in order to oust him from Halas Hall because of punting would be funny.

I don't know what the future holds for Northwestern after this game.  If they do as expected and get flattened by Ohio State, then they will supposedly go to some bowl game even as the entire infrastructure around bowl games appears to be collapsing.  College football is poised to limp across the finish line having grasped at whatever money they could find, and it is impossible at this point to believe there is nothing that conferences will not do with their programs to get every last penny.  Bowl season, already a sort of jaunty appendage to the college football season, will probably exist and mutate into something even stupider as exhausted players beg to for the season to end, as teams continue to have outbreaks.  It will probably end up being like one field in a complex that every team who still wants to keep playing comes to and just sort of footballs at each other for a few hours in an unorganized free-for-all as announcers just scream the name of sponsors over the action until someone emerges in a robotic exoskeleton.  But nothing can affect the Playoff as college football marches towards its pot of gold that cannot be stopped even if Northwestern manages to completely destroy it this weekend.

Masque of the Red Hat

In the past weeks, Pat Fitzgerald strutted around screaming the team's new motto of "how dare you call us Rece Davises," then Northwestern ate shit to a bad Michigan State team, claimed the Big Ten West crown via e-mail, and watched the entire Big Ten Conference eat itself over the question of whether Ohio State would get to face them in the championship game, so it was about a normal two weeks in this ridiculous college football season.  

In several years this is going to be an insane sign (photo taken from the Northwestern Football twitter account)

 

The math on the Big Ten West appeared to work to Northwestern's favor two weeks ago because of their win over Wisconsin and because of a new tiebreaker that had been used to disqualify teams because they or enough of their opponents had come down with a disease, a metric that was almost instantly moved away from the horrific implications of teams incubating dozens of cases to be just another Factor in Division Championships.  Under the ancient Big Ten Laws codified in September, Wisconsin was disqualified from appearing in the championship, but under the new Oh Shit Ohio State Could Miss The Playoffs Laws signed in an iron-clad google doc signed with the blood of all fourteen Big Ten Athletic Directors, now Wisconsin could have qualified if they hasn't already lost to Indiana in a straightforward series of events that could have been clearly laid out to the Badgers if the Big Ten had worked out how to manipulate the space-time continuum. 

So sometime last week, Northwestern officially won the Big Ten West outright, which I learned about when they sent me an e-mail offering to sell me 2020 West Champions merchandise.  This itself was funny, but I think it would have been even funnier if Northwestern fumbled the ball in the Michigan State endzone and then were presented with the Big Ten West trophy because of Covid Cancellations.  The apex of this season would then be if Wisconsin had beaten Indiana the next week, then the conference activated the Actually We Were Kidding About The Six Games rule on Tuesday, and a Big Ten official in some sort of protective bunny suit was forced to extricate the trophy from Pat Fitzgerald's office as he levitated over the multi-billion-dollar facility in a state of ecstatic apoplexy.  They could have existed as Schrodinger's Wildcats having both won and not won the Big Ten West indefinitely as the conference continually adjusted its rules.

The Big Ten's Great Rules Kerfuffle has been one of the most enjoyably ludicrous highlights of this godforsaken season.  It is not funny or enjoyable that the conference and the sport in general has been plowing blithely ahead through the ever-worsening pandemic with unflagging, dead-eyed determination to get their TV money, but watching the bureaucrats flailing away with the desperation of Homer Simpson chasing a roast pig has at least been entertaining.  The question of whether it would be fair to leave Ohio State out of the championship game is beyond the point; nothing about this rotten sport is or ever has been fair, and the idea that the Big Ten's phoney-baloney rules were about to fuck over the team whose hopes of getting the Big Ten a slice of that playoff money is one of the reasons why all of this is happening in the first place while the most deranged Ohio State fans went nutso on the internet was a wonderful several hours. 

The entire Ohio State debacle served to unleash the absolute stupidest debate in college football discourse this season where teams upset by a rival team cancelling games from a Covid outbreak accuse the other team of ducking them.  In this case, the conspiracy theory is that Michigan has been so delightfully inept at football this season that Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Athletic Department have used a rampaging team outbreak as an excuse to avoid humiliation at the hands of the Buckeyes and potentially disqualify them from the Big Ten Championship.  First off, the idea of spitefully cancelling a game to disqualify a rival is incredibly funny and should be allowed.  But also, the theory is so profoundly oaf-minded, a plainly moronic way of thinking where fans are angry at the Covid-riddled team for not welcoming opponents to the stadium so they can aggressively breathe on them because it might affect how the Playoff Committee thinks about their Football Resumé.  

Needless to say, this theory was espoused by Kirk Herbstreit who then appeared hours later in a self-filmed apology video from his wood paneled Football Office with his face looking like a bulbous dried mango strip; I would suggest that this entire turn of events would be one of those insane and unfathomable 2020 events that would be impossible to explain to the naive pre-March world, but I believe that if you told any 2019 college football fan that teams would still play games during a world-crippling pandemic it would take them approximately five seconds to guess that teams would instantly accuse rivals who have come down with a plague and subsequently are reluctant to play games as ducking them, and honestly they could probably guess that the person most responsible for this would be Dabo Swinney.

HAT HAT HAT HAT

For the second time in three years, Northwestern and Illinois face a Hat Game where Northwestern has more incentive to rest players than win.  They have already clinched the Big Ten West and will once again face Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship and therefore have little incentive to play their top players in a quest to do the impossible and upset the Buckeyes and complete the Northwestern mission of ruining the Big Ten's entire season.  This Hat Game scenario happened in 2018, and Illinois quarterback A.J. Bush played heroically, undone by some unfortunate turnovers and an Illinois field goal try so cowardly that even Northwestern fans groaned.  

This year, once again I will approach the Hat Game with mixed feelings.  On the one hand, of course I want Northwestern to win the coveted Hat, the prize in North America's greatest sports rivalry.  Northwestern is very close to evening the all-time series with Illinois and, in coming years, achieving a winning record against a Big Ten team that isn't Rutgers.  On the other hand, the idea of Northwestern losing to Illinois and limping into the title game infuriating Wisconsin and Iowa fans is funny, and I am sort of nurturing a theory that the shittier Northwestern looks heading into Indianapolis the more powerful their conference-ruining powers will grow.  

It will be interesting to see how Fitzgerald approaches the game.  Last year, Northwestern narrowly clung to a lead and then almost literally kneeled out the entire second half, and it seems that this has gone from a tactic used to beat Illinois with third-string players in the fourth quarter to an entire governing team philosophy.  The only way to play more conservatively if they do manage to get a lead on an Illinois team that I think looks pretty dangerous this season would be for the quarterback to run backwards in the pocket to drain time off the clock resulting in an intentional safety or some sort of weird abuse of rules demanding a ten second runoff.

THIS SECTION IS ABOUT BOB DYLAN MOVIES FOR SOME REASON

I do not know why but in the past several months I have become obsessed with classic rock documentaries.  I believe there are two reasons for this: one was hearing a Crosby, Stills, and Nash song on the radio and then being drawn for the first time into reading about their entertaining web of cocainous feuds and grandiose insults and then watching the Peter Bogdanovich documentary on Tom Petty around the Wildflowers re-release and falling victim to the twenty-first century malady of looking for similar content before next thing I knew I had consumed something like fifteen hours of Bob Dylan-related films in the course of two stressful late-October weeks.

There are two things that stand out in the D.A. Pennebacker film Dont Look Back. One is the insane gaggle of press conferences and interviews that are used to besiege a young Dylan on a 1965 tour of Britain.  Dylan is short with reporters and various hangers-on and, as noted in Roger Ebert's original review of the movie, comes like an irritating prick, but at least for me the entire spectacle of a twenty-four year-old guy with a guitar and harmonica necklace subject to press conferences like he is a politician expected to represent an entire generation is unfathomably bizarre.  The other is how close Pennebacker got to Dylan and how much of the movie is just him killing time before shows, obsessively reading about himself in the papers, hanging out with his entourage who all are identically dressed and sunglassed, dicking around on the guitar, and being at the center of a party that he never wants to be at.  In one memorable scene, Dylan bangs on a door demanding to know who threw that fuckin' glass off the balcony, man, getting into what looks like it might spiral into a physical altercation with an extremely drunk and high man and a middle-aged Beard Guy, and generally yelling at people with his Dylan Voice.  Only the Radiohead documentary makes being a famous rock star look more unbearable, and the confluence of that energy with constant interviews asking him to sum up the state of the world made his abandonment of the folk scene so he could play rock music and have his fans all turn up to his shows to tell him to go fuck himself palpable.

The best part of the enormous and sprawling Martin Scorcese Dylan documentary No Direction Home is the transition from acoustic to electric Dylan.  This transformation, complete with a fan screaming "Judas!" at him, has fallen into pop culture lore, but the sheer anger captured in the documentary is really something.  Scorcese mines several minutes of footage of young British people who are absolutely livid about Dylan.  Many of them have just seen or are about to see Dylan in concert, but they are more than happy to spend several minutes getting extremely flustered and agitated about how Dylan is now "simply rubbish and rot, with the electric. It is shocking how he is not even wearing the harmonica."  This vitriol toward Dylan expressed precisely by scandalized teenagers is one of the funniest moments in the history of popular music and if they had any dignity they would have reacted by throwing beer bottles at a chicken wire fence.

No Direction Home is filled with extensive Dylan interview segments, but they are conducted by his own manager and allow Dylan to weave his own mystique, which is a fancy way of saying that Bob Dylan loves to say a bunch of lies and bullshit.  This is at least somewhat understandable-- the entire Bob Dylan persona was willed into being from his first moments in New York when he pretended to be from New Mexico instead of a sleepy Minnesota town, and one can certainly understand why the Bob Dylan of Dont Look Back had no interest in saying anything particularly interesting to the ravenous press that is desperately trying to shape him, package him, and sell him to their own ends. 

Dylan's commitment to myth-making about himself perhaps explains why he was willing to collaborate with Scorcese again on The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, a sort-of documentary about his bizarre, small-venue 1976 tour that combines old footage that Dylan shot for what has been described as a very bad fictionalized version of the tour he made as a 1978 movie called Renaldo and Clara with contemporary interviews that include several actors playing fake characters including a Danish tour impresario, a fictional head of CBS Records, and even Sharon Stone pretending she joined the tour as a sort of teenaged groupie.  The tour itself, even before all of the hokum, included a lot of elements of acting and dress-up; performers wore masks and facepaint and Dylan enters the phase that all rock musicians hit in their 30s when they invariably become Hat Guys.  Present-day Dylan is once again croaking out his reminisces to the same manager who interviewed him for No Direction Home, but he really comes alive when he gets to do some belabored acting so he can take some potshots at a fictional person named "Stefan Van Dorp."  To be fair, I have not seen any of Dylan's actual acting work other than the GIF of him throwing what might be the world's funniest punch, but it seems like Dylan really only comfortable playing Bob Dylan.

These two approaches from Scorcese and Pennebacker-- Scorcese relying on archives and cagey interviews from Dylan and everyone from the expanded Bob Dylan universe, and the Pennebacker fly-on-the-wall method from Dont Look Back and the almost incoherent, druggy follow-up  Burn the Document that you can find as a bootleg on the internet-- at some point rely on Dylan as the steward of his own story where the price of access to Bob Dylan comes due as indulging in Bob Dylan's bullshit.  One of the stranger efforts to get around Dylan himself is to not use Dylan at all, as Todd Haynes attempted with the bizarre 2007 film I'm Not There that uses several quasi Dylan-like figures to represent different eras of Dylan, which is both a fascinating approach and eerily similar to the way Bill Simmons would approach making a Bob Dylan movie.  The standout performances for me are Cate Blanchett as the Dont Look Back Dylan who goes electric as Blanchett performs a miracle of physicality by transforming herself into a twitchy, irritable Dylan complete with the Dylan Voice actors love to do and Heath Ledger as a loutish actor who represents the 1970s Blood On The Tracks Divorce Dylan.  The movie switches between sections that also include an 11 year-old boy who calls himself Woody Guthrie and presents himself as a world-weary 1930s hobo traveling around in the 1950s, Christian Bale doing Folk Dylan and later Born Again Dylan, and Richard Gere floating through a nonsensical magical cowboy world, but it is a wonderfully odd attempt to make sense of this one person and his numerous reinventions and well-guarded personal demons.

Of course, no documentary or book or any other sort of media will ever give me what I am looking from Dylan which is not a painstaking deconstruction of his lyrics or puerile gossip about his personal life, but a sense of what it is like to be Bob Dylan, to reach a bizarre level of fame and influence that 40 years after his greatest heights he is having movies made about him that involve Richard Gere in bizarre Western Stunt Show dreamscapes.  I don't think it is possible, not for Dylan nor for anyone in any of the other documentaries I have watched because that level of fame is so deranging and warping that anyone who achieves it has to lose all sense of perspective and wrap themselves in a cocoon in order to survive.  The Baby Boomer Rock Doc narrative always involves listening to the Beatles, forming a band, the giddy rush of fame, and then years of drugs, divorces, and probably losing a large amount of money on ill-advised real estate or boat boondoggles that culminate in them going on reunion tours.  

Dylan has made more of a meal of it both by being more famous and held to more importance than his peers and by shrouding himself with mystique that makes fans desperate to try to peel back the curtain, leading to an opening for professional Dylanists.  He has returned in 2020 with a new album featuring the apotheosis of the 1960s Legacy Artist: a 20-minute song about the Kennedy assassination and an announcement that he has sold his catalog for an estimated $300 million, meaning it is likely we are going to be hearing Blowin' in the Wind in the background of one of those pharmaceutical commercials with people in bright clothing cavorting in parks.  The more Dylan that you see, the more he appears as a fascinating enigma and shameless huckster trading on mystery, and both might be the same thing.