Bob's Fate | Bob Dylan & Masked & Anonymous - Page 4

Jack arrives at his destination and meets joker John Goodman who he refers to as “Sweetheart” since Goodman takes a rather condescending attitude toward him from the beginning anyway, calling Jack a “skinny thing:” and “no more than bones” with the “jail pale” and so on. Obviously, though a promoter, Goodman is just doing his job and has booked the legend but is no fan. Not really.

Dylan calls Luke Wilson – a bartender who is full of such lines, as he says to one thirsty customer who wants a drink and says My glass is empty. Wilson answers, “The glass is always half empty.”

The film is full of lines like this. Are they platitudes? They’re just general statements that are thrown out there, and though they may sometimes or even often be true, the volume has been bumped up. Jack Black tells us A chemist invents a new drug and doesn’t care about the side effects so the pharmaceutical industry is not immune. and Expect the worst and you’ll get it, but is that last a warning to us – to not think the very same way that Jack Fate is thinking here, or is it a wry comment – a Jack’s Truth: Expect the worst and it will come anyway or rather, Expect anything and you’ll get the worst no matter what.

The latter seems more like what he is saying, but here again; it’s all interpretation and will depend on who is doing the looking here. You’d have to watch for yourself to determine the meaning of each individual line, but clearly, the overall message is that, his father, El Presidente, is one corrupt sonofabitch who cares nothing for the people, nothing for his son.

Even Jack’s seedy hotel room has reminders of his father; after all, he is the leader of what we assume is supposed to be, ironically, the “free world” and his picture hangs over his bed, like a Stalinist propaganda poster. It rather reminded me of my own recent visit to a government building where, after I had gone through the usual security measures necessary at government buildings and so, having been through the metal detector and seen men remove their belts and shoes, I felt all warm and snuggly safe. I looked up and saw framed photographic prints of our own President and Dick Cheney and though it had not occurred then (call me stupid), it occurred to me as I was watching this film that perhaps the photographs that seem to occupy most classrooms and even university lecture halls and the like of our current leaders are perhaps not so different from the Russian propaganda art of Constructivism around the time of the revolution (1917) and the early
1920s.

Article Author: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a published writer in both the United States and Europe. She is widely known for her music commentary, particularly her writings about Bob Dylan about whom she runs a highly-trafficked site. …

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