entitled “The Monkey Taster”
about which you said meant “a nice work of butter
carved into the shape of a young man who likes
only african women” you are an idiot – it doesnt
mean that at all . . . i hereby want nothing to do
with your hangups – i really dont care what you think
of my work as i now know you dont understand it
anyway . . . i must go now – i hve this new hunk of
margarine waiting in the bathtub – yes i said
MARGARINE & next week i just might decide to use
cream cheese –40
But, butter sculpture apart, it is famously the art of film that Dylan most likes to stage or to screen within his songs. And the greatest of such is Brownsville Girl.41 It starts Well.
Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck
I once tried to sum up why it earned its place among his Greatest Hits, third time around:
The end of an age, an age ago, ending “long before the stars were torn down”. At 11 minutes, it has world enough and time to be a love story, a trek, a brief epic . . . Patience, it urges. We wait for eager ages for his voice to introduce us to the Brownsville Girl herself. Great rolling stanzas (“and it just comes a-rolling in”), and memories of the Rolling Thunder Revue, especially since Sam Shepard plays his part. About films, it has the filmic flair of Dylan’s underrated masterpiece, Renaldo and Clara. Delicious yelps from the back-up women, who sometimes comically refuse to back him up. He: “They can talk about me plenty when I’m gone.” They: “Oh yeah?” It moves, and yet stays put, circling back round. One of those great still songs.42
What particularly takes Dylan about films, I take it, is that they move – why else would they be movies? – while at the same time or in a different sense they don’t. Don’t thereafter move from what they once were. For to film it is to fix it. And a re-make of a film is not the same thing as re-performing a song. Like Brownsville Girl, a film – including this one within the song that someone remembers or kinda remembers – moves and yet stays still. It stays more than just stills, that is true, but to see it again is to see it exactly as it was, for all time. (Eternity is a different story.) There is comedy in Brownsville Girl’s beginning “Well, there was this movie I seen one time”, for although “one time” makes perfectly good sense and we know what he means, it is going to be many more than one time that we shall hear tell of his seeing it. The second time it goes, or rather, arrives, like this:
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
The way people moved, and meanwhile the film moved, and how they looked out my way from the screen as though I were the performer (no longer “a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself ”), not – on this relief of an occasion – the performee. And yet the film, once and for all, is not going to move, or move out of my head. Even when an actor returns in the re-make of a film, as did Robert Mitchum for the second Cape Fear, he is not himself or is not his previous self. One man in his time plays many parts. And so the song muses on the Muse of Film:
Well, I’m standing in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck
Yeah, but you know it’s not the one that I had in mind
He’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about
But I’ll see him in anything so I’ll stand in line
A new one out now, the old one being in then, preserving its people, just as they were, for ever and a day. “Welcome to the land of the living dead.” Not just The Night of the Living Dead, which is one particular film, but the land of the living dead, filmland. “I’ll stand in line”: much is made of lines in this song, the medium of song being lines and it’s not being only Dylan’s audience that has to be willing to stand in line. Any song must. And Dylan reels out the lines themselves, one of the furthest extended being a line that does indeed find itself over the line (we forgive it its trespasses):
Now I’ve always been the kind of person that doesn’t like to trespass but sometimes you just find yourself over the line
And then, as the song winds to a conclusion, it winds back to the beginning, this time underlining “one time” with “twice”:
There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice
I don’t remember who I was or where I was bound
All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun and he was shot in the back
Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down
And so – in this requiem for the stars, the living dead – on to the refrain for the last time, a refrain that is a showing, or a plea for a showing:
Brownsville girl with your Brownsville curls
Teeth like pearls shining like the moon above
Brownsville girl, show me all around the world
Brownsville girl, you’re my honey love
Show me all around the world: that is all that any film asks.
There is in Dylan’s songs a sense that competition between sister-arts is as inevitable and (mostly) as unproductive as any other sibling rivalry, but that only a very touchy visual artist would object to a singer’s envisaging the day When I Paint My Masterpiece. But there is (praise be) such a thing as stealthy competition.
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About
