On June, 11, the night before “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese” dropped on Netflix, I attended an event for the movie following its premiere at Lincoln Cente…
” dropped on Netflix, I attended an event for the movie following its premiere at Lincoln Center. At the party, I got to sample reactions to the revelation that roughly 10 minutes of Scorsese’s back-to-the-’70s rock doc consists of prankish fake-documentary footage, like something out of a Christopher Guest movie.
In the movie, all this stuff is executed with deadpan drollery, in a spirit of high malarkey, that sounds harmless and fun. And maybe it is. Yet the fact that I was nearly seduced into palming off a blatant fabrication as fact kind of bugged me. It rubbed up against my journalistic instincts and made me bristle. I didn’t feel delighted — I felt played. And the fact that I liked the rest of the movie so much didn’t mitigate the irritation; if anything, it only increased it.
And that, in its way, was the inner spirit of the ’60s and early ’70s. This was the kickoff to the Age of Speaking Truth to Power, but one of the premises of the psychedelic carnival of the ’60s, as well as the grand dilapidated sex-drugs-and-rock-‘n’-roll party that followed, is that the corporate powers were so full of baloney that there were times when you couldn’t, in fact, speak truth to the Man. You had to. You had to bamboozle him with the lie he deserved.
There’s a crasser way to look at all this: that Scorsese, on some level, was courting publicity with his fake-news documentary gambit, and that he got it. The fact thatis even in the film is a marketing hook, and the idea that “Rolling Thunder Revue” is an effusive ’70s rock doc fused with a Christopher Guest parody of that same doc sounds like a cagey aesthetic strategy.
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