Getting to the Point

Abstract

Getting to the Point Stefan Iversen (bio) I really like music documentaries. If forced to rationalise this taste, I would point out two main reasons: one is to experience the aesthetic joy that can be derived from audio-visual performances; the other (less easily put on a cultural pedestal) is to revel in the decadent details of remarkable anecdotes, an important part of the story-bound fabric that provides music celebrities with [End Page 477] their cultural auras. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese delivers aplenty on both accounts. Combining unseen footage from Bob Dylan’s experimental and mythical 1975 tour of United States and Canada with present-day interviews, the film shows Dylan and artists such as Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, and Allan Ginsberg performing and writing together in all sorts of creative collaborative activities. It also provides an informative stream of juicy stories about the tumultuous life of an (or perhaps even the) anti-establishment figure in modern music culture. During one such anecdote, it dawned on me that there might be a different point to the movie than the one I thought I was getting. In a present-day interview, actress Sharon Stone tells the story of how she as a young woman got involved with the tour and with Dylan. Dylan tricked her into believing he wrote “Just like a woman” for her, which then led to Stone joining the troupe. Wondering how this spectacular coincidence was missing from my previous knowledge about either cultural persona, I turned to the Internet as the movie ended, only to realise that the reason I did not know about this was that it never took place. Billed as a documentary, the movie offers no inter- or paratextual hints that central parts of it are made up; it has even been submitted to the Oscars in the documentary category. Upon closer inspection, other (but not all) interviews in the film appear to be discussing either completely or somewhat made-up events. The main framing device of the movie, a story about the eccentric filmmaker Stefan van Dorp who allegedly shot the concert footage, is made up. The concert footage itself, however, does document Dylan on and off stage in 1975. As a consequence of these conflicting textual and paratextual fragments, viewers (or at least this viewer—others might not even realise the presence of invented material1) are faced with a set of interpretational challenges, operating with all kinds of delays and with huge variance, depending on the particular cognitive environment of the individual viewer. This “Bob Dylan story” is not only a story about Bob Dylan or a story by Bob Dylan but contains an implicit double genitive: The intermingled narrative of fictionalised and informative events is itself like Bob Dylan and, vice versa, the combination of the words “Bob” and “Dylan” points less toward a biographical person and more toward a story with multiple conflicting points, effectively deconstructing the myth of the rock star. The film is by no means unique in its disruption of traditional distinctions between inventive and informative communicative devices: from experimental art such as autofiction and happenings via unconventional [End Page 478] documentaries to hoaxes, information campaigns, and even contemporary politics, present-day culture is riddled with texts that confuse their audiences due to subversive or mutually exclusive attributions of status as either fiction or nonfiction—texts that diverge from straightforward purposes and that are not so much out to make a point as to divide it. In order to approach such texts and try to understand their broader, real-world ramifications, one need not move away from definitions and distinctions about what it is that fictionalised discourse does, rather the contrary. A solid theory of how things normally work is needed to explain diversions of this kind. The understanding of fictionality as a rhetorical resource suggested and elaborated on by Walsh and others is such a solid theory. It offers a convincing, coherent paradigm through which to approach the forms and functions of fictional discourse. Its considerable explanatory powers stem from the fact that it avoids a series of pitfalls, inherent in most other theories of fiction...