Masked and Anonymous
Now that we’re all floating around the nub of things in a prevailing mood of postmodern detachment, I wonder how bad things have to get before we acknowledge that they are not simply an ironic pastiche of ‘bad’ but actually, in and of themselves, terrible. When can we safely admit that a film is no longer about itself but about something else? I may laugh when a man walks into a lamppost, but that don’t make it comedy.
So I’m watching all these scenes in which Bob Dylan looks on with a blank approximation of messianic pity whilst someone or other monologises on a life well or woefully spent, and 
I’m thinking “What, really?” Is it all a joke about the cult of celebrity, the way we take a bunch of answers and project them onto the guy at the top of the pop charts? Is it a step beyond that, even, a joke about those kinds of jokes? I mean, it can’t be serious, can it? Does the film really think we think Bob Dylan is Christ? But then, everything about those scenes… if they aren’t sincere, they’ll do till sincere comes along.
Bob Dylan’s films seem always to have been about his myth rather than his music, and something like Masked and Anonymous makes you wonder if what we care most and know least about, in the end, is what we mean to those around us. Poems, they say, are love songs to the world; too bad the world never writes back.